Memorial Breakfast, Communion Service pay tribute to sacrifice — then and now
General Superintendent George Wood (left) and
Assistant General
Superintendent Alton Garrison
pray over the Communion elements.
James Bradford
By Rob Cunningham
A pastor of a church in the Middle East, who has spent time in prison for his ministry and daily faces risks and threats, offered words of encouragement to fellow believers gathered for the 53rd General Council.
“Today, some of you might be discouraged in ministry,” Pastor Jules said during Thursday morning’s Communion Service. “Maybe you’ve believed God, maybe you’ve followed God, maybe you’ve prayed, trusted God, obeyed God — yet you’ve seen minimal results. When nothing is going right in my life, I’m going to praise Him and believe in Him for the impossible.”
God wants to give each of us a dream and a vision of what He can do in us and through us, said Jules, whose full name, nationality and other identifying information have been withheld from this article to help maintain his safety in his homeland.
“There is a dream for God working in your heart, and that dream is your Canaan, that dream is your Promised Land, and you have to believe in it to receive it,” he said, reminding the audience that even though God had promised to give the Israelites a land of milk and honey, “somebody needed to milk the cows and somebody needed to be stung by the bees to get the milk and the honey.”
Jules offered four thoughts on responding to the dreams God places in our lives. Believe in the dream, even when you don’t see it. Obey the Lord, even when you don’t understand His orders. Persist, even when you feel like giving up. And trust God, even if you don’t receive your promise.
Some years ago, God placed a dream in Jules’ heart to see his nation reached for Christ — despite the constant risks to his life. When he first launched his church, the congregation often had to meet in a different place each week because of physical persecution. People in his church have been killed for their faith.
Pastor Jules has been imprisoned because of his ministry. One day as he sat in his prison cell, he remembered that “people could live without physical light, but I knew that no one could live without the real light of Jesus Christ.” So, he spread the message of Christianity to the other people sitting behind bars. From his perspective, if he had to spend the rest of his life in prison, he would launch a church while there.
“Anyone can trust God when things are going great, right?” he asked. “But what about when things seem hopeless and the tide has turned against you?”
And drawing on the list of faithful in Hebrews 11, this Jules reminded his audience that not everyone will see God’s promises fulfilled in their lifetime, but that isn’t a reason to give up and quit.
Jules commended the Assemblies of God for its consistent growth over the past 95 years, which reflects a depth of devotion to God.
“The secret of this success is that God has found people in the Assemblies of God, people whose hearts are fully committed to Him, people who’ve wanted God’s glory more than anything else,” he said.
Thursday’s service included Communion and a video scroll featuring the names of credential ministers who passed away between June 1, 2007, and May 31, 2009. The names of more than 800 men and women were included on this year’s list, which General Secretary James T. Bradford said represented about 40,000 accumulated years of ministry.
The video scroll was also played during the Memorial Breakfast earlier in the morning, and at that event, Bradford encouraged surviving family members to embrace their loved ones’ legacies — and to pass on those legacies to future generations.
“May we never forget and may we never be ungrateful for the legacy they have left us — a lasting legacy,” he said.
This year’s list of ministers is filled with the names of men and women who led the Fellowship “through the heart of the 20th century,” said Bradford, whose father-in-law, Paul E. Lowenberg, was among the ministers who died in the past biennium.
The Assemblies of God would look dramatically different if these leaders had not remained steadfast and faithful to God’s call on their lives, Bradford said, and their sacrifices, risks, prayers and labor were not in vain — it was “labor that lasts.”
Ultimately, Bradford said, what matters most is what we give away to others, not what we give ourselves.
The video of the Memorial Roll presented at the Memorial Breakfast can be viewed at www.GeneralCouncil.org.