The Allegheny Regional Conference (ARC) kicked off yesterday, Friday May 15th. As with each of our regions and elderships, annual conferences and gatherings are an opportunity for a variety of good things. Equipping, discipleship, fellowship, and future planning. Worship, prayer, ordinances like feet washing and the Lord’s supper.
This year the equipping and training was led by Dr. Matt Lake, a leader from Fresh Expressions and the pastor of First Church Williamsport, PA. Pastor Matt was also the keynote speaker at the CGGC’s Triennial Conference in 2025, so it was great to catch back up with him and for more people from around the CGGC to learn from his story.
Dr. Matt Lake
The ARC was challenged on Friday to listen. To listen to God, the moving of the Holy Spirit, to scripture, and to their communities. Part of this was led by the conference handing out demographic information for each of the church’s present. It meant that each church was able to reckon with their community's population, social economic make up, their greatest needs and issues.
You can find data like this about your local community at: www.datausa.io
Church teams worked together to come up with new ideas for how they can reach their communities, thinking through how they might address mental health and opioid challenges, loneliness, and more.
The ARC, in partnership with the CGGC, is committed to creating cohorts to help churches walk through these new plans, encouraging each other and offering best practices in a group of likeminded people. The idea is to help get these new ideas off the ground, to evaluate and improve, and then to help these new initiatives become sustainable over the long haul.
Pastor Matt spoke about the incarnational and informal nature of doing ministry outside of church walls. That Jesus’s ministry encapsulated both the formal in temple and the informal in homes, towns, streets, boats, on the mountains, and in the wilderness. One example Pastor Matt gave was of a rugby ministry which involved some prayer and scripture and lots of intense rugby matches. The guys playing rugby were very unlikely to grace the doors of a church building, and so the church came to them. Using Christian lingo, the church was incarnated into their context, like John 1:14 says “The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
With a plethora of examples, Pastor Matt encouraged the church leadership to get creative and to be okay with meaningful change in their communities.
This year conference was hosted by Grange Church of God in Punxsutawney, PA. Pastor Marcus John, his family, and the entire team at Grange were remarkably hospitable, with excellent food and accommodations, which is a testament to the giftings that God has given them. We did get to see the world famous, Phil. He was napping.
Worship ended on Friday with a local Pittsburgh band named It’s Only Temporary (IOT) who played a mix of classic Christian hymns, contemporary worship, and their own original Christian music.
Saturday (today) was a time of more official business for the region, where regional licenses were handed out, and ordinations were recognized with their families present. 3 pastors were recognized for ordination at conference: Marcus John (Grange), Brian Zeisloft (Mt. Pleasant), and Stephen Flugga (Congress Hill).
Stephen Flugga and Family
We’d ask our readers to be in prayer for the ARC and all of the CGGC regions and elderships throughout this conference season. Big changes and moves are being made to strengthen churches and ministries, and we pray that God will work through these times of fellowship, that the church might greatly impact people for the kingdom of God.
CGGC eNews—Vol. 20, No. 20
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