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Genuine Appreciation

Do you remember when I wrote this SI article a year and a half ago? Today I appreciate the ministry of Grace Community Church (GCC) even more, having attended my first Shepherds’ Conference and a full Sunday morning and afternoon vespers worship with the church family in Sun Valley.

As we consider the issues in Part 2, we will try to determine where we want to be on that spectrum. We can focus more on our teens or more on outsiders. In Part 3, I want to say that these choices actually are the same thing. What I mean is that focusing on our teens is incomplete until we get them to share our focus on unbelievers.

“Stover, are you sure you know what you’re doing? You mean to tell me that my grandkids are going to be ‘Pollocks’?”

That was my father-in-law’s response (himself a missionary in Thailand for more than thirty years) to the news that my family and I were leaving our ministry in Chicago to join a church planting team in Poland. He was joking, of course, but the reaction was a common one as we prepared to head to the field.

Talley-Cunningham, Marian. The Faces of Grief: A Women’s Bible Study. Greenville, SC: BJU Press, 2007. Paperback, 112 pages. $7.95.

Reviewed by Barbara Ritsema

(Review copy courtesy of JourneyForth.)