BLT 09: On Solid Ground

As some of you may have realised, over the last week I was not in Brisbane. I temporarily re-located to a small ensuite known as Watson Park, 15 mins from the Brisbane Airport. Now some of you may be asking why did I move?

The reason why I went to Watson Park was for a annual conference called BLT which brings together Christians from all around Brisbane. It was a conference started up two years ago to mimic a conference down in Sydney known as KYLC. 

In a general overview, BLT is a great event cuz in Brisbane we are all aware there are a handful of chinese churches and from what we read in the Bible, we all serve the ONE and only God and thus we are all part of ONE church... So this event gives us an opportunity for different churches to come together to bond and grow each other as one big family. 

TALKS: 

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This year we were fortunate to have two great speakers, Grant Thorpe and Gary Koo both up from Sydney speaking on the topic of "On Solid Ground". Grant delivered a series of sermon which encourages us to hold on our faith in Jesus emphasising the ffact that we need to be people of faith and certainty. In addition, Grant ends with two statements: God works for us (cf Heb 13:20) and works in us (cf Heb 13:21). 

Gary's sermons took a slightly different perspective. He firstly started with the topic of relevance - Why do we want to know about God? For God was the creator of all things including the heavens and the earth. And then he went on to talk about Sin.  Prior to Gary's talk I always thought that there were different types of sin. But as Gary points out... there is only ONE sin... for everything else like the seven deadly sin are only just "symptoms" of a much bigger sin. The sin where we say YES to ourselves and NO to God. That really opened my eyes. 

STRAND GROUPS

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This being my 3rd year, we tackled the idea of Systematic theology ( in simple where we look at topicals in an ordered and categorised way) We looked at the topic of "Resurrection" Through looking and filtering through heaps of passages which all included the word "Resurrection" we realised that much of what is preached in sermons is only a small slice of a bigger cake. We covered many areas including the nature, source, timing, purpose, escitology and consequences of resurrection. But even with the week which we dedicated to looking at resurrection we had only skim the top of the cake. 

TOPICALS

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Apart from just listening to sermons and doing strand groups we also had a workshop on what it means to be a christian man. One of the things that seemed to appeal to me was the point made about "Christian Men needing to lead with humility". The description of this reads - Sometimes men can become domineering or overwhelming... (Yep that was me) ... There were a series of workshop and on the last one we were fortunate to see things from the female perspective. Here we found out that women were different not only in the physical sense but other characteristics as well. 

Just in brief 

 - Women want to be understood

 - Women like to use non-verbal language

 - Women are more sensitive in an emotional sense

 - In order to get from A to B, women may drag it out by multiple figures. (To Clarify, if you ask men a question they would be direct and say YES/NO... but for women they say a sermon just for the simple YES/NO)

So some things about men

 - Men have fragile egos

FREE-TIME

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Coming from me, a lazy bum who doesnt do much sport, I would say that this BLT camp i have done more sport than i have done in a month. We spent a lot of time playing 3-on-3/ 4-on-4 basketball and Soccer in the rain .... (Note: Uncle P is a great goalkeeper)

OTHER HIGHLIGHTS

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What else happened at BLT... For the first time in BLT history... Our strand Leader YY, did a rap in front of all those at BLT. 

Well that is all I will say if you want to know more come to BLT Plus 09. It is held at Mt Tambourine from 21 -23 Aug