This year we are celebrating 10 years of strengthening marriages and families in the UK.
At our gala dinner in January guests from across UK and Europe joined to celebrate the last 10 years of FamilyLife ministry in the UK. We were able to celebrate the thousands of couples who have benefitted over the last ten years and share stories of changed lives and marriages.
It was great to mark key moments with gratitude and look ahead too through a short video.
One of our key values is that people who have benefitted pass on those benefits to others to create positive ripples across their communities. This was echoed by Rob Parsons OBE, author and founding Chairman of Care for the Family.
A master story-teller Rob told the story of his own journey to faith as a result of a couple sharing what they had.
Rob was sent to Sunday school by his parents although they didn’t attend church themselves. However Rob received real love and encouragement from a poor and childless couple who opened up their two room home each week to run a youth club. The children played ping pong on the back of an old door and were bought fish and chips. This couple generously shared what they had. They shared Bible stories and the love of Christ in action.
Then he went on to tell the story of Jesus feeding 5,000 from the lunchbox offered up by a young boy who gave what he had in faith and Jesus used that. Rob encouraged everyone there that evening to share what they have with others including our ordinary life stories. The results are up to God and he can use the smallest things given in faith.
On Saturday and Sunday we continued with our Vision & Equipping sharing stories of changed lives and marriages from couples around the UK and Europe. Another guest couple Ed and Candice Holtz led a seminar which equipped us all to be better at sharing our own stories, learning how to enter other people’s stories through listening and understanding of their motivational themes and finally seeing how we fit into God’s bigger story.
One person summed up the day as: “ Inspirational. Relational. Informative.”
Many people had a great sense of expectation as they left to go back to their communities to share God stories in the UK and further afield in Cyprus, Hungary, France, Germany, Greece, Malta, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.
There are lots of wonderful photographs from the whole weekend on the FamilyLife UK Facebook page.
