Desiring God's Conference

My father, who is a pastor, and I will be going to the Desiring God Pastor's Conference on February 4-6, 2008. It looks great. The theme this year is the Pastor as Father and Son.

The following is an excerpt of John Piper's welcome:

The theme of the Desiring God 2008 Conference for Pastors is owing most immediately to my father’s death on March 6, 2007. He was a fruitful evangelist. He preached the gospel for over seventy years, if you count the final testimonies in the nursing home. I loved him. I admired him. And I wondered how I might honor him.

The thought came to me: “Make him the subject of your biography at the Conference for Pastors. Tell his story and the impact he had on you.” Then I recalled that Don Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School had lost his father, a Canadian pastor, and was hoping to write a book about him. (In fact, the book is written and will be ready for the conference in February, Lord willing.)

It occurred to me that Don might find it enjoyable to celebrate his own father’s ministry while instructing the rest of us about lessons learned from him and from the Word. Maybe, I thought, we should build the whole conference around the pastor as father and son, that is, the pastor as father of a family and father of a church; and the pastor as son of an earthly father and son of a heavenly Father. I wrote Don and told him my vision. He embraced it and agreed to come.

At that point, the Desiring God staff got excited about doing something totally unusual with this conference, namely, encouraging all the pastors to bring their sons and their fathers. Amazing. We all loved it. So that’s the plan. Come. And if you can, bring your sons and your dad.

Read the whole invitation here.

If you are in the area, please come. No other alive theologians have influenced me more than D.A. Carson and John Piper. The impact they have had in trumpeting the supremacy of Christ and the preciousness of His Word has been incalculable. If money is an issue, Desiring God has generously offered a whatever-you-can-pay policy. If you are unable to attend, please pray that God would richly bless the efforts of the Desiring God staff, and that Pastor, and their sons or fathers, would more fully grasp a passion for the glory of God.