Anabaptist Financial, Global Impact, and Ken Ham

I love learning, and listening to great speakers is one of my favorite things to do. This week I’m taking a break from writing Ireland stories and instead writing about some recent seminars I attended— three conferences three days in row, on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of last week.

Wednesday: Anabaptist Financial Employee Seminar

On Wednesday I got paid to listen to speakers! Every year, Anabaptist Financial Organization has a big conference focused on work, and happily my company generously paid me to attend. (Maybe that says something about my company. Or me. Oh, never mind! I’ll take it at face value!)

The seminar for employees (there’s also a seminar for managers and business owners) was attended by six hundred people. Most of the attendees were from the Anabaptist Community.

On Wednesday I arrived at Shady Maple Banquet Center soon after 8 a.m., and found my seat with the other employees from Good’s Store. Since it was the third year I’ve attended, I knew we’d spend the whole day sitting at the same table, where we’d listen to the speakers and have coffee breaks and lunch break all at the same spot.

After I claim my seat, and say hi to my co-workers, I go grab coffee, fruit, and half of a doughnut, and while I’m up, I do a room scan to see who else is there. Since this is geared toward the conservative Anabaptist workforce, women are outnumbered about 10 to 1, I’d guess. There’s lots of Amish people and all kinds of different Mennonites, with careers ranging from teachers to construction workers.

Everyone’s wearing name tags, and I spot another Susan Burkholder! We talk for about thirty seconds— the other Susan Burkholder works at Christian Light Publications in Virginia.

I spot a familiar face in the crowd, it’s my oldest brother, Tim. My youngest brother, Andrew, is here too. They’re both computer programmers, Tim is a CAD designer and Andrew is in IT. My middle brother, Ken, isn’t here this year. He works in sales and accounting. I work in marketing. We like to joke that we have the beginnings of a corporation in my family. My two sisters are stay-at-home moms, but we know which one would be a great project manager and which one would throw the best office parties.

I sit down with my co-workers and we start talking about a fire that made some of us detour on the way to the seminar. Marilyn says, “I was driving through New Holland when I saw flames shooting out of a building and people running out. One woman was holding a baby.”

“And you didn’t call 911?” Craig asks in mock dismay.

“I didn’t have to!” Marilyn says. “Everyone around had their phones out!”

It’s good to have relaxed conversations with the people we usually only nod at in the warehouse or the lunchroom.

Throughout the day, six different speakers give presentations about having the right perspective about work, ways to make things go more smoothly with co-workers, how to find your niche at work, etc, etc. There’s a lot of helpful suggestions about being teachable, reliable, sociable, etc.

There’s workshops available, too, but unfortunately, they’re all about QuickBooks, something I (mercifully) have never needed to learn. Maybe there’ll be a workshop on advanced Photoshop next year.

At lunchtime, we dig into the famous Shady Maple buffet, then sit down at our spots to eat. One of my co-workers asks me about Penny Letters. Except for Facebook, I don’t make a point of spreading the word about my new hobby, preferring the word to get out naturally. Ryan manages two WordPress sites himself so we discuss the technical parts a bit.

After eating, it’s time for more listening. Anabaptist Financial provides a detailed workbook to follow along, which makes concentration easier.

The last speaker of the day, Jason Reed, has a topic titled “God’s Plan for Changing the World Through Work” about the impact of our work on God’s kingdom. Reed talks about some of the economical impact Anabaptists have had in the past, and reminds his audience, that good or bad, we’re making an impact on the world today.

Thursday: Global Impact Training

Okay, so this was actually a three-day event, and I only went for Thursday evening. Still, it was definitely worth attending, maybe next year, I’ll go for all three days. It was held at a local church. I’m going to be vague about the details since the program handed out at the seminar requested we don’t post details online.

The speaker for the evening was a former Muslim, sharing his journey from Islam to Christianity. Unfortunately, he got the location wrong and so his presentation was livestreamed from his home instead.

I’ll call the speaker Dr. George. He was an American who converted to Islam in grad school. For years he was a devout Muslim and rose pretty high in the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood. He shared some details about the structure of Muslim communities in the United States and disagreements that arise between Muslims from the Middle East and those from Western backgrounds.

Eventually Dr. George began to feel that Islam was empty, and gradually left that religion. He became a Christian and now works as a counselor to Muslims.

I talked with several friends before and after the meeting who are studying missions in NYC right now and had come to Lancaster for the three-day conference. “I didn’t really want to come back to my own neighborhood!” Lil told me. Such are the burdens for those of us who live in heart of Lancaster County!

Friday: The Ezekiel Forum Featuring Ken Ham

Okay, this speaking event was the icing on the cake! It was held in State College, several hours west of here, and featured the Ken Ham, one of the best known young-earth creationists in the world. Ken Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum. I’ve never been to the Creation Museum, but I couldn’t turn down a chance to hear Ken Ham speak.

My friend Susanna arranged for a group of us to travel together in a van. We talked almost the whole way to the conference; the subjects varied from the “meaning of flowers” to “what is exactly is ‘speaking in tongues’ anyway?” (The only thing better than being a nerd is having nerdy friends!)

We had bought tickets in advance, and the conference was sold out. As soon as the doors opened, we claimed seats and settled in for the two and a half-hour session.

Mr. Ham’s topic was “Thinking Foundationally: How to Communicate to a Secularized Culture”. The gist of his message was this: Christians need to believe and share the six-day creation day story, because it’s essential to our faith to believe that God is the Creator, the Bible is true, life has purpose, and morality matters.

As a Christian apologist who doesn’t shy anyway from controversy, Ken Ham sometimes draws protesters, but tonight it’s a friendly audience, and there’s much cheering and laughing, such as when Ken mocks the notion of dinosaurs morphing into birds. “You can see dinosaurs today! You can go watch your bird feeder!”

After he’s done speaking, there’s a question and answer time. Audience members enter questions on a conference website, and we vote on our favorites.

As usual, there’s some questions that people won’t have to ask if they would have been paying attention, and there’s a few silly ones (“Did Adam have a belly button?”).

There’s also a few questions that really can’t be answered, such as “If the universe is less than ten thousand years old, how can we see stars billions of light years away?” I think Ken Ham answers it well when he says, “Yes, some things we can’t explain, except for the miraculous power of God. The evolutionist might say, ‘You have a God of the Gaps! You just pull in God to explain what you can’t explain!'” But, Ken goes on to point out, “Evolutionists have a ‘God of the Gaps’ too. Their ‘God of the Gaps’ is time.'” No evolutionist can explain how matter created DNA, or how the human eye formed, except to say “it took billions of years.”

After the talk is over, our vanload heads to a nearby Waffle House to eat a late supper and debrief, and then we head east to Lancaster County. It’s 2:30 in the morning before I crawl into bed, but it’s with the satisfaction of an evening well spent.