At Recharge 2023, teens in Northeast Fellowship churches learned to “break free from worthless cycles and create new habits of holiness out of loving obedience” to God.
Four locations in New York hosted the two-day student conference, with each location featuring its own speaker on the topic “Break the Cycle”:
- First Baptist Church in Horseheads, with Josh Perez, interim pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church, Penn Yan, New York
- First Baptist Church in Marilla, with Ben Campbell, pastor of First Baptist Church, Wyoming, New York
- Open Door Baptist Church in New Woodstock, with Ben Johnson, pastor of First Baptist Church, Memphis, New York
- Camp Bayouca in Smithville Flats, with Conroy Lewis, pastor of Grace Baptist Church, Syracuse, New York
Each speaker focused on the “memorable and powerful stories” from the book of Judges, the Northeast Fellowship says.
“I dare you to tell me the Bible is boring after reading the book of Judges,” Josh Perez (in photo above) told the students at First Baptist Church in Horseheads. “Something else cool about Judges,” he says, is that it’s “relatable.” In the book of Judges are “down-to-earth failures” who “set the stage for God to show His grace, power, wisdom, and love.”
Those failures were people who had once been heroes. They had delivered the Israelites “from their enemies and poor choices,” the Northeast Fellowship says. “Victory proved temporary, however, as God’s people fell repeatedly and needed rescue continually. They were stuck in a cycle. We can learn a lot from them—both positively and negatively—from their good examples and their bad examples. We can learn to break the cycle in our lives and live in spiritual freedom and confidence.”
