MIDWEEK CONNECTION
Dr Myles & Ruth Munroe; Angie & Dave Burrows
Greetings Urban Life Family,
By now you have heard about the tragic plane crash that took the lives of our dear friends and ministry colleagues, Dr. Myles Munroe and his wife, Ruth in the Bahamas this past Sunday evening. Also killed was his right hand man, Dr. Richard Pinder, who was the senior pastor of Bahamas Faith Ministries. They also lost their newly appointed youth pastors.
I broke down in tears as I watched my friend and brother, Pastor Dave Burrows, fight to stay strong as he read an official statement about the tragedy to the media during a press conference.
The loss is extremely difficult to handle and even more difficult to explain. These were people who have had a direct impact on our lives. God connected us with Dr. Munroe as far back as 1976. He spoke at our home church back in 1991, a few months before he became a household name in the American Christian community. He and my brother, Bishop Raphael Green, have been friends for nearly 40 years.
Back in 2008, Dr. Munroe ministered at the Worship Center in Lancaster, PA and we drove out to see him and took several members of our church family from Harrisburg. We'll always remember that time because he introduced us to the congregation there by asking us to stand. After the service he literally grabbed Carol and me and began to pray strongly for our personal and ministry breakthrough in Harrisburg. Our sons were so impacted by him that they began to read his books about Purpose.
We are still very close to several people in that ministry. Two of them are Pastors Dave and Angie Burrows, who stood strong as their first youth and young adult ministry leaders for over 30 years. Now they must carry on without their beloved leaders.
Please allow us to tell this one story to put things in perspective for you.
By 1996, we had been serving as the teen ministry pastors in our home church in St. Louis for 4 years. It had been a very tough year because several teenage girls got pregnant and we came under heavy criticism for what was happening amongst the teens. We were also taking criticism for our ministry style which included using music tracks, dance and rap in our praise and worship. We were very discouraged because, even though the youth ministry was growing, it seemed to be going in the wrong direction.
That's when youth pastor friends, Pastor Mark and Dawn Lawrence, invited us to Nassau, Bahamas to attend a youth conference called Youth Alive. They told us that our mutual friends from college, Dave and Angie Burrows, were the youth leaders at Dr. Myles Munroe's ministry. Since we were so discouraged, our senior pastor consented for us to go and our home church sent us.
On the very first night of the youth conference, God began to heal us. We walked into a 2,000-seat auditorium that was filled with teenagers and young adults. They were cheering and clapping with excitement as the session began with praise and worship. The music started and they were using music tracks, just like we did back in America, in St. Louis.
I turned to Carol and said, "So we're not crazy after all." They also used dance and rap. They were doing all of the same things we had been doing. We realized we were actually on the cutting edge of a new move amongst young people in the 1990's.
By the end of that praise and worship session, I was on my knees, tears streaming down my face, with my hands lifted high. All of the disappointment and discouragement was melting away. That was just the first hour of the first night.
That week, we received practical instruction and teaching about youth ministry. We bought Dave Burrows' books and several videos of the speakers during the conference. We took what we received in that conference and implemented the wisdom they gave us. We were given the freedom to just be ourselves. We could hardly wait to get back to St. Louis.
One day, after a morning session, Pastor Mark invited us into the ministry's board room to reconnect with Dave and Angie, whom we had not seen since our days at Oral Roberts University.
After that conference, we charged back to St. Louis on fire and encouraged. We wrote songs that became the most impactful in all of our years as youth pastors. Many of those tunes came directly from the impartations we received at Bahamas Faith Ministries in 1996.
We also purchased Dr. Muroe's books on Purpose and The Kingdom of God and they became a big part of our personal library even as his teachings became a driving force in our lives. We became much more effective youth leaders as we began to train people in the proper roles of leadership, authority, success and succession. We learned how to give the teenagers and youth volunteers personal ownership of the ministry. It's a practice that we still employ to this day.
Little did we know that God was connecting us to Bahamas Faith Ministries for the rest of our lives. A year later, in 1997, we were united again in a youth conference in Norfolk, Virginia. It was at that time that Dave and Angie asked me to come to the Youth Alive Conference in 1998 to be one of the guest speakers. That year solidified our relationships at a new level. Not only did I preach to 2000 young people, but we taught them two of our songs. Several of the youth connected with us and began calling us 'mom and dad'. One of them died in the plane crash.
Dave Burrows and I discovered that we had a lot in common. He eventually became the publisher of my first book through a company he started in the Bahamas.
For a short period, I served as a vice president on their board of International Third World World Youth Leaders.
They invited us back one more year to train and speak to youth leaders from all over the world. It was during that conference that I found myself giving a public exhortation to Teen Mania's leader, Ron Luce. After giving the word, Dr. Myles Munroe pulled me to the side to tell me that the prophetic word was confirmation of what the Board planned to say to Ron the very next day. During that season, I was starting to get bolder and stronger in the call and gifting of God on my life.
Later that week, one of the staff pastors of Bahamas Faith Ministries prophesied to Carol and me about God establishing us in our own ministry. We had no idea it would be Harrisburg and Urban Life.
So, as you can see, our ministry today has direct ties to Dr. Myles Munroe and the Bahamas Faith Ministries in Nassau, Bahamas. They became friends and family to us. We had personal connection with some of those who died Sunday afternoon.
We admit that we needed some time to grieve and recover. Right now we can only say that we will carry on even more determined to fulfill God's purpose in our lives. We are here in this world to Make Disciples of All Nations and that's what we're going to do. We might be in tears sometimes, but we're going to go forth anyway.
It's all for the harvest,
Chris and Carol Green
