Building
Communities of Fraternal Care, Service,
and Mission
.
An Interview with Dave
Hughes
Sword of the Spirit North
American Region President
Dave Hughes began
serving as regional president
in October 2016.
In this interview, Dave lays
out his vision and priorities
for the region.
Question: For the benefit of those
who don’t know you well, tell us a little bit
about yourself.
Answer: First, let me tell you
about my family. My wife Jane and I have been
married for 35 years. Jane is a wonderful wife and
support for me and whenever we can, we try to
serve together. We have five children, four of
whom are now married and have produced nine
wonderful grandchildren. Family is a great joy for
us and we look forward to spending time with all
our family.
Both Jane and I got involved in the charismatic
renewal and covenant community in the 1970’s and
have been active ever since. I have been involved
in leadership in various capacities since the
1990’s. Most recently I served as the Senior
Coordinator for Word of
Life in Ann Arbor. I have also filled
various service roles in our region and
internationally in the Sword of the Spirit for the
past ten years or so.
Jane and I are members of the Evangelical
Presbyterian Church. We find a great fit between
Reformed theology, the working of the Holy Spirit,
and living out covenant commitments with believers
from many traditions. We are confirmed ecumenists!
I am an engineer by training and recently retired
from an executive level position at General Motors
in order to serve the Lord in a more full-time,
volunteer capacity. I also tend to accumulate
hobbies—we have a large garden and orchard, I
raise bees, love to sail, golf poorly, etc.
Question:What does a
Regional President do?
Answer: That is a good
question and on one level I’m still discovering
the role. Simply stated, the role of regional
president is to ensure that the region moves
forward in unity, finding effective ways for the
communities in the region to support one another
as well as to support and further our common
outreaches — things like our regional youth work,
Kairos, and building new communities. We have a
pretty collegial working structure in the Sword of
the Spirit so most of the role involves leading a
collegial, team approach to what we do. We have
various councils and committees to get this all to
work well, so a lot of what I do is to make sure
this all works together peacefully and in unity. I
get to work with some great brothers and sisters.
Question:What is your
sense for what the Lord is doing among us and in
our Region of the Sword of the Spirit?
Answer: To begin with we need to
see that God is always doing a lot and we are
always in the position of trying to discern what
he is already doing. We need to then go do that
too. We are meant to follow in mission, not lead.
Having said that, I think we live in interesting
times. We live in a season of mission and open
doors. Yes, times are dark but that is a good time
to be a light. I see a lot of opportunity for
mission and clearly that is something the Lord is
always doing. The Lord is always on mission and we
need to be as well.
At the same time, a core part of our call and
charism is to find effective ways to love and
support one another in our modern setting. We
never outgrow our need to attend to the basics of
loving one another. As a senior coordinator I
learned that in any body of believers at any given
time there will always be some who are hurting,
who need special care, who are in a season of
trial. We need always to be ready to walk
alongside and pastor these brothers and sisters in
our midst.
I often picture the scene from Nehemiah of the
workers with a sword in one hand and a trowel in
the other. They are doing two things at the same
time. I picture that for us as well: we do mission
(the sword) and we build our common life (the
trowel). And there’s no inherent conflict in these
two things — we can do both things well and in
harmony.
Question: What
priorities do you see for the region?
Answer: It’s dangerous
to ask an engineer that question—I always have a
long list of priorities. At our most recent
council meeting last October we looked at a set of
new initiatives and then did a prioritizing
exercise to sort out what we collectively thought
were the right next steps. A couple of things came
out of that exercise. Generally they fit into 2
‘buckets’—things we can do to improve our support
for local communities and things we can do for
mission.
In the first bucket, supporting local communities,
we want to try some new ways to foster
communication and sharing amongst leaders on
critical topics facing all of us. We have some
ideas on how to do this in a low resource way via
video conferencing between leaders to avoid the
cost and time of travel. We also are looking to
strengthen and improve some of the existing ways
we support one another — things like visitations
and the outside coordinator role.
In the mission bucket, we have some exciting
efforts underway to strengthen and expand our work
by building new communities in places where we
have university outreaches.There are some
promising efforts already well underway—places
like Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Columbus,
Tallahassee—and we think the Lord has much more
labor for us in these fields. So we have a team
working on this. We are also looking at some new
ideas for developing and distributing our worship
music as a form of mission. I’m personally pretty
excited about this opportunity and we are
gathering ideas and interest from many young
people around the region on how best to do it.
Of course, these are just some of the new
initiatives. There is also all the excellent work
being done by our existing outreaches and
teams—for example the community building team in
our region involves dozens of men and women
leaders, working with 21 communities in various
cities.
Kairos continues to do a great job of serving our
youth. University Christian Outreach (UCO) and the Brotherhood of
Hope (BOH) are both doing great work on college
campuses and expanding their impact.
I am optimistic that the Lord has much for us to
do—to do more of what we are already doing and add
some new things. All of it of course needs to be
discerned and submitted to the Lord’s direction.
So, a lot of priorities…
Question: Is there
anything else you would like to add?
Answer: I ask for our
communities to please pray for the leaders in the
region. They all work very hard and we need to
appreciate their service. Pray for the brothers
and sisters who serve us in the regional office.
Pray for wisdom for me as well. Finally, let’s
pray that the Lord would send us all out into the
harvest. Let us go do mission and may God be with
us.
[This
article was first published in the Sword of
the Spirit North
American Region (NAR) Newsletter, April
Issue, 2017. See NAR
website and Newsletter archive.]
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