Dick Lucas’s brainchild, the Evangelical Ministry Assembly (EMA), is holding its 40th conference this June, writes Iain Taylor.
The main theme is ‘Let it be Known – Bringing God’s fame to all nations, and all generations’ and the keynote speaker is Jim Hamilton of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who will be looking at the Psalms.
Lucas’s original vision for the EMA had two aims: to establish an annual forum where clergy could hear good speakers address major issues affecting their ministries; and to heal the sad division between Anglican and Free Church ministers. After 40 years the event, held this year at Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, has now become a staple fixture in the evangelical calendar. At its largest it attracted 1,100 people to the Barbican Centre.
Flagship conference
Nigel Styles, Director of the Proclamation Trust (PT), which runs the EMA each year, ‘In terms of what has remained told en: the same, the EMA was and is PT’s flagship conference. So at its heart we always want it to encourage and equip church workers who are committed to expository Bible teaching. This means that its key purpose is to showcase expository preaching, although there have always been other elements in the programme. And people also come to meet up with their friends and colleagues in ministry: we are committed to fostering mutual encouragement amongst clergy and other delegates.
‘What has changed? One key feature is that the conference is increasingly appealing to a higher proportion of international delegates, for whom we run a special welcome reception during the week. This international focus is visible in the sermon series on Mark, given by Peter Kamau (from Nairobi), Larry Norman (from Leipzig) and Remi Adedire (from Catford). These speakers are all ‘next generation’ and from ‘the nations’, so they have different ethnicities, seek to reach different communities, and are ordinary pastors, in their first five years or so in ministry. They will each bring the conference one of their normal expository sermons – or doing at the EMA exactly what they would do in their home church, Sunday-by-Sunday’.
Styles added: ‘We believe as strongly as ever that our role at the Proclamation Trust is to help teachers and preachers listen closely to what God says in the Bible, so we may proclaim it faithfully and persuasively. We all need regular “in-service training” – within the context of warm, supportive relationships - to help us make progress in our urgent task, so that people facing God’s judgment might hear and respond to the gospel and be saved’.
