THE Guyana Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists will on Friday declare open its annual ‘National Men’s Ministries Conference’, which will bring together hundreds of men from across the nation for a truly life-changing experience.Activities will be held under the theme, “Equipping Men for Today’s Challenge”, and the Conference will run from Friday through Sunday.

Activities will be conducted at two locations: The Central Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Church at Oronoque and Church Streets in Queenstown, Georgetown, and at the Sophia Exhibition Site on the eastern outskirts of the city. Sessions on the opening and closing days will be conducted at the Central SDA in Queenstown, while the second day’s activities will be held at the Sophia Exhibition Site on Saturday.

Friday’s opening session will begin at 18:00 hrs, according to Brother Fenton Park, Coordinator of the Adventist Men’s Ministries in Guyana, while sessions on Saturday and Sunday will start at 9:00 hrs.

Extending a warm welcome to all males between the ages of ‘nine years and 199 years’, Director of Adventist Men’s Ministries, Pastor Dennis, Hamilton, asserts: “All men from everywhere -– Essequibo, Demerara and Berbice — are invited, regardless of religious persuasions.”

Pastor Hamilton announced that the main presenter will be Dr. Leon Wilson, Provost and Vice-President of the Alabama State University, USA.

On Saturday, there will be an Awards Ceremony at which five awards will be conferred on four special individuals and a group (not members of the church, but recognized for their dedicated and impacting service within society). And 300 individuals from within the SDA Church who have been involved in ministry and active service will be awarded.

Brother Lance Hinds of the Georgetown Chamber of Industry and Commerce will on Sunday speak on “Empowering Men through Entrepreneurship and Business Skills Development.”

The Annual Men’s Ministries Conference started in 2004 and was first held at the Grove Primary School. Subsequent conferences have since been held at Linden, in Berbice, Essequibo, and in Georgetown.

According to Pastor Hamilton, the objective of the Conference is to bring men to understand their role in the home, in the community, and even in the Church. The aim is to help them to be more stable in their outlook towards life — their social as well as working relationships. This conference should be of particular interest to those young men who can be easily influenced out in the streets.
“They need to understand their relationship with women, be it their wives, friends, business colleagues and their mothers. We need to get back to a point where men treat women with respect, and not see them as elements to be abused, battered and slaughtered; and the time to act is now!” Pastor Hamilton has said.

Pastor Hamilton reasoned that while the men in church may have one perspective, others outside of the church invariably have a different outlook, based on their norms and value systems; and are very often influenced by misinformation, peer pressure, and sending of wrong signals. “In short, they may not have had any training with regard to their significant principled role in the community, hence they go awry,” Pastor Hamilton reasoned. “Therefore the Conference is to help the men to have the value system that will help them develop spiritually, mentally, physically within the church and community; and even economically, since we will also be teaching them business skills”.

He added that the idea is to harness, as far as possible, vulnerable young men in society who are being fed into a culture of gun-toting, domestic violence, murder and rape, and are significantly contributing to the loss of lives by reckless and drunken driving, all of which are infractions of the law. “We want them to begin to see life for what it is worth, and to take their rightful role in society,” he concluded. Within the national Adventist body there are 19 chapters, and each chapter is made up of individual clubs.