Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Last week I was priv­i­leged to attend the President’s Con­vo­ca­tion for the Florida/Georgia Dis­trict of the Lutheran Church, Mis­souri Synod held in Day­tona Beach.  

LEFT TO RIGHT: Pas­tor Hoyt Byrum; Dr. Peter Weiss; and Bill White, Well­ness Coach for Pas­tors at Chris­t­ian Care Min­istry, fol­low­ing the com­ple­tion of our work­shop.

Although I’m not Lutheran, I was attend­ing to lead a work­shop on well­ness and it’s inter­sec­tion with Chris­tian­ity.

It was a great time.  First, let me say that I have never met any nicer group of peo­ple.  The Dis­trict staff was help­ful and friendly.  I spoke with at least a hun­dred atten­dees and enjoyed every minute of it.

There is no doubt that the folks I met are fol­low­ing Jesus as evi­denced by love, peace, kind­ness, and other fruit of the spirit. (Gala­tians 5:22)

It feels good to hang out with such lov­ing indi­vid­u­als.

John Maxwell, a Chris­t­ian lead­er­ship guru, was the keynote speaker.  Now, I’m always a lit­tle skep­ti­cal of “gurus” (which may just be envy on my part) but John was great.  He imparted deep wis­dom in a humor­ous and very mem­o­rable way.

Although I’ve read some of his books, it was a spe­cial treat as he shared some of the per­sonal expe­ri­ences, which formed him into the leader he is today.  I came away with an even greater respect for him (and added a cou­ple more of his books to my Ama­zon wish list.)

John Rein­hold III, Direc­tor of Health Coach­ing at Chris­t­ian Care Min­istry, and Dr. Pete Weiss.

My work­shop — titled, “Fol­low­ing Jesus to Per­sonal Health and Well­ness,”  was held in the morn­ing of the sec­ond day, which, in my opin­ion, is always the best time slot.  About 50 peo­ple attended.

Per­haps one-third were pas­tors and the rest were church and Lutheran school staff.  Sched­uled for an hour and 15 min­utes, it was shorter than I would have liked but we still had a lot of great dis­cus­sion.

Of course, not every­one agreed with every­thing I said, but I think it gen­er­ally went well and hope­fully the atten­dees are now bet­ter posi­tioned to work on their own well­ness and to help oth­ers.

That was the whole point of the event.  Nat­u­rally I’ll be inter­ested in detailed feed­back as eval­u­a­tions from the atten­dees are shared with me later.

Get­ting the eval­u­a­tions is not always pleas­ant, but as you know, I accept ALL feed­back.

I’ve attached the agenda for my ses­sion (CLICK HERE to down­load) along with this post to give you some idea of what we cov­ered.

If it looks inter­est­ing, and you’d like me to lead a sim­i­lar work­shop at your church (or help YOU lead one) please drop me a line.  I’d be happy to do so.