What Winter Conference Means to Me

Editor’s Note: February 22-24, 2024 the Anglican Mission in America will hold its annual Winter Conference, Live the Mission. We asked Beka LeMaster to share with us why attending such meetings has been meaningful to her.

My first experience with the AMiA’s annual winter gathering was in 2011. I had only been on staff at St. Andrew’s for a short eight months and was very new to Anglicanism. As a Pentecostal pastor’s kid, I’d attended more than my fair share of church conferences and thought I knew what to expect. Honestly, I was as excited for my husband, Jeff, and I to have a weekend away from our young daughters as I was about the conference. It only took one night to prove that my expectations had been far too simple.

Because of winter weather in Arkansas, our first service to attend was the night of prayer and healing. Growing up in ’90s evangelical culture, my faith was filled with shoulds and oughts and lack of eternal security. I was convinced that God was highly disappointed in my behavior and iffy about me at best. I certainly didn’t feel that I had earned God’s love or pleasure and had felt abandoned by him in the darkest time of my 29 years.

That night, as +Philip and Claudia prayed over me and I sobbed, a decade-long healing process began. It was a process of taking years of head knowledge and translating it to heart knowledge, of learning to read Scripture without hearing an angry God, of rewriting vows I’d made to protect myself, of trusting God with the hardest and worst parts of life.

Then, as the service ended, our associate pastor at the time looked at Jeff and me and said “It’s beer-thirty.” Now that had never been part of my experience of church conferences! But the social times were sweet, and I got to know the St. Andrew’s staff team in ways that wouldn’t have happened simply working alongside each other. We had breakfast and dinner together. We became friends.

I came away from that weekend with pages of notes from the sessions and an excitement about the things of God that I had not had in years.

Each year since has been the same: healing, rest, renewal, community. And, as my role at St. Andrew’s expanded, it became a time of worship where I wasn’t responsible for making sure everything ran smoothly or all the volunteers showed up or the temperature was right. It was just me and God and my community.

As new staff have come on board at St. Andrew’s over the past 13 years, I’ve made it a point to encourage them to go at least once. In fact, almost every member of our team was there in 2023. For me, there is nothing like Live the Mission in our daily life, and I look forward to it all year.

We are excited to be hosting Live the Mission in Little Rock this year and, while it won’t be a time where I’m not responsible for things, I want it to be one for each of you. Come, be refreshed and renewed!

Beka LeMaster is the Operations and Communications Director at St. Andrew’s Church in Little Rock. She has been on staff at St. Andrew’s in various roles for the past 13 years, though, as a pastor’s kid, she claims she’s been doing this exact job since she was 10. Beka has also been on the AMiA staff since 2017 as the Executive Assistant to the Canon for Ecclesiastical Affairs. She and her husband, Jeff, have been married for 21 years and have two daughters: Cosette (20) and Cora (17).