On Eagles Wings - Ron Hutchcraft Ministries

A Surge to the Cross

You have helped put on this event. Your prayers have brought us here, and it may very well be that your gifts have literally enabled some of these young people to come here from some corner of North America. We now know that this is definitely the largest Warrior Leadership Summit we’ve ever had. There are 622 people here, and they represent 70 different nations. We have grown from about fifty people not very many years ago, and God continues to enlarge the impact of this conference!

Yesterday morning, a first-time Native speaker here, Pastor Bobby, came and spoke to us and talked about Mary Magdalene. At each session we’re talking about a great warrior of the Bible, because our theme this year is The Warrior Way. We talked about how Mary Magdalene was willing to stick by Jesus when there seemed to be no reason to stick by Him. He had died. He was buried. He’d been in the tomb, and Mary Magdalene refused to defect.

That’s the way of a warrior, and it was a marvelous challenge to young people who will go back to some of the hardest environments in America. There might not be another group of young people for whom that kind of a message would be more important. That’s why we have to pray for these kids, because they go back to toxic places where they stand alone. Here they are not alone and they know that.

A New Generation of Warriors

Let me welcome you to Day One of Warrior Leadership Summit (WLS). I’m living the answers to your prayers. We prayed that this might be the largest gathering at a Warrior Leadership Summit we’ve ever had. It was only a few years ago that fifty Native young people came together, and then there were a hundred, and then there were a couple of hundred. I’m excited to tell you that there are over six hundred people at this Warrior Leadership Summit. There are also seventy nations represented here. What a day it has been!

We’ve had vans, cars, and planes. Vehicles have come from all over. We’ve had people come from an Eskimo Village right next to the Bering Sea, all the way across Northern Canada—people who left two and a half days ago to start driving here. It’s almost like there has been a magnet at this conference center drawing Native young people from all over the continent. They have literally come from the four corners of the United States and Canada.

This year, we even have for the first time, representatives from the largest Indian tribe in the world from South America. We have our first Native leaders from there here at WLS. This thing is literally almost spanning the hemisphere in terms of the people that are participating.

It was the summer of broken chains!

The participants at the Warrior Leadership Summit conference all wore them. Paper chains that symbolized the real bondages of young Native lives - the sins, the addictions, the pain.

As I stepped out on the stage the final night, I walked through broken “chains” everywhere. Throughout the week, these once-hopeless young people had torn them off and left them at Jesus' cross. They came enslaved. They left free! And now they would help set others free.