(Arnolds Park)– The Okoboji Bible and Missionary Conference gets underway Saturday, August 1st and runs through the following week on the tabernacle grounds at Highway 71 and West Broadway in Arnolds Park. Pastor Mark Schwarz is the Conference Director. He tells KUOO news this marks the 92nd year for the event…
“We’ve never charged admission. We’ve never asked for any special way of people paying. We just ask people if they feel it’s blessed them, if you’d like to give us some money because it cost quite a bit of money to run this conference and for 92 years we’re in the black, believe it or not. This conference is anywhere from $350,000 to $400,000 to run just for that one week with all the expenses of housing and speakers and musicians and food and everything else. It’s quite a bit of money to run it, but this will be our 92nd year.”
This year’s keynote speakers include John Stumbo, a pastor and former president of the Christian Missionary and Alliance Nomination; Aaron Maddox; Rachel Ruth Lotts Wright, an author and bible teacher; Joshua Becker, an author with a book currently on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list; and Andrew Rutton, a pastor from Omaha.
Pastor Schwarz says this year’s conference will also feature two concerts, including a performance by The Browns, based out of LeMars…
“One of the gospel magazines, gospel concert magazines, they were just on the cover and so yeah, they’re going to be great on Saturday night when we have them at 7:15. And then we also have a gal named Terrian and some may not know her but she’s written several songs, she’s a songwriter. She was also on American Idol, she was a top 40 finisher on American Idol like 12, 14 years ago, something like that, and she’s just got an incredible ministry. She’s actually touring right now with CeCe Winans which is a pretty big name to be touring with. She was at RiseFest and so really looking forward to having her on Sunday night.”
He adds the conference is a huge draw for the Iowa Great Lakes…
“Well you know I think if you total everybody up for the whole week, and some of those people come back. It’s kind of hard to know who’s who because of the registration issue, we don’t really register people. I think somebody said we have about 12,000 people over the week. That would be over seven nights, so I don’t know if you divide that by seven or 12,000 by seven maybe you’d have a little bit of a number. Some nights we’ll have maybe 1,500 to 2,000 people and some nights we might 600 or 700 people. But it’s very well attended. It’s one of the busiest weekends of the year for the lakes area. Every store owner and restaurant owner will tell you that.”
You can find a complete schedule for this year’s Okoboji Bible Conference here.
