The Long Play...

Hello, friends!

After a 44 hour work weekend (15 hours Friday, 18 hours Saturday, and 11 hours Sunday), 2 sick days (migraines are the worst!) and a fair amount of Ezra time (I really didn't get enough of it) I feel like I've fully recovered physically from FC15. What a weekend it was!

Fall Conference weekends normally have a certain structure to them. Students arrive on Friday night in anticipation of the weekend to come. We have our first session that is followed by the small group "what are you hoping to get out of this conference?" question. Saturday morning has another session followed by free time. Saturday night, the Holy Spirit falls, the speaker makes a call to faith, a bunch of students "stand up" to make decisions to follow Jesus, and we all leave after the Sunday session refreshed and ready to take on the world. I would venture to say that this structure isn't even special to Fall Conferences but it pretty much standard across the weekend Christian conference landscape. It's a good formula and it works.

However, sometimes you get a conference theme and you know that things aren't going to be wrapped up into a tiny bow come Sunday morning. FC15 definitely had that feel.

"Reconciliation" is a HUGE topic, one that isn't easily defined or easily remidied. Where does one begin? Is racial reconciliation the most important topic? How do we reconcile the good news of the Gospel with what we're seeing in the world right now? What about socioeconimic reconciliation? How about gender reconciliation or sexual reconciliation (asking the LGBT questions)? Students come from a number of different backgrounds and belief systems. It would be impossible to cover everything that needed to be covered in the course of a weekend and we knew that going into FC15. The word that I kept getting was to "remember the long play..."

With a conference theme like "Reconciling All Things," your goal is not to have the conference be self contained. You want it to bleed out beyond Sunday afternoon. We want there to still be conversations, wrestlings, and question asking because the long play says that figuring out our role in God's reconciliation of all things takes time.

Let me give you an example. Saturday morning we held a series of workshops called, "How the Gospel reconciles the _________ community," with "Black," "Asian American," "White," "Latino," "Native American," and "International" filling in the blank spot. Students would attend 2 workshops. First, they would go where they identify (ie, I would attend the Asian American workshop). Second, they would go where they DON'T identify but want to reach. Each workshop was about 45 minutes.

There isn't a lot you can do in 45 minutes and we knew that. What you CAN do though, is start the conversation. I think that's what we did. We had students in the first workshop begin to discover their ethnic identities in ways that they hadn't considered before. In the second workshop, you could see the gears turning for students as they considered what it would look like to connect with someone different from them.

Our job is far from over and our job looks very different from normal. Thinking about the long play means that follow up is more crucial than ever before with every student who attended, not just those who stood up Saturday night. (That's especially true this year as no one stood up Saturday night). It means that FC15, instead of being the end of our New Student Outreach season, actually begins a new season of hopefully hard conversations and new revelations. It means that after 44 hours of conference directing, 2 sick days, and not nearly enough Ezra time, the long play is just beginning.

Have an excellent day!

~Adam