National Youth Workers Convention I

National Youth Worker’s Convention Part I

So I entitle this Part I because I am sure there will be many more postings to come.  Needless to say, I’ve had a wild weekend so far.  

Thursday afternoon I took Doug Fields’ “Your First Two Years in Youth Ministry” course.  It was five hours long and it was worthwhile.  While I don’t agree with Doug on everything, I find it hard, if not impossible to argue against his five purposes.  While one might be able to add to this list, worship, evangelism, fellowship, discipleship, and ministry is a pretty good list.  While I might not agree with how Doug implements these five things, he never asks you to do that.  He says that you take the principles and implement them in your own context.  

Friday morning I had to miss the second part of Fields’ presentation because of a Hebrew midterm.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected and there’s even a chance I did quite well, but I’ll find out next week.

Friday afternoon and evening were back at the NYWC and what a time.  Jars of Clay, David Crowder Band, Doug Fields, Mark Yaconelli, and David Kimball.  Kimball’s presentation was on New Questions that our Postmodern Context is asking was really good and I thought he had some excellent points to make.  Doug Fields talked about the need to say no, in order to save ourselves and also our families.  

Today featured a presentation by Holly Rankin Zaher (formerly of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry) that dealt with the topic of Evangelism to/with Postmodern Students.  Then another general session, followed by long workshops of which I chose to attending Dan Kimball’s “Worship beyond Singing and Preaching” which was excellent, but the room was so cold and I was just getting tired of sitting in workshops all day long.  Tonight we had a wonderful general session to close the night.

Tonight was “Late Night Theology Discussion” with Tony Jones.  This was quite interesting to say the last as people were from all over the map when it came to theological perspectives.  

By far the hit of the conference so far has been the David Crowder Band who has been leading worship for the past two days.  They are absolutely marvelous.  They are done as of today, but Chris Tomlin takes over tomorrow, and tomorrow night is the special Third Day concert.  The conference wraps up on Monday around 1.  

The fun part about this conference has been the great sense of confirmation that youth ministry is where I am called.  I worried, and still do worry, that I want to do youth ministry more than God is calling me to do youth ministry and that I am trying to control my own destiny, but things in my life continually point to youth ministry as where I am supposed to be right now, and that makes me happy.