Stephen's weblog

One of the other things that has been huge for me this year is the National Youth Ministry Convention. It is coming together quite nicely so far, but is taking truckloads of work. However, the plan is to get almost all of it locked in this year, so advertising etc can go out early.

Basically, the NYMC will be a national event for Christians that work with youth and young adults - youth pastors, school chaplains and teachers, university workers, Government and community youth workers - the whole lot. The goals are to help them to be more fruitful in what they do through encouraging and refreshing them, connecting and networking them with their peers from across Australia and NZ, plus providing high quality training and professional development.

We started off with noone, and now have been able to bring together an amazing team of people to coordinate it, a broad coalition of denominations and para-Church youth ministry organisations as partners, some great sponsors and an impeccable bunch of speakers. Tony Campolo, Duffy Robbins, Josh Griffin and The Skit Guys are the "big name" international speakers, but the aussies are absolutely awesome too. They are all people who are specialists in their field, have an amazing message and are gifted in communication.

So it's exhausting, but it is worth it. For years I've been hoping that someone would organise something like this in Australia, but it never seemed to happen. Back in 1999 when I was travelling around the world I stopped at San Diego on the weay home and went to the American National youth Worker's Convention run by youth specialties. It was fantastic and I thought for years it would be great to have something that was closer, cheaper and especially more Australian oriented.

Every time I suggested it to people who I thought could do it I hit a brick wall. Finally this year a few events came together and an opportunity was thrown our way to do something ourselves. I asked around a number of people I trust, and this time the fedback was very different - it was all - go for it! So a team was assembled, a proposal put together, and soon enough Geoff Risson at the RMT in the Churches of Christ in QLD gave us the green light for youth vision QLD to run with the idea. However, although we're coordinating it, we really don't want it to be a "Churches of Christ" thing, especially as a good Churches of Christ person doesn't care less about denominations anyhow. I really hope that it can be a demonstration of and encouragements towards unity, not some parochial little event.

So in practice I'm working on this two days per week with youth vision, mostly from my home office. Have a look if you're interested - www.nymc.org.au