'Leaders To Go' conference

Katie Peken and Chris Young attended the bi-annual 'Leaders To Go' conference, which was held at lovely Anglesea this year. Every second year it's near Melbourne, in between it roves around the country, and people come from all over Australia, New Zealand, and further afield. It's a one-of-a-kind conference, because it's especially for people who have leadership roles in children's ministry, and need not only to know how to communicate, nurture, engage and mentor children; they also need to have skills in adult leadership, recruiting, training, building teams, developing skills in the leaders they lead.

This was Katie's third L2G conference, Chris's first. It was definitely worthwhile; there were keynote talks about leadership (fancy that!), child theology (not what we anticipated, which was, what does God say about children - it was rather, what does it do to your understanding of God when you remember that in the Bible he speaks to children as well as adults?), and advocacy (that is, making sure children aren't overlooked in the decision-making of the church). There was lots of time in small groups to discuss and work with the ideas we heard in the keynote talks.

There were also two sessions of electives; I went along to Pastoral Care of Families, but didn't think I learnt much of value there, it was largely about the characteristics of a family pastoral worker, whereas I want to know what I can do to better care for families - back to the drawing board on that one! I also attended a more helpful session on avoiding burnout - brilliant Terry Williams from Scripture Union Queensland gave us his 12 top tips for staying fresh and encouraged in ministry.

There was a mad evening called 'Market Place' where delegates had the opportunity to tell us about products and services they offer, and in some cases, about projects they'd like help with. Batches of ten delegates had one minute each to give us a teaser (there was a prize for the most creative!), we chose which to follow up, then they had ten minutes to explain more fully, before we raced back to the main meeting space for the next batch of ten. It was crazy, but a fun way to find out what's out there and what different people are doing and developing.

What I love about Leaders to Go is the generosity of the organizers - their whole focus is to serve children's ministry leaders, so they record all the talks and provide them on a cd for no extra charge at the end of the conference - along with photos of everyone who was there so we can remember who we met later, all the powerpoint slides, film clips we discussed, games we played - everything, because we might find a use for it in our ministry. They stay up all night copying the wretched things! Those folk deserve a medal, for all the love and care they put into organising this conference.

So - let me encourage you - if you can make it in 2011 - DON'T MISS LEADERS TO GO!!