National Church Goer Conference ‘09

Hey Where’s My Conference?!?!

This is a good guest post over at ChurchCrunch.com by Eric Jones of Jonese.us.

Why aren’t there conferences for Joe the Churchgoer? Not a very easy question to answer. There’s good discussion in the comments of the original post. My response is too long to include there so I’m dedicating a post to it. Here I go:

First, there is a trend in business to move away from a centralized working environment, allowing workers to have flexibility in how and where they do their jobs. As the Church, I think there is also a need for decentralization particularly because all Christians are called to be Christian (minister, worship, be on mission, serve, evangelize, disciple, etc) all the time. When your local congregation is the primary manifestation of your Christian life, you are constrained by their ability to create touch points in all these areas throughout every day of every week. To that end, conferences could be a great way to augment support in people’s growth as Christians. I do not believe that conferences can or should replace the local church. (“Think Kingdom, Act Local.”)

The reason people attend conferences is for networking, learning/training, and to promote themselves (or their company’s products/services). I think there is room and value in creating equivalent opportunities within the flock. How great would it be to have a resource that specifically speaks to an area of need in your life or that connects you with people who have similar interests or experiences in their faith. Or one that puts you in front of those that you may be able to serve (both professionally and minister-ial-ly(???)). How powerful would it be to spend 2-3 days in intense fellowship with others are able speak into issues you may be having in my faith in ways that those within my church (both staff and members) aren’t equipped to and/or can’t afford to.

The problem with conferences is the cost (both dollars and time). As long as people segment their lives (my Christian life, my family life, my work life…), there will be the perception that we can’t afford to invest the time to go to a conference. Our excuse is often the trade-off that would be required in some other sphere of our lives. Before we invest in coordinating a conference, we should invest in addressing and breaking down the barriers that people build up between their faith and the rest of their lives.

For those who are blessed and don’t segment their lives this way, the challenge becomes organizing a conference that can add value to your areas specific of need. A universal “flock” conference cannot meet the needs of the entire body; efforts at providing resources to large, diverse groups always end up speak to the lowest common denominator of that group. Conferences aren’t designed to operate in that way, that’s what festivals and revivals are for. Conferences need to concentrate on specific areas in order to attain a level of perceived value among attendants. And that perceived value must exceed a conference price that’s high enough to offset the cost of putting on a conference (believe me, my wife used to be a corporate event planner, conferences are expensive). It will be impossible for conference organizers to convince the flock of the value of attending so long as we continue to prop up the belief that “church topics” should be left to the professionals. People aren’t going to pay to attend a conference on a topic so long as they think their pastor is the one who should be studying it and anything of value to them will be communicated as bullet points in 20 to 45 minutes on Sunday.

Maybe instead of a church conference for the rest of us, we can start by trying to spread the value of the thousands of conferences that already exist deeper within the body. What if conference organizers encouraged this by offering special “Bring a Member” pricing, giving pastors that brought a member a discount or letting the member attend for free. Not only would the church member be blessed through exposure to the spiritual issues and teachings presented at the conference, the local church would be blessed by that member’s glimpse into the life of his/her pastor. Imagine how much easier would it be to raise support for pastoral training if members of a church had actually experienced first hand what the pastor was receiving at the conference?

I think the idea of conferences for the flock is a good one and hopefully will become a reality in the future. Until then, how can we break down the barriers between clergy and laity, pastors and members that stand in the way of us working together toward our common goal.