Chicago right now. Well, a suburb of Chicago. I was downtown last night. I am here with the rest of our Student Ministry team from LCBC at Willow Creek's Shift conference.
To be honest, I was not looking forward to today. I had 4 breakout "seminars" scheduled, each an hour and a half long. I had the attitude that I would not get anything out of them. They did not offer any insight into my world in Student Ministry Production. I'm glad I was wrong! I had two morning breakouts that were huge mind-blowers and now I am learning about ways to include Middle School students in the leadership of the ministry.
Yesterday, the whole conference got to hear from Brian McLaren, Shane Claiborne, and Mark Yaconelli. They offered some amazing thought on shifting the direction we move our students. (More thoughts to come)
Moving away from the actual conference, we have hit up some slammin' food! Great deep dish pizza, White Castle (not really good, but fun to eat there, Jimmie John's, and we are in the search for a good Italian restaurant right now.
Well, back to the conference. I do want to say before I go, conferences are great marking posts in my life that inspire me to learn and grow. Often I feel uninspired to grow and move, but gathering with other people is a great place for me to get energized again!
Peace
Our team is back in Lancaster. We had a great time in Chicago at the Shift Conference. We ended up staying in the same hotel as Charlie Hall and Switchfoot, we met some of the student minsitry team from Mars Hill, and ate at some great restruants! One of the highlights of the trip was spending roughly 2.5 hours in the hotel lobby as a team and sharing what we appreciated about each other. It was a sweet time!
Maybe my least favorite part was flying back from the conference. After a short layover in Pittsburgh we got into the plane shown above. The only problem with said plane was that as I took this picture, I was sitting in the second to last row of the plane. That's right, a total of 40 seats, which included the flight crew! The cabin was a toastly 83 degrees. Thankfully the flight was very short!
