A certain prominent Christian leader used to finish the big festival every year with a speech to the gathered throngs of young people. He’d acknowledge that they’d had a great week, that the music had been terrific, the teaching fantastic and that many of them had received a particularly powerful experience of the Holy Spirit. They now risked going home and experiencing two things, first the crash after the high which would take its emotional toll and then the temptation to critically compare their local church with the event.
Now regular readers will know that I fell out of love with the Christian holiday conference some years ago. I’d grown up going to an annual holiday in Filey and so such weeks were a special part of my own formative years. Then since getting married, my wife and I had attempted to get into another of the big events. We’d never really taken to it and after a while we stopped going. For us it was the best decision we made.
However, I want to be clear that I don’t see them as a bad thing in and of themselves. I am not saying, they shouldn’t happen and I definitely would never say to people “don’t go.” In fact, we are hoping to be at one such event next year as our network of churches relaunches its annual festival following a hiatus during the pandemic I agree with Steve Kneale here, both in his insistence that there isn’t a rule against conferences and that they can be a blessing. I also agree with his plea that we don’t neglect the local church.
My reason for writing here though was to pick up on the advice given by that former leader and kind of reverse engineer it. Part of the problem is I think, that we expect too much of the Christian convention. This is to some extent linked to the point Steve makes. There are lots of things that conferences and festivals can do. Most of that is to do with economies of scale. They are able to focus a lot of resources into a couple of weeks, justified by the numbers of people that will be there. It means they can get in the people who are writing and recording worship music as well as those who have been writing books. It means that you can enjoy being in a large crowd. There are lots of benefits to that.
However, the convention/festival cannot and shouldn’t be expected to do a lot of things that the local church can and should. It cannot provide pastoral care, meaningful relationship, true accountability, contextually applied teaching. Don’t try to make it do those things for you. Don’t expect it to fill in the gaps if your local church isn’t managing to do those things. You need to sort the issues out at home, not plaster them over with a holiday experience.
Enjoy your holiday but go away looking forward to being home again.
Faithroots 