I'm at work now. On my lunch break. It's a little sad the youth conference season is over and I'm back to the old work. However we are in a new office and that's making me feel very productive.

I am a little tired now that it's over it was pretty big.

This year was the first time I had ever been to KYCK. I know it's terrible. I've spent 8 years in conservative Sydney Bible Colleges, 7 years working in Anglican Churches as a Youth Minister and not once did I make it to a KCC convention. It's only now that I've become a Baptist that I'm forced up the mountains to listen to Bible teaching.

But it was a good experience. We had a group of 8. There were 5 leaders, 1 assistant cook and 2 youth. We were perhaps the most over staffed youth group in attendance.

I did enjoy having a whole weekend of solid Bible teaching. And the music was a whole lot less Sydney Anglican than I thought. There was not one saxophone to be seen, let alone there being a glut of saxophone solos. Plus the songs sounded more like Hillsong than a theology text book most of the time. Which I like. I still would have liked to the music to be louder. Worship music is best played at rock concert levels in my opinion. I think because then only God can hear me sing, and this is probably better for everyone.

I went up to Soul Survivor on Tuesday night, going straight from work. The music was louder there. Soul was up in Newcastle this year. We were doing Soul in the City which means that in the morning and evenings there was a main meeting with worship and teaching, and during the day everyone went out to do projects to serve the community.

I really love the format of getting hundreds of teenagers together to love a bunch of people they don't know just because Jesus loves them. It's entirely outward focused and you very rarely find youth events, or any big Christian event for that matter, that is so outward focused and practical about it.

What I appreciate about Soul is that as far as growing a large, Christian conference goes, it's doing everything wrong. After 5 years in one location it packed up and moved to Canberra. Then after two years in Canberra, it packed up and went to Newcastle. Next year it'll be back to Sydney. The year after I think the plan is to split itself across a bunch of rural towns and bless them with acts of kindness, like Soul in the City but it's Soul in the Bush. If you want to build a big conference this is not the way to do it. You would think the best thing to do is find one adequate location, run the event in the same place, at the same time, and then do the same thing every year but bigger and better with more and more famous people every year.

But this isn't really about building a big conference, it's about following Jesus. And Jesus is outward focused, and has no desire to build big movements just for the sake of big movements.

I like Soul because they follow Jesus*.

For me the Soul Survivor experience this year was hectic. I was speaking in seminars on 3 out of 4 mornings. And making videos with Sal every day.

We'd start making the video after the main meeting at about 1pm and then have to have it done for showing before 7:30pm. The 6 hour turn around from concept to shooting to editing then rendering, was pretty hectic. But I did enjoy it. It was like the extreme sport for video geeks.

This is a poor quality version of the first video we made, teaching people how they should behave while on projects:



It was a fun few days. I would do it again. Though I would like a little more sleep when it's all over.

*That's not to say that the KCC crew don't follow Jesus. My reflection on one conference is not in contrast to the other.