Best One Yet!

We had a great conference at the BGC Celebration in Winnipeg the end of last week. It was designed to be more relational and more relaxed and it was. I don't know who was responsible for the creative idea of having lunch and the annual meeting on a two hour riverboat cruise, but it was super. I had to laugh to myself that this had to be the best attended annual meeting ever and yet also the shortest! I also thought the evening concerts were a nice touch. I was able to go home feeling refreshed instead of overloaded.

As I expected, the preaching and worship were top-notch. The messages were very simple but powerful. God was speaking, at least to me.

My only suggestion for improvement would be concerning the seminars. Either they didn't start on time or they just weren't long enough to deal with the material. And as I commented in an earlier post, while the information was good, I found the application to be weak or not very helpful. It seems it is extremely difficult to put together a great seminar. Or maybe my expectations are too high.

I still struggled with using the fellowship times well. It was good to connect with people I've gotten to know previously and I did visit with a few new people, but it was still awkward for me. Again, I emphasize that this is my weakness, not anyone else's fault.

As far as the guilt aspect of some conferences I attended, our conference head, Jamey McDonald, took the heat off right from the beginning. On the first morning he announced something like "We have our schedule and agenda and things we need to accomplish, but if that does not work for you and you have other things that you need to get done, you should feel the freedom to do what you have to do." Gutsy! I don't seem to have the faith in people to give them that kind of freedom, but I certainly did appreciate it. I think there is another side of this however. Seeing how most of the people there were delegates from their churches and most likely had their expenses paid for by their churches I hope they felt some responsibility to their churches. And by the looks of it, I think most did.

All in all, it was the best BGC conference I've ever attended and if we can keep going in this direction I won't hesitate to encourage people to attend.

Dave