I love Christian conferences. While I am thankful to God for placing me in a solid local church, there is something about getting away, meeting, and fellowshipping with other believers that I don’t see regularly. It is like going to visit your cousins on vacation. You never stop loving your immediate siblings, but it is exciting to catch up, reminisce, and learn from other relatives who can tell you their latest stories, hardships, and advice. They can also give perspectives that may not be easily seen in the normal rhythm of life. A few of my formative Christian developmental milestones happened as a result of attending conferences.
However, not all conferences are created equal, and recent events in the American evangelical sphere, such as the fall of notable Christian celebrities and the scandals surrounding G3, have shed light on this truth.
Christian conferences are valuable, but they should generally be small, intimate, and local or regional in scope to be worth the time and cost of attending. The mega-conferences with thousands of attendees, while giving the impression of a “can’t miss” event, are counterproductive in a world that desperately needs less superficial showiness and more one-on-one, real-world relationships.
Conference vs. Convention
The mega-conference circuit that has dominated the evangelical world over the past two decades follows a predictable pattern. It takes place in a large city where most people have to travel quite a distance and find lodging. When they arrive, they are given a badge and a schedule, and are met with several booths of Christian organizations and businesses trying to promote their causes or wares. They may meet up with some friends, but their circle of interaction is their small group, not with the main leaders of the conference – they are sequestered in a green room. The events then unfold as the speakers come out on stage, give a sermon, a Q&A, and afterwards the attendees discuss what was said. While some generous men may go to their booths and interact with attendees, there is a long line to see them, and the personal interaction lasts only a few minutes at most. There have also been instances where speakers charge attendees extra for VIP access to their presence.
Remove the Christian theme, and this scenario describes a corporate trade show at a convention center. The actual vibe matches that kind of event. Some may object, saying that they receive valuable information from the sermons and fellowshipping with their group of friends. That may be true, but why put up thousands of dollars in costs and travel across the country when you could have similar interactions with your friends at a closer location and watch the events on a TV screen?
According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a conference is defined as “ a meeting of two or more persons for discussing matters of common concern.” A convention is defined as “an assembly of persons met for a common purpose.”
The difference between the two is the degree of interaction. The modern evangelical conference circuit resembles more of a convention than a conference. There is not as much “conferring” and more just “convening.” The conferees are largely separated, and interaction is relegated to smaller groups.
This distinction is important because the convention model resembles more of a worldly setting than what the Scriptures model for us regarding how believers are to interact and learn from each other. The danger is, like with many other church innovations, that if you emulate the world you become like the world. I don’t doubt that the speakers can give theologically uplifting and beneficial information, but there is a better, less superficial environment to accomplish this.
Biblical Examples of Conferences
So then, is there a Biblical model of church conferences? With all the valuable information the Scriptures provide on how the church should function, one wonders whether there are examples of conferences in the early church. Actually, there are some. Paul calls the Ephesian elders to meet with him in Miletus, where he counsels them to “pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood” (Acts 20:28, ESV). It is one of the first pastor retreats in church history. Paul wants to impart the wisdom he has gathered for many years into the hearts of these men.
Another example immediately precedes this, and it included laymen: the gathering at Troas in Acts 20:7-15. This was where the incident with Eutychus falling from the window and Paul raising him from the dead took place. The Scriptures record that Paul took several men with him to meet the Troadian believers:
Sopater the Berean, son of Pyrrhus, accompanied him; and of the Thessalonians, Aristarchus and Secundus; and Gaius of Derbe, and Timothy; and the Asians Tychicus and Trophimus. These went on ahead and were waiting for us at Troas, but we sailed away from Philippi after the days of Unleavened Bread, and in five days we came to them at Troas where we stayed for seven days (Acts 20:3-6, ESV).
In both these incidents, the listeners knew the speakers, fellowshipped with them, and had personal interaction with them. “And when Paul had gone up and had broken bread and eaten, he conversed with them a long while, until daybreak, and so departed” (Acts 20:11, ESV).
The conference was intimate, personal, and impactful. It wasn’t something you could replicate by watching a screen. It was also just long enough to be this way, as opposed to the “drive-by” interactions that often take place at today’s mega-conferences. It was genuine, organic fellowship, not a corporate show.
Personal Experiences of Good Conferences
I have attended both large conferences like G3 and smaller intimate settings like the ones described in Acts. By far, the smaller settings were superior. Here are some examples of the latter from my own life.
For the past few years, I have attended Grace Bible Church’s (Wappingers Falls, NY) Adirondack Men’s Retreat held at Camp of the Woods in Speculator, NY. The conference had a different theme each year, but the goal was to get like-minded men together to fellowship and network with each other, edifying each other through worship, listening to great preaching, and shared recreational opportunities. About 50-75 men attended in a beautiful lakeside setting, and shared room options kept lodging costs very low. For men in the Northeast, it was within a day’s drive, yet many men came from much farther away.
There was no green room for the speakers. The “green room” was literally a campfire, and it was open to all. Speakers would stay up much of the night interacting with anyone who wanted to, and the camaraderie was close and personal.
One year, I took my teenage sons. One of the speakers had a fairly prominent national apologetics ministry. He spent one entire afternoon playing miniature golf with my sons and getting to know them. I was astounded that someone well-known would sacrifice his time like that. Granted, the man was very humble and had tremendous character, but I also believe the venue lent itself to that level of fellowship.
Another good example of a regional church conference is the Edgewood Baptist (Anderson, IN) Annual Ski Retreat, which is actually a multi-church event held each January in the Cincinnati area, mainly for Reformed Baptist churches in Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. They also get some well-known speakers, but they interact with the youth after the sessions, and the adult chaperones from the different churches work together to edify each other about what was preached and how to relay it to their children. They also have recreation throughout the evening between sessions, including a traditional ice-cream social for the graduating seniors that is looked forward to from the time they are little kids. It is a fun, intimate event that brings the same kind of solid teaching as the larger conferences.
The Jesus and Politics Conference held in Northern Indiana has also been a blessing. It has around 200 attendees; the speakers are accessible, and people feel close fellowship.
Lunch is provided, and the speakers are right there with everyone, talking to you like they were members of your own church.
Our own church has an annual Biblical Counseling training conference that is open to the public, and is designed not only for our own church members, but other churches in the Atlanta area who want to be trained on Biblical counseling as opposed to worldly psychological methodology. We have several speakers from ACBC leadership come every year, and they train in an intimate setting where there is give-and-take between the audience and the speakers.
Conclusion
The American Church is now seeing the fruit of a commercialized, complex, and celebrity-driven mega-conference culture. While the content is often good, it is done in a way that is expensive, often unattainable for the average congregant, and promotes a worldly two-tier structure that separates the leadership from the laity. There is also not much added value – you could just watch the event in a fellowship hall with the same local or regional church members. Resources would be much better spent on more local, intimate settings that promote fellowship, mutual edification, authenticity, and openness. This is what we see in Scripture when believers get together, and it is definitely needed in today’s low-trust society.
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