The annual Newfrontiers conference for leaders, students and twenties changes its name so often that I decided to simply title this post what I always call the conference in practice. Yesterday evening I arrived back in Hampshire after spending most of last week on Brighton seafront at the Brighton Centre with 5,000 others from our family from across the world. It was a most unusual and particularly directional conference for our family of churches, and I'm hoping to get some time in the coming weeks to use this blog to help me digest various themes, sessions and speakers. But in this post I wanted simply to write about the context in which I came to Brighton this year, and the context I am coming home to.
2008 so far has been a whirlwind of activity for
Life Church Southampton, and therefore for me too. In January we hosted a leadership development weekend for many of our small group leaders, at which our new-found friends Nick and Penny Sharp (Grace Church Nottingham) came to be with us (they blessed us a lot!). In February we moved the venue of our Sunday meeting to a beautiful cinema in Ocean Village on Southampton waterfront. At the end of February we took many of our students and twenties away to get together with many others from around the Wessex region to spend a weekend with
Terry Virgo, which was an outstanding time for us.
In the months that followed, we completed our first cycle of church membership and ran our first Foundations course using the book by John Groves (Winchester Family Church). We multiplied two Life Groups in March and April, and hosted our second annual church weekend away ('Life Camp') in May, at which God clearly spoke to us through John Groves, who did two sessions with us. In June we put on our first ever large-ish gospel and healing event we called 'Park Life'. This was a series of seven church services we put on in a marquee in central Southampton at which we prayed for the sick and preached the gospel (Front Edge style for those familiar with such things) and saw 24 responses to the gospel. Among those who came to serve us were Kevin Bartlett from King's Church Salisbury, Spencer Nichols from Dorchester Family Church and Paul Brown from City Hope Church in Bermondsey.
During all that, I have been working on this year's Global Cafe at Newday in August, and as a staff team we have been hard at work preparing for our region's first 'Together' event, this year called Acceler8. In addition, there has been the organising and administration of our region's first Front Edge event in November.
So it has been rather busy.
I was priveleged to be able to get out to Portugal with some old uni friends the week directly preceding the conference; I felt very refreshed as I relaxed, read Romans, Desiring God and a highly interesting book by David Starkey giving an overview of the English monarchy since the Tudors which contained some interesting details of how the Anglican church and British government are so inextricably linked, for better or worse.
Nevertheless the flight into Gatwick from Faro (which arrived at 1am on Tuesday), the journey to Wimbledon where I stayed the night, and the train to Brighton at 9am meant that I arrived less than relaxed even if fairly refreshed generally.
So the conference for me fitted into what is probably my busiest season of life so far where I am learning so much about God, church, church-planting, leadership, work, life, family and so many other things. It wasn't a relaxing time, but that is not why Terry hosts the conference, nor the reason I chose to attend for the seventh consecutive year. Between the sessions I had packed all kinds of meetings (probably too many) but as we know God's voice is like a spearhead; it pierces through the busy-ness of life and the busy-ness of a conference to bring direction and true refreshment by His Holy Spirit.
I have come home to another season of busy-ness: in the next three weeks I need to make the final preparations for Global Cafe, tie up a load of loose ends on Acceler8, spend some time thinking about next year's 18:20s work and prepare two preaches for immediately after Newday. It will be busy, but I also hope in all the busy-ness that spending time digesting the contents of the Brighton Conference (which I will partly do here) and above all abiding in Christ will prove to continually water my soul. There has been much to ponder!
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