Under God, something a little accidental and thrilling has just happened, so I thought I’d share it here. 

A year ago I was invited to speak at a conference in the South West of Sydney called SweatCon.  It stands for South West Evangelism and Training Conference.

It was so impressive.  There were 20 or so churches working together brilliantly with close collaboration and team work. I came home inspired, encouraged and thrilled to bits. 

And so when COVID forced the shutdown of the evangelical training conference that we used to send a few of our people up to each year, I said to the other minsters around here, ‘Let’s see if we can pull it off, to set up a local non residential ministry training conference running over four days.’ 

And so Cultivate Conference was born.  The kind people at SweatCon gave us the strand material. The great trainers from Youthworks came and gave us electives.  Plus there was an elective on sexuality from the crew at livingfaith.online

We had four New Testament talks from Bill Salier in the morning and Mike Leite on the Old Testament in the evening.  All for $130 a head.

We got local restaurants and cafes to cater.  On the first day - over an amazing Lebanese feast that we had for lunch - I met one young lady who came to Christ in March, who was having her first meal at her first Christian conference.  I had to tell her. ‘Just so your expectations aren’t shattered about Christian Conferences in the future, in terms of food.  It’s all down hill from here.’

Let me tell you what was amazing:  

• From our church - we had at least four times as many people trained - as we have ever been able to get to go away to a residential external conference. 
• It was the best inter-church co-operation that I’ve seen in our area in twenty years of ministry. 

If it can happen in the hard soil of the inner west of Sydney - then in the many other places where the soil is softer - it’s absolutely possible. 

And here’s a thing where the Covid disruption could lead to good.  Wouldn’t it be awesome if instead of a total of 5-600 people going to the blue mountains to be trained, across the 26 mission areas of Sydney - there were 26 x 100 people each at one of these local training conferences. 

There could be thousands more people being trained and equipped in the ministry of Jesus - who would never go to an overnight dormitory conference in the mountains.

How do you get the strand material?  Go to sweat.org.au and send the conference organisers a message, be nice and polite, and you never know what might happen.  That’s what I did.

See Sydney Anglicans Article: https://sydneyanglicans.net/news/cultivate-conference

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