Rethink Recap

The intellectual and moral challenges facing our young people are immense.  It's time for the church to step up the training and discipleship of our students.  At Stand to Reason, we're doing our best to help parents and leaders with this task.  That's why we held our very first Rethink Student Apologetics Conference the last weekend in October, at Crossline Community Church in Orange County (by the way, a huge thanks to the Crossline team of Erik Williams, Matt Smyles, Grant Gunther & Jourdan Svajda for partnering with us to pull this off).  More than 400 people showed up, from junior high kids through college students, as well as parents, youth leaders, youth pastors, and other adults.  Many were local to Southern California, but people traveled from NorCal, Nevada, Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa, and even Canada.   

So, how was this apologetics conference tailored specifically for students?  Here's what we did:

#1 - We elevated our expectations:  When it comes to the spiritual training of its students, the church has set the bar low. Indeed, it's so low that the majority of our young people now are almost completely inarticulate about their faith.  Many churches are satisfied if their students come to youth group once-a-week and hear a 30 minute inspirational message.  Not us.  We know students are capable of handling a lot more, so we gave them a ton of content:  six teaching sessions, each over an hour-long, and two additional Q & A sessions.  We fit all of that into a Friday night and Saturday (all day on Saturday, from 9 am to 9 pm).  We elevated our expectations for students and they ate it up.  We heard student after student rave about the conference. 

#2 - We made it accessible:  I was careful to pick speakers who not only know their stuff, but can make the content accessible to young minds.  No, this does not mean dumbing down the content, but communicating it in ways students can grasp onto.  When we don't make apologetics accessible, we run the risk of making it seem irrelevant and then students write-off the whole endeavor.  So, having a Ph.D. or being a well-known author were not prerequisites for our speakers.  Being an engaging speaker and excellent translator were.  

#3 - We made it interactive:  We weren't satisfied with students merely sitting through some teaching sessions.  We wanted them interacting with the material and reflecting on it throughout the conference.  Therefore, we built in 15 minutes of Q & A at the end of every single talk, giving students an opportunity for immediate interaction.  In addition, we scheduled two one-and-a-half hour "cohort" sessions, where we broke attendees into three smaller groups for more Q & A with our speakers.  We received a ton of good feedback about the cohort sessions.  Finally, most of our speakers were able to be there for the majority of the conference and were intentionally "out and about" amongst students, rather than hiding out in the speaker's green room, away from conference attendees.  This gave students access to our speakers beyond just their teaching sessions.  

Overall, it was an excellent first Rethink conference.  The positive feedback from students, parents, and youth leaders was so humbling and encouraging.  Indeed, there is such a huge need for this kind of student conference, we're planning a second Southern California Rethink conference for the Fall of 2013 AND another one in Alabama.  Start looking for more info at the beginning of next year.  

Comments

[Shay Phillips]

Please come on down to the San Diego (Escondido) area for the next Fall conference.

[Amy]

Shay, Crossline Church is only about an hour away from Escondido, so hopefully that's close enough for you to make it to the next one.

[JustChatting]

I commend you all for your efforts and these types of conferences make a big difference in the lives of our youth. And I think that STR has done a great job of providing the opportunity for "parents and leaders" to engage in the apologetic task.

Unfortunately, I think that much of the problem still lies with parents and church leaders... THe general Christian community seems to be ambivalent about the apologetic enterprise. Few churches have it as necessary part of their youth program. Yet, the numbers of youth who seem to fall away from the faith of their fathers continues to be shocking. These are our own kids. If we can't be missional among our own I would argue that there is something fundamentally broken.

These conferences are of tremendous benefit to our youth and to attendees. Yet, I wonder, where is the organization or message that directly addresses the general failure of our churches and, more pointedly, of parents, in providing our youth with a robust apologetic foundation? WHo is chastising our parents and church leaders and pushing the harder message that our Christian community continues to fail to provide our youth with the needed defence of our Faith, exactly when such a defence is most needed by our youth? Gone are the days when no one questions the foundations of Christianity. As Greg has suggested the real battle is in the realm of ideas. We continue to under perform in this arena. STR (along with other outstanding apologetic ministries) should be overwhelmed with demands from churches throughout North America. THe works of these organizations can not be understated.
But, as for the 3rd wave of apologetic practitioners that are up and coming, a different goal may be necessary: every church must provide an apologetic foundation for their members with a focus on youth. THe realization of this goal requires us to ensure that we focus our attention on parents and the Church community, along with our youth. Otherwise, despite the excellent work of STR, we will continue to row against the current. We will make head way, but we will never get to the destination intended.

[Tim Wright]

Will any of these presentations be available for download?

[Amy]

Tim, they're not available yet, but we're hoping to have them eventually. We haven't heard/seen the recordings yet, but as long as the quality is good, we'll be offering them. We'll make sure to announce it here when they're available.