I regularly read Tim Challies blog (as I guess do a lot of you) and in the last week he’s been at the True Woman conference (I think he’s still secure in who he is). Anyway, he made a couple of observations. Firstly, that this conference was full of prayer which he contrasted with a lot of leaders and pastors conferences he had been to.

Secondly. he reflected that most of the time a conference is just a conference and not a movement (although he felt this one with a ministry behind it was a bit different).

“But at the end of the day, conferences end. And then you’re left with real life, with the daily grind. You leave the place of refuge, the time of focus, and return to life with all its busyness and distraction and difficulty.”

And here’s where I think Newfrontiers has stood out for me. I’m not known for publicly praising our conferences so I hope I’m not going to damn them with faint praise but our conferences have prayer at the heart of them. We pray as leaders, as regions, as churches and as individuals for our gatherings and when they do they are not just a conference but the coming together of a movement. The movement already exists whether the conference does or not (read for example about our Front Edge conferences and also here).

So at our conferences things often change, as a result of them people return home with a call to church plant, move to another nation, step up into leadership, make themselves available to serve in a whole new way – they really are together on a mission.

I’m not always a fan of everything that goes on, but I love the passionate heart for mission and that the conferences serve the mission (not the other way around) and act as a catalyst for change in some and an encouragement to keep going for others.