The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
The goal of most faith-based events is transformation. Some conferences have business meetings, elections or the occasional Slip ‘n Slide break, but at their core, religious conferences are aimed at creating life changes for attendees or sending them out as an empowered body of people to make a difference in their churches, communities or the world at large.
In other words, faith-based events change lives. They inspire people to start a movement, get involved with a cause or become someone new. There’s something about getting away from the distractions of the world, coming together and listening to gifted communicators that lifts people up. Jamie Wagner, Ken Wytsma, Delaney Melaven, Zach Norman and Eric Wood all attended youth events that set them on new paths. They are proof that religious events can make a difference.
The Planner
Jamie Wagner, Director of Conferences and Events, Cru’s Great Plains Region
Today, Jamie Wagner plans the conference that changed her life in college.Like many college freshmen, Jamie Wagner struggled to find fulfillment and really wanted to be popular when she began her college career at the University of Missouri. She was a Christian, but “Christian was just another term that described me,” she says. She asked about Bible studies when going through sorority recruitment but ended up in one of the wildest chapters on campus. “I felt like I was in this internal war, the way most college Christians feel,” she recalls. “I didn’t have any clue how to walk with God in college.”
Her friend Ryan from high school, who later became her husband, invited her to a Cru meeting one week. At that first meeting, she met Cru staff member Jamie Hunsberger, who that night would convince Wagner to lead a Bible study in her sorority, and Hunsberger continued to meet with Wagner and mentor her throughout college.
Wagner was immediately drawn to Cru’s Denver Christmas Conference that year when she heard about it. “I had only gone to one other Christian conference in high school, and that’s where I became a believer,” she says. “I equated making big steps in my life with going to a conference.”
DCC exceeded her expectations. The last day of the conference became Wagner’s no-turning-back moment. Being with thousands of college students who shared her challenges and desires solidified her commitment to live out her faith in college. Additional Cru conferences developed Wagner’s faith throughout college. The Legacy, a conference for Greek students, honed her leadership skills and introduced her to friends familiar with the experience of being one of a few Christians trying to make a difference in secular environments. Summer Project, which she describes as a 10-week conference, gave her intensive teaching, training and hands-on experience. At Opportunities of a Lifetime, which helps juniors and seniors prepare for life after college, she began considering joining Cru’s staff.
Today, Wagner has planned or is currently involved in the planning of each of those events, and her fellow staff members share similar life-changing Cru experiences from college. In preparation for DCC, the planning team pulls in people from other departments to review the last conference and brainstorm for the next one. Staff members always bring up stories of crucial moments that took place at Cru events while they were in college—from becoming a believer to clarity on major decisions or the desire to come on staff.
The team’s insight into what students are thinking is an important advantage when planning. “Every year I relive all those thoughts I had as a freshman, sophomore, junior, senior,” she says. “I continually remember to get in the shoes of the student: How do we plan a conference that really meets the spiritual needs and answers the questions that they’re asking?”
Cru events anchor a year-round ministry of relationships. “We say that DCC is a semester’s worth of discipleship in five days,” explains Wagner. At Christmas Conference, the students hear about Summer Project, then those 10 weeks at that event springboard them into the fall. “[Events] propel entire movements on our campuses,” Wagner says. “They come back not just emotionally fired up…but with tangible tools about how to be effective.
“If you have students showing up expectant, students that are not distracted by the outside world for whatever time you have, who are listening and eager to hear from God, you have the right elements combined with a breeding ground for the Holy Spirit to work in a student’s life,” she says. “I am the personalized version of those reasons.”
The Author
Ken Wytsma, The Justice Conference Founder, Author of “Pursuing Justice”
An attendee’s state of mind can be just as important as the event itself. Ken Wytsma’s turning point occurred during a summer spent at Pine Summit in Big Bear, Calif., during college. Wytsma broke his jaw in a bar fight right before he went to camp, and once he arrived there, he says he was stripped of his comfort zones, allusions and distractions. He compares that series of events to a shepherd breaking a sheep’s leg to reacquaint it to his voice and care. He says his time at Pine Summit gave God room to speak to him, and the relationships he developed with attendees during the following two summers as a leader at the camp instilled in him a heart for ministry and compassion.Wytsma went on to found Kilns College, a school of theology and mission, and became a lead pastor of Antioch Church in Bend, Ore., which is known for its internships and residency programs for college students. He launched The Justice Conference in 2010 intending to create results similar to his own story.
“All of those things gave me a firm belief that everyone is hungry to get beneath the surface,” Wytsma says. “A lot of things are just entertainment-driven. Camp can be that way. Conferences can be that way. But everyone, no matter where they are from or what their age is, has a deep desire to connect with something solid, to understand truth and see how it all fits together. That element is what I aim for.”
The message of justice pervades the conference, which drew 4,000 to Philadelphia in February this year, and his new book “Pursuing Justice,” released in January. Each outlet spreads the message in different ways, but he acknowledges the power events have to foster change and action.
Wytsma avoids the hype, guilt and fads often associated with social justice. Instead, he anchors the conference in solid theology, which he says can’t help but lead to a heart for authentic justice. “When you study scripture, you can’t miss the justice, love and compassion that’s there on every page,” he says.
“[Events] transform people because there’s power in gifted speakers teaching,” he says. “There’s something about teaching to large groups. The sermon on the Mount to masses of people—there’s something about boiling down truths in that context that hits people.”
The Student
Delaney Melaven, Sophomore, Webb City (Mo.) High School
Delaney Melaven had never run a 5K before attending Christ in Youth’s Move conference in 2011. She’d not given much thought to the Christian persecution, either. But at the conference, she watched “Love Costs Everything,” a film about the persecuted church around the world. Melaven similarly was moved by a speaker who asked her to come down front, pick up an unlit match to represent shining the light of Christ, and figure out how to metaphorically light that match—in other words, how to make a difference.“I just knew I wanted to do something. I had no idea what at that point,” says Melaven. Her youth pastor gave her a list of ideas, and one was raising support to run a 5K. The determined teenager set out to plan one instead.
Melaven quickly recognized the power of events, and she organized a small screening of “Love Costs Everything” at her church where people could register for the race. She learned new terms like “break even” as she enlisted local running businesses, gyms and YMCAs as sponsors and locations to post fliers. With support from her church, friends from the conference and the community in Webb City, Mo., she hosted the Ignite India 5K, May 12, 2012, for 65 runners at Ozark Christian College in nearby Joplin, Mo.
That summer, Melaven went to India to see the church planted as a result of the money she raised for Central India Christian Mission. “I was kind of shocked,” she says. “It was very humbling to see what a 5K or anything you do to raise $2,000 can actually look like in another country.”
A second annual 5K is in the works for this spring, and it will benefit the same organization in India. Melaven plans to incorporate new ideas based on last year’s run and her trip to India. A devotional before the race will educate runners about the cause, and they will be able to participate in activities before running. They also will be able to write letters and donate toys for a CICM children’s home she visited.
“Being at a conference calls you to action a little more because you’re surrounded by so many more things that tug at your heart,” Melaven says.
The Missionary
Zach Norman, Marketing and Program Development, Lake Williamson Christian Center
Zach Norman was not interested in attending a church summer camp as a junior high student who thought he knew everything. But the reluctant teen packed his bags for East Bay Camp in Bloomington, Ill., anyway—a decision that changed his outlook and set him on his future career path.Suddenly, stories he’d heard in church were presented in a new way. Men he admired weren’t preaching to him. They were fun to be around and they asked his perspective on the lessons being taught. “It wasn’t just going to church and Sunday school class and then going home,” Norman says. “We were having fun and doing these things together all day, and then we would have conversations about it. Having that opportunity to live among them, see that life unfold around you and hear it all in a short span of time [led to me] making some of the decisions and career choices I’ve made.”
Peggy O’Neal, who Norman met at camp, invited him to be in the UMC Illinois Great Rivers Conference youth leadership program while he was in high school. The committee worked at camp and planned statewide retreats. Norman planned the annual youth retreat at Lake Williamson Christian Center, where he would later intern in college and now manages marketing and program development.
At Lake Williamson, he helps group leaders create the life-changing environments that affected him. “There are 1,000 things people want to do here, but they almost always want to unplug from their lives and focus on something else,” he says. “They’re planning a meeting or a larger conference with workshops and general sessions. My focus is to ensure the guest experience remains distraction-free but feature-rich at the same time.” Feature-rich means, for example, making sure the retreat centers provide any AV equipment planners might want.
Norman began to feel separated from the pivotal aspects of conferences he loved so he began coordinating mission trips to South America. “The work I’d done in planning events and being on the supplier side of the table showed me I had a knack for travel and details like getting visas, transporting medications in and out of third-world countries, and getting teams ready to go into remote villages,” he says. “I look back at my professional experience as preparing me to blast off into the mission field.”
While working at Lake Williamson, Norman is pursuing a degree in nursing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. When he graduates in December, he’ll be able to provide medical aid on his trips to Bolivia.
The Pastor
Eric Wood, Connections Pastor, Valparaiso Nazarene Church
Hundreds of Nazarene church leaders around the country can attest to the impact the Nazarene Youth Conference has on the thousands of students that attend the national conference every four years, but Valparaiso Nazarene Church specifically has benefited from the conference. Its last two youth pastors were called into ministry at the event.Eric Wood says he didn’t have high expectations when he went to the 1999 Nazarene Youth Conference in Toronto with his Valparaiso youth group, but it was there that the lessons he had heard in youth group and the interest he had in how his youth pastor prepared and delivered sermons began to make sense.
“It’s the vastness,” Wood says. “You’re overwhelmed by that many people worshipping at the same time. [The conference is] every four years, so the planning and execution of the event is very thought out. It has the definite feel of having been prayed over consistently, and the spirit is very heavy at the conference.”
Wood began to feel led into ministry during a conference session about finding your calling. He immediately spoke with his youth minister, Shawn Evans, and became more involved in the youth group when he returned home. He joined the church band and began working on his degree in youth ministry at Olivet Nazarene University. He later took over as youth pastor for Evans, who is now executive pastor at Valparaiso. Current Valparaiso youth pastor Mike Denny followed a similar path, speaking with Wood when he felt the call into ministry at Nazarene Youth Conference 2003 in Houston. Denny filled Wood’s position as youth pastor when Wood became connections pastor.
Wood has attended the conference four times now, and it’s the work put in before, during and after the conference by leaders that makes it a conduit for change, he says. Digital resources and materials at the conference help leaders prepare students for the conference and help them once they return home. Wood’s focus on discipleship surrounding the conference makes sense. His turning point occurred at an event, and follow-up made it stick. “I’ve seen both lasting impressions and spiritual highs come out of it,” Wood says. He advises conference planners to offer resources for leaders that help disciple students and put less emphasis on big-name speakers. “They’re talking for 50 minutes, and then they’re out of students’ lives forever.”
“The community aspect of [an event] is crucial,” he says. “It’s all about the relationship. During [the conference], you help unpack what they are dealing with, and post-event is keeping them accountable for decisions they made.”
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