awesome

Mission Acapulco was an incredible conference. From registration to biblical instruction to creatively inspired worship/prayer experiences, it was probably the first Mexican conference of its kind, all available to Mexican students at a very low price. Every morning and evening, a speaker delivered a message and a nine-member worship band artfully performed popular worship music. Most afternoons, students either visited locations like the beach to evangelize or traveled to orphanages to offer community service. The conference was filled with clever videos, interactive prayer journeys, and even funny masters of ceremony. By all appearances, Mission Acapulco was awesome.

But it took fifty staff members two months to plan, and most of them spent every waking moment at the conference creating the next meeting’s experience. The worship band barely slept, the creativity team worked around the clock, and nobody on staff ended the week rested. Worse yet, few if any staff were available to spend time with students. So the conference looked great, but we paid for it with our relationships.

250 people came to Mission Acapulco. 50 of them were employed by Campus Crusade for Christ. It seemed to me that about 50 of the students present were student leaders. They are the ones who are initiating with other students, teaching bible studies, and probably recruited the rest of the students to come. The 150 remaining students present were plain old students – they are not actively leading anything on their campus.

The meetings seemed to be split up geographically into 1) staff actively running the meeting, 2) staff not running the meeting, 3) student leaders, and 4) plain students.
1) The staff running the meeting, the worship leaders, the guys running lights and sound, and the people who are in skits, are paying a lot of attention to the stage, but are certainly not doing so for content. They’re clicking, adjusting, giving cues, and making sure all the “transitions” are smooth. These are the people who are creating the experience.
2) Staff that aren’t running the meeting, but have been involved in some way with the conference, are not putting on the show right now, but have been at some time this week. They’re here to see how it turns out, watch the students enjoy the experience, or try to feel like they’re connected to the conference as a whole. These people have also created the experience.
3) Student leaders at the conference know well that this whole thing is not about them, and so they tend to be disengaged, trying to take a break from being the leader, enjoy some rare fellowship, and make the best of a very busy conference schedule that they don’t really feel was created with them in mind.
4) The plain-old every-day students are who this experience is designed to capture. All of the lights sound, worship, talks, interactive prayer sessions, evangelism on the beach and serving in the community is pointed at getting students in this group to say, “Now this is something I want to do with a large chunk of my time.”

Which is to say that the point of the conference is, “If we put on a great experience for non-initiative-takers (students in group 4), maybe they will become initiative-takers (groups 1-3).” The lights, sound, prayer activities, half-initiative evangelism and community service (where you don’t have to take the get-off-my-rear initiative, just the “Hi-I’m-John” initiative) are all pointed at getting someone to say, “Now THIS is what I want.” I feel like, in effect, it’s advertising. We dress ministry (and even following Jesus Christ) in colorful, surround-sound, friend-packed and minimal-fear environments and add in risk-free samples of evangelism and community service, all in hopes that unknowing freshmen will want to get involved.

We invited all kinds of students to Acapulco in hopes that they would “catch the vision” and start something huge. That is, we are hoping that this conference will facilitate the fulfillment of the great commission as students commit to a lifestyle of evangelism. It’s conference-driven ministry (put on a conference and ministry will flow from it).

What I’m worried about is that, in my own experience, ministry is something that happens solely because Jesus Christ is moving in my heart to take his gospel to those who do no know it. The motivation for ministry is love. And, also in my experience, ministry takes place in the midst of homework, dating relationships, conflict with my parents, and pressure from my friends. It is rarely characterized by an emotional rush, almost never has live worship bands, and certainly never happens alongside two hundred like-minded people. In other words, my life does not naturally culminate in ministry, so a conference that does seems ... like false advertising. The ministry of the gospel is work, and a conference like Mission Acapulco tends to cast it as play.

In addition, facilitating a conference like Mission Acapulco required the labor of those staff and students who are most motivated to see the great commission fulfilled. That is, would-be gospel sharers diverted their evangelism/discipleship time into planning/organizing/creating time so that the experience could be really cool. So then, evangelists stopped evangelizing to create an experience in hopes of recruiting new evangelists.

I think recruiting of evangelists would be much better and certainly more honestly realized by simply inviting prospective evangelists to accompany existing ones. Not only does the new guy get to see the real thing, including the initiative, but it’s a heck of a lot cheaper.

I think recruiting of leaders, likewise, would be much better served by inviting prospective leaders to accompany existing ones. They can try on limited responsibility under guidance, and the existing leaders will have the opportunity to begin to “empower” other leaders.

The problem with this model, though, is that it relies heavily on existing student leaders and staff members who are actively engaged in evangelism and discipleship. They would need to be in good spiritual health, have plenty of guidance, and be well-acquainted with the end goal of what they were doing in the first place. And after a semester or so of working hard to minister and raise up ministers, they would likely need a break, something like a conference.

So, what if a conference was the result of ministry? A ministry-driven conference wouldn’t be trying to create ministry, it would be taking a break from ministry. It wouldn’t need flashy, attractive experiences because it’s target audience would already have decided that this whole thing is worth the work. It would have a lot of free time to rest and fellowship. It would have some teaching centered on the gospel, and would include a lot of evaluation. The goal of the conference wouldn’t be new ministry, but the same old ministry better.

If campus staff and student leaders decided to take a few days off to rest, evaluate the semester, and pray about the next one, the whole affair would be smaller and quieter. One guy could teach and lead all of the evaluation. A couple people leading worship wouldn’t necessarily be less effective than a dozen, but it sure would be easier to organize. If the group was small enough, they could even eat all together. I'd like to try it.