Important Ministry Update!
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
As followers of Christ we know there is only 1 unchanging thing in the universe and that is God himself. Everything else changes, and that goes for Spirit & Truth too. I’m going to let you guys in on some information that you may or may not already know but won’t be officially announced until next Tuesday when the latest Spirit & Truth podcast is dropped:
Spirit & Truth will no longer be hosting an annual conference.
We’ll be hosting 3!!!
Before you start questioning our sanity at the amount of time, effort, and work jumping from 1 conference to 3 generates there are some details I should clarify. While this may look like we’re going bigger in almost every way we’re actually going smaller.
The 3 senior staff members of S&T (and by senior I mean OLD) have all enjoyed our share of a variety of conference environments. From the high-octane-several-thousand-seater to the more reflective lecture style of academic conferences, and just about everything in between– and we have mostly enjoyed all of them. In our opinion the very best conferences are hosted by organizations who know who they are, what they care about, and use their gathering times to solidify the community of their tribe and encourage deeper pursuit of the organizational mission and vision.
The staff at S&T has spent many hours in conversation and prayer attempting to clarify what obedience to the Lord looks like when it comes to executing our mission. Ultimately we always come back to the undeniable and eternal importance of the Church. We do a lot of wonderful things here at Spirit & Truth but at our core we are a ministry that serves and equips the local church. We travel to local churches with the goal of reminding the people of God who they are in Christ, exhorting them to take up the full authority of their supernatural inheritance, and then live on mission for Jesus in every area of their lives. There was a point last March when we questioned how the S&T conference fit into the vision of that goal.
We realized in order for the conference to make sense in the context of how we believe the Lord is leading this ministry we would need to make a few changes:
Make it more financially and schedule accessible so both leadership AND laity could come. To that end we changed the conference schedule. It now starts on a Friday evening, goes all day Saturday, and ends Saturday late afternoon. Everyone has time to get home for church on Sunday! AND the conference now only costs 49.00!
Keep it small. Keep it focused. Our conference is all about radical encounter with the living God. We pack a lot of good teaching into our equipping weekends with local churches; but our conference is about making time and space to meet the Lord. To accomplish this we’re limiting the size of each conference to a few hundred people, and we’re not packing out the schedule with talks. Will we have speakers? Yes. Will they be awesome? We think so. Will we yield to whatever the Holy Spirit tells us to do? Yes. That’s really the whole reason to come to the conference.
We’re bringing the conference to you. Until we came up with this latest plan the only place people could come to the S&T conference was at Stillwater Church in Dayton, Ohio. Stillwater is the location of the flagship conference and we will continue hosting a conference there as long as they put up with us. But S&T has an ever increasing geographic reach and Dayton just isn’t that convenient for everyone. So we’re partnering with host churches in areas to which we find ourselves traveling more frequently, to put on the S&T conference in more geographic regions across the US. In 2024 we’re thrilled to bring the conference to churches in Mobile, AL; Conroe, TX; and Dayton, OH. We expect some of these locations to change seasonally with site availability.
We say it everywhere we go: Spirit & Truth longs to see the church fully alive. We long to see a new movement of Christians who are empowered by the Spirit, rooted in the truth, and mobilized for the mission.
Will you join us as we stoke the fire of our hunger and devotion to Christ? I pray so.
Registrations for the 2024 Spirit & Truth conferences are open here: https://www.spiritandtruth.life/conferences