I am back from conference in Finlake with SWYM and it has been awesome! Just in case you don't understand what on earth I'm on about Conference is a time when all the people under the SWYM umbrella (trainees, assosiates, leaders, applicants and a couple of others) get together for fellowship, community, communal worship and learning. There is around 50 trainees doing 3 courses (An MA, an OCR Diploma (I'm doing that) and a Marjons Diploma), there are also a good number of assosiates and stuff!

On Monday we kicked off by hearing from Matt Summerfield (the national director of Crusaders) who talked about 'Catching a generation rising' which was very cool and he had a very good pointpoint presentation that went along with his talk. In the afternoon we got a chance to talk more with Matt and he told us some more stuff. In the evening we had a 'chilled' session with worship done as a meditation on God's word (Colin read out Philippians from memory), then Matt spoke to us again and Jon did some musical worship for us. I got the chance to pray for some people which was really ace and was actually something I hadn't really done before.

Tuesday we had leadership lecture which I hadn't been looking too forward to but actually turned out to be ok. For the first bit I helped Scottie Lesley to get her Baptism presentation up to scratch on powerpoint, then we had a debate where we were fighting for the loosing side but because we had more confident and better speakers (me and Steve) we came out on top. In the afternoon we had discovery who came to SWYM conference last year, so this session covered a lot of the same stuff that they'd done then. We had pastoral time after that. The evening session which we were leading on wednesday was moved to today so we were doing the whole prayer thing. It was really cool and the whole putting candles on the map thing that I was doing worked really well. I also got the chance to get prayed for and pray with some people which was really goos. I've also started to find that if I get to the evening session a bit earlier to do some prayer I'm ready when we start!

Wednesday was another cool day at conference - it opened with Martin from Discovery (the youth bit of Agape) speaking. We pretty much had the discovery guys all day and in the morning they took us through an evangelism review. In the afternoon I went to an optional seminar (my first!) which the discovery guys where doing a thing on culture and looking at how we relate to those young people and where their 'morals' 'beliefs' and 'worldviews' come from. In the evening we had a guy called Roy Searle from the Northumbria community come and talk (an awesome chat) about being a church community and he showed us a really cool aninmation DVD with voices done by some Irish kids 20 years ago - Funny just doesn't get close! We also had a disco from Simon Tuck which was a real laugh and added a great social element to the week.

Thursday (wow that's today) we had Catherine Tollerton and Jon Prockter doing Spiritual Disciplines with us and we also had another assignment set (isn't the word ass in assignment appropriate!) so that made my day!! Then it was time to go and so piling into the ICEmobile we came back to Exmouth and now I'm here typing this! I've got supergang soon and I'm about to have a late lunch! Cherrio!