Church is Boring?

Jesus, God, Father, Holy Spirit, Church, Christianity, Catholicism, are so often described as boring, out dated, an institution for those who are not free. Clearly myself along with about 1000 other young people missed this memo. Over the last few days IGNITE (the largest Catholic Youth Conference in Australia) has been taking place. The National team, along with 3 other teams had the privilege of being able to volunteer, help out and attend the conference with varying level of involvement. The conference ran from Thursday 27 – Sunday 30^th. The theme for Ignite was “Awaken” – Wake up sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Ehp 5:14. First off the whole thing was A-MA-ZING!! For the Kiwi’s reading this it’s sort of like Setfree but WAY bigger and on steroids.
 

The National team was responsible for running the “blaze” stream, which were grades 8-10. Basically what that means is that every day we ran and 1½ session with them and we were the small group leaders for that age gap. Other than that we had to do various odd jobs, like being an usher, or manning the NET ministries stand. With that said we also got to attend the conference and WOW it was crazy good. Every morning we kicked the day of with a rally, which consisted of praise and worship, a fabulous speaker, prayer and more praise and worship. All of the music was led by Emmanuel Worship, so obviously it was epic. Throughout the day, we were fed copious amounts of food, had workshops, listened to talks, small groups, did some random stuff and ended each night with a rally, similar to the morning rally. So much goodness, so much God, so much joy.
 

Church is boring. The statement is so flippantly thrown around but for me the  only way to make the statement true is “Church is boring?” it has to be a question, a shock, a surprise, because God is anything but dull and the Church is certainly alive and overflowing with joy. Ignite Conference 2012 was so good and for many people it was life changing, God was truly present and he alone is responsible for changing lives.

 

AMDG