Youth Convention: A brief summary

Hi guys,

It's Jono here. Youth Convention 2006 has officially ended and by now most of the Perth people are back in Perth. I just wanted to share a bit of the happenings during the convention and how it has taught (me, at least) us a bit about mission!

As you know the Theme was "Out of the world, into the world" and Edwin wrote the English Theme Song which was chosen. He got an award for that which he is sharing with Sebastian. Nice!

The camp was quite relaxed, consisting of mainly - a talk followed by free time, a meal, some games in the afternoon, dinner and a short program at night. Thankfully the programs were light and this gave us plenty of free time to explore the very large camp site and also rest. We may be posting some pictures on this website (Edwin? Sean? If you have time?) to show you how it looked.

It was a fantastic camp site - the cabins were very nicely kept, they provided us with a mattress, bedsheets and pillows! And they were warm too (the fact that it was Summer helped). The showers were quite nice too. The food was enjoyable (although they did have some problems with quantity the first two days).

What programs were there? Dr. Omar Djoeandy was the speaker for the English section and gave three talks on "Redefining Success". I won't talk too much about this here; I believe one of our future Youth programs will be giving a summary of the camp too. For me personally it was a huge challenge and totally spun my train of thinking in a new direction. The talks were fantastic and ended with about 15 commitments for mission work.

In terms of social activities we had three main events. Firstly, Amazing Race with 12 groups competing for the fastest finish. There were 8 'events', with a mix of physical and intellectual challenges. That was great! Secondly, there was a movie entitled "Destination" which was made by the Camberwell Youth which was extremely professional and very well made. We'll try get a copy of the movie and show it to you guys. Thirdly there was a Captain's Ball league (which I'm sure if more of our Youth were there we would have done very well!) in our groups, too.

As for the rest of convention, I will leave that to the Perth people coming home to tell you all. Next year's convention will be in Sydney - I hope that many of you can come! It seems that every year gets better and better. This year our Perth group went around Melbourne for 2 days before Convention, sightseeing and walking around. I believe that only a few are left here in Melbourne - Amy, Sean, Thomas, Kim and Cynthia (Tan), Dennis, Rebecca and Regina. They'll all be back within the next week.

God bless you all, I'll see you next year!