Two weekends ago now (November 20th and 21st) Chestnut Ridge Church hosted the 58 Conference.  This conference is geared towards middle and high school age kids from all over West Virginia to help them grow closer to God and help them love others more.

You might be wondering where this 58 comes from.  Is it the number of different groups that came?  Is it the number of people they have helped out? Is it the amount of food (in pounds or tons) that has been donated?  While 58 may be the number for some of these, that is purely by coincidence.  The 58 Conference gets its name from Isaiah 58 and God call for us to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free, to share our food with the hungry, and to see and learn how to let the light that Jesus provides in our lives shine brighter than ever before.

So how does one small conference accomplish all of that in a mere two days?  In all reality, part of October the whole month of November lead to the conference as its conclusion.  The conference hosted the 58 Food Drive and the Trick-or-Eat event.  On Halloween, kids and adults from all over the state went trick-or-treating in order to gather donations for the food drive.  All of the donations were given to the Mountaineer Food Bank, which distributes food all over the state to where it is needed the most.  Then at the conference there were several main sessions featuring people who just told their stories of what God has done in their lives.  These were then followed by small group break-out sessions where the kids could then talk about and process what they had heard and ask questions about everything.  In addition to this, the conference invites several non-government, non-profit organizations in to set up booths and talk with the kids about where they came from and what problem with the world they saw and are trying to fix.  Yes, all of that can be some pretty deep and hard to process, but there is also a lot of fun time in there too.  The kids were able to smash the fruit of injustice lead by the infamous Jimmy Justice and run through an obstacle course and just have fun.

My role with the conference this year was three fold: setup and provide multimedia services for the main sessions, stream the main sessions live through the wonders of webcasting, and find people to shoot pictures and video – and maybe put together a little something with the footage.  So, if you haven’t already, watch the video.

Until next time, Ciao! Ciao!