5 Things I Learned Planning and Running Heal the Nations (our annual conference)

5. Delegate more and more and more.  The people love to serve and will constantly surprise you by the input they will put in to a conference if they can see that their work is actually making a difference in people’s lives.  Not only that it means you can focus on receiving the Word from the guest speakers and ensuring your message impacts as many people as possible as deeply as possible.  Of course, this comes from a church culture of delegation, service and raising leaders.

4. Invest in the worship as much as the preaching.  It makes such a difference to the preachers and those being preached too.

3. Integrate the conference into the life of the church.  We preached on preparing for conference the week before and then last Sunday I preached on how to keep the conference high for the rest of your life.  The conference is called HEAL THE NATIONS, which is from a Scripture “the leaves of the tree of life are for the healing of the nations”.  That is why we are doing it – to reach as far as we can to dream big and impact nations.  The speakers are speakers who have all spoken at the local church (with one exception but that was just time constraints).  It is a bigger deal than Sunday morning but it has the same DNA.  A mistake I made this year that I can see clearly now is that we did not consistently have declarations every service.  Tree of Life Church make declarations every service – that’s part of our culture and DNA.  So next year, expect Heal the Nations declarations every single service!

2. Enjoy yourself.  It’s a hectic pace and things will go wrong and things will surprise you.  Just keep smiling – keep at peace.  Remember the big picture!

1. Remember WHY you are doing it.  It’s to equip the saints to do the works of ministry.  Invite people who will do that.  Will Graham said something important – good works require longevity.  I got into a bit of a mess trying to get all different speakers for all sorts of reasons, then I just pulled back and simply invited the speakers that over the many years have consistently impacted my life for the better.  They all came, and they all helped and equipped people.