Fast Break and Back 

It takes a team to pull off an event like our annual Fast Break Conference. Each winter we gather students from the various staff and volunteer led locations in our region and provide training, encouragement from God’s word and opportunities to exercise their faith.  This MLK weekend was no exception.  More than 200 adults and students invaded the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Dayton, OH for the 2018 version of the event.  We have several teams to pull of this event, I (Scott) had the privilege of leading the spiritual formation team.       

That role had me oversee our ministry skills training seminars (both in content and leadership).  The training seminars were each 75 minutes long, and are based on how many times a student has attended one of our conferences.  Sunday morning we offered a buffet of optional seminars intended to shape worldview and discuss topics that help students walk with Christ in a world that can be hostile to our faith.  I also was responsible for making sure that the late night small group leaders had questions they needed to lead their students in discussion about the events of our day.  Here is a little bit about the training seminars and what they covered.

Blue Seminar - first time conference attendees hear about our need to share the hope that is in us.  We train the students to use an easy to explain and understand presentation of the gospel so they can share with their friends when they get back home, but also during our conference wide outreach that afternoon.

Green Seminar - second conference students learn how to effectively write out and present a three minute version of how they came into a saving relationship with Christ.  These stories will serve them well as they get to a point in their conversation with friends where they can share how they responded to God’s offer of salvation through Jesus Christ.

Red Seminar - each student who joins us for a third conference will be reminded of their identity in Christ and then put together a plan that they could use to share Christ with the students in a group or on a team that they also participate with.  Once they get home they can organize the event and invite their friends to a relational event where their classmates can also respond to Christ’s offer of salvation.

  Gold Seminar - This year Kristin and I led this seminar and helped students understand that the gospel is not just the door of salvation by which we enter into a relationship with Christ, but it is also the pathway, by which we continue to grow in our relationship with God.  We helped them identify their sin has both a fruit - the action we all see and an underlying root of unbelief about God or His care for us.  We also gave them a tool to use to identify what our actions might look like if we believe the truth in a situation versus how we might respond when we believe a lie.  We concluded by giving students an opportunity to identify an area of their life where they have elevated something to a place that should be reserved for God alone.  They made a Play-doh image that depicts that area of their life and then smashed it as a sign of surrender and added it to the other images and formed a Play-doh cross.                                                                                                                

Comments regarding students who attended two of the seminars:

“This was the most important time of the day for me... our time getting into the Word was awesome. And then the seminar helped me understand for the first time that the Bible is about God, and studying it is about Him and about me only in the sense of how I should relate and respond to Him.”     Red Seminar Participant   

One of our staff was helping a couple of students write a three minute faith story. One of the young man admitted that through the exercise and their conversation he discovered that he didn't know Christ. The staff person then used four icons to share the gospel with him and he trusted Christ. Another student in the group surrendered his life to Christ because he wanted to end a season of disobedience.                       Report from the Green Seminar



Your prayers empowered us as we prepared, led and responded to the questions and discussions that happened around the tables in the training seminars.  We rejoice at what God did as each student met with Him that weekend.  Thanks for partnering with us to change lives!