SFC Conference

Spent last week at the last ever Students for Christ State Conference, in Blampied. This year we had a sort of faith vs. fear theme.

As I said, it was the last SFC State Conference ever. We were told when we arrived, on Monday night. Next year there'll be no SFC. That's beacuse next year we'll be changing our name to Universe Victoria. In fact, there'll be quite a few changes coming in next year:

We'll be changing our name to Universe. If the name sounds familiar, that's probably because there are already Universe groups operating at some of the unis in Adelaide. This means it won't seem as though we're just a group for Christians.

Secondly, we've just started a partnership with Youth Alive Victoria. (Apparently we're going out with them.) This means that they'll be advertising our events at all their rallies. It also means that we'll be better able to stream former Year 12s from Youth Alive into Universe when they start at uni.

We'll also be starting partnerships between each campus group and a local church. The local church will employ a Campus Director for that campus group. As Campus Workers are generally in and out of university in three or four years, a permenant Campus Director will be able to make sure the vision stays the same, and the group keep heading in the same direction. They've already got a Campus Director at Monash Clayton SFC. I mean Monash Clayton Universe.
Partnerships with local churches will also mean we won't have to worry about providing church for Christian students, and can focus on evangelism.

Lastly, over the next few years we plan to have paide Campus Workers at each campus group, and to begin planting groups at other univeristies - particularly RMIT and Victoria University. There was also talk at the start of the year of campus groups being re-planted in Geelong and Bendigo.

Actually that wasn't so 'lastly' after all. There's been one other change, which maybe wasn't so expected. In the past we've had a real attitude of poverty, jokingly saying that, 'SFC runs of the smell of an oily rag.' This sort of an attitude is often encouraged by our churches, saying that students don't need to tithe.
However, on the final night of Conference when there was an offering collected for SFC, almost $6000 was collceted - enough to run the SFC office for a year. That means the $3000 we'd already received before Conference, plus anything else we receive, can go towards outreach events.
The most we've given on a Conference before was about $3000, in 2002 - our biggest conference on record. This year there were only about 70 people at conference (it clashed with a number of other things), which means each student put in an average of about $85. This is a lot considering that the average Australian church-member 'tithes' only $10 a week.

Anyway, that's enough talking about money. What about the shenanigans? What about the late night playing Risk and Mafia?
On Monday night I went to bed pretty early - about 1am. However, the Tuesday night I was up until 4am playing Risk and trying to convince a guy from the Young Liberals that I'm not a member of the intelligencia. Wednesday night I was up till about 3am playing Risk again. Thursday night I was up till about 5am playing Mafia. Each morning I got up between 7am and 8am.
On Wednesday afternoon a few of the guys (mostly from Ballarat) played British Bulldog, out in the mud and rain. 'Twas lovely.
Thursday afternoon I had the priveledge of a Punishment. At Thursday's morning meeting I was on the roster for singing, and forgot to wear my name tag. And if you forget to wear your nametag on Conference, Crazy Dave gets to give you a Punishment. Mine ended up being that I had to brush my teeth with wasabi paste for 60 seconds. I was expecting it to be pretty bad, 'cause Devo had gotten the same Punishment on Wednesday afternoon, and taken it pretty bad. And it was bad. But by the time the 60 seconds were almost up, it wasn't very hot anymore, so I decided to start dribbling it out of my mouth. When the 60 seconds were up, Crazy Dave was about to give me a towel to wipe my face, so I spat the wasabi all over him. Unfortunatley he didn't appreciate it heaps.

There is so much more I should put in, but I can't be stuffed right now. I might do another post later.