A Week In Carbondale...ahh Paradise!

I spent last week in Carbondale, IL at what we call IL1 (that's our event code for the first event in Illinois for the year). With 1928 people in attendance (not including staff) this was the largest Summer Conference event of the 2007 season and the largest I'd ever been to (previous largest for me was TN5 a few years ago at almost 1600).

We had the usual SIU (Southern Illinois University) issues - dorm space reductions, meal cards that don't work, water balloons coming out of 8th floor windows, etc. But things went very smoothly for an event of this size. Registration has been a big problem at some of our large SIU events in the past. Despite a long, stressful Monday for Krystle Fernandez and Shawn Brown the lines were fairly short (average wait to enter the room was about 5 minutes and average time in the room was about 20 minutes). I don't care how you do it, registering 83 churches in a 7 hour period is going to be long, stressful, and tiring.

The program was outstanding, no surprise there. Matt Proctor couldn't make it, because of the birth of his 6th child, so Robin Sigars and Mark Moore each picked up an extra night of preaching. Jason Epperson preached Thursday night. All were very good.

We narrowly avoided getting to see a couple of guys run up on stage during worship when I happen to hear them discussing it just before they made their break for the stage. Doing my best Jimmy Foreman, I wheeled around and said, "What are we going to do?"

To which the bigger one said, "We're going to dance on stage."

My reply, "No we're not."

Bigger one again, "We're not?"

Me: "No we're not!"

They talked it over and decided to go back to their seats. Once that was over I set about trying to stop the crowd surfing that had started. No one got hurt and some semblance of order was restored a few minutes later.

One upside for me on this event was getting to spend a week at Conference with one of the intern teams. I had spent 3 weeks in the office with them prior to this event, but getting to go on the road together was a blast. Even better is the fact that they decided I was nearly as rigid and intimidating as they seemed to think I was in the office. Hopefully they'll spread that rumor to the other groups so that I'm not labeled too scary for future intern prospects. For the record, I haven't yelled at or made a single intern cry in 2 summers as the Intern Coordinator.

Enough rambling. IL1 was good. Sadly it will probably be the last time I get to attend a CIY Summer Conference directed by Robin Sigars. Who else can work a story about the Panama Canal into staff his time one night and spend the next night talking about getting run over by a bull? I mean really.