‘BJ’ a youth pastor from one of our local Baptist churches picked up the free WCA ticket and here is his review of the event:

The conference was held at CCC Hepburn Heights which is a good facility and there was a large projection screen which was good for the DVD’s of the speakers. The morning started with a time of live musical worship lead by a team of people from the church. All the delegates received a booklet with an overview of all the sessions and also a space for writing notes. This was a great thing because it meant that you didn’t have to take notes if you didn’t want to or if you weren’t a super quick note taker.

The booklet was professionally put together as you could expect from Willow Creek. The speakers for the sessions were really good. It wasn’t your usual leadership conference and it was definitely targeted at higher level church leadership like Senior Pastors and team leaders. It was very business oriented in its focus for a lot of the sessions. They gave you team time after each of the sessions and there were questions in the booklet to go through with your team. As I was on my own this was a bit redundant. Also, because of the cost I could imagine that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to afford to bring their whole team. Not to mention the fact that you can buy all the DVD sessions and the booklet to reproduce for only $180.

I went to a Willow Creek conference in Sydney a couple of years ago and it was a really great conference. The speakers were actually there in person and there were targeted workshops in the afternoons. I’m not really sure why they choose to get people together in one place to watch a DVD when they sell the DVD for the same price as the ticket and you could show it to your entire team and church for nothing. If you couldn’t buy the DVD’s after the conference for so cheap then I may consider getting an early bird ticket to the conference but when I can buy the DVD’s for the same price as 1 ticket then I doubt that I would go again.

Willow Creek do great stuff for the church and I appreciate who they are but this seems like a bit of a strange concept and I think they would do better to market the DVD’s and allow more people to experience what they have to offer.free rocky ii movie download