Today, I am in New York speaking at the first-ever New City Gathering and spending time with my friend, Drew Hyun and his new network. Learn about the five values that they see as being critical for new churches here.
What’s interesting to me is that their church planting conference is brand new.
I’m not against new conferences, nor am I against church planting; after all, I serve as the Director of Church Multiplication for NewChurches.com! But, what’s fascinating to me is how the trend with church conferences seems to be heading in the direction of small, regional, and specialized.
- Take the Catalyst conference for example. They grew their single location conference in Atlanta to 10,000+ attendees, and then started a West Coast version of it. Soon afterwards, they introduced smaller one day regionals across the country.
- Exponential went the same route. They had their Exponential East conference of over 5000+ attendees, started a West Coast version of it, and are now introducing regionals in the U.S. and in other parts of the world.
- The Verge Network did the same. After growing their Austin based conference to 3000+, they shut it down for a year, and have now opened up with a regional only strategy.
- The SEND Network had a 10,000+ sized conference in Nashville last year, and are moving to a regional strategy this next year. They’ve decided to alternate between one big conference and smaller regionals every other year.
–> The tension that big conferences face is the push to generalize their content, in order to broaden their registration base.
–> The benefit of small conferences is knowing your target audience, so you’re able to specialize and specifically equip your niche audience with what they need.
[Read more…] about Trends for Church Conferences