After all these years of hearing so much about the Dare2Share student conferences, tonight I was finally able to witness one first-hand.

A couple observations:

• Wow, there’s a lot of kids here! Hearing the number “6,000 students” and then seeing it are two different things.
• 6,000 people doing anything is a lot of potential, especially when it comes to evangelism!
• Dare2Share does a great job with keeping the stage moving. Although Greg Stier can definitely talk, he’s frequently interrupted with video clips and skits. I like how the pace keeps moving.
• Seeing so many students respond positively to a crystal-clear presentation of the gospel is truly moving.
• We’re only on the first night and I can already tell many of these kids are taking the Great Commission seriously.

Tonight was mostly a, “Here’s what the gospel is and why you need to share it,” kind-of night. It was presented in a very truthful and tactful way with no pressure or emotional hype of, “Your friends are going to hell! You want that on your conscience forever?” Greg was firm, but fair, an undoubtedly tough balance to maintain without coming off too pushy.

Personally, this conference will probably be just what I need right now. I know it’s for students, but my personal outreach efforts have been slacking, mostly due to me shrinking back into my comfortable, Christian bubble. I’m feeling my view of evangelism shifting to become more like God’s view of evangelism again and less like my own.

Social media-izing

I’ve been tweeting and posting little updates to Facebook through the experience here tonight and will continue to do so tomorrow (Saturday). Be sure to connect with me there if you’d like to keep up with the updates!

Below are some of the pictures and videos from today.

Pictures

My pictures didn’t turn out very well, but here’s 4 of them on Facebook from the first two sessions tonight.

Videos

I uploaded two videos to YouTube from tonight.

Session highlights
This video is a quick little recap video hitting some of the highlights from tonight along with some student interviews at the end. It’s only a couple minutes long, so be sure to watch what these kids are thinking and feeling so far.

Vlog
This one is like a video diary of my entire day: traveling, flying between airports, my nerve-wracking taxi drive to the convention center, crashing Greg Stier’s study session, being caught by security guards, and more.

Posted on February 5, 2011