Just finished up a lunch meeting building out the PDYM ’07 conference. Islands. Yum.

Many of the discussions were about wanting to give people more time to discuss and dialogue as a team, planning out a new praise and worship night, encouraging lead youth workers to bring their team out here to Saddleback, and focusing more on being a local church conference and not pretend to be something that we’re not.

I’m most excited about the last part of our conversation, in that I think that YS and now Group do great parachurch ministry, but we want to focus on opening up our church doors, letting people see the guts of this thing right in the trenches, show failures, talk about the current year/learnings, let people just hang out with Doug and the team and learn a biblical foundational philosophy to build everything else on.

I’m excited because another year we’ll get to host close to 2,000 youth workers and their teams on a biblical approach to ministry, many of them just starting out. I’m excited about funny bits, great videos and awesome time with God speaking to my heart. I love the community that links people together. I love being personally renewed to go back for another year ready to take on the world.

Man, I love my job.

JG