From Friday until Sunday afternoon, myself and one of my leaders in Awana attended the Commander College 101 seminars, near Chillwack.
Abstract: If you’re an Awana Commander, I highly recommend it. Great teaching, great application, great networking. Downside: Information overload.
The event was held at Camp Stillwood, a really nice retreat/camp destination in the Columbia Valley, up behind Cultus Lake. I’ve been there several times before for Men’s retreats with Cedar Grove Baptist Church, but this one was slightly longer, so more enjoyable.
The main speaker was Dr. Greg Carlson, who has been involved with Awana for decades along with his wife, Donna. He wrote the book that Awana promotes, “Rock-Solid Teacher“. The local Awana missionaries, Harvey and Lil Fehr also spoke. All four of them, along with one of the local Awana commanders, Karen Quan, were quite good – engaging and passionate about their subject matter.
The material covered was very in-depth, about the philsophy of children’s ministry, the importance of presenting the gospel to children, the importance of protecting the children from abuse, and many other subjects. It certainly gave me a much better vision for children’s ministry. I found myself renewed with enthusiasm for doing my job well and serving the children, their families, and the leaders I am leading.
I don’t have a lot to complain about. However, I will raise a couple of beefs. First, in their lesson on child protection, they used a short video, a series of monologues which were meant to express forcefully the ravages of an abuse situation – how it impacts the church, the family, the abused, and the community. However, at its end, the video pinned the blame for not reaching the lost of the community on the failings of the club to keep an abuser from abusing. This is an unfair framework. To suggest that because the church is rocked by this trauma, they stopped evangelizing the community, so people died in their sin, never hearing the gospel, that this is the church’s or the Awana Commander’s fault? That is way too much. People die in their sin not because someone fails to tell them about the gospel, but because they have heard the gospel, and have no excuse for their ignorance of God. If they didn’t hear it from that church, then it came to them in another form, and they rejected it.
Another issue I had was with the intensity of the weekend. There were so many sessions, and there was little time to reflect and process what was learned. On the plus side, I have never experienced a conference with such a vested interest in retention for the attendees. They built into the program all kinds of opportunities to note down takeaways and direct application. At the end of the process they even had us write letters to ourselves highlighting the most important things we don’t want to forget from the conference. However, I would have relished more time for reflection on the content I was downloading, if for no other reason than to think through some of the issues I have in particular and how their information changes how I see them. I mean, from breakfast through to bedtime on Saturday, we were going for 12 hours straight! That is intense for a learning experience.
I have written a lot above about what I didn’t like, but read that last paragraph again. This was a very good weekend and I got a lot more out of it than the last conference I attended. I attribute that to the organization and effectiveness of the speakers. And the Word of God was the beginning and the end of their subject.
Tags: Abuse, awana, Commander College, conference, equipping, travel
