Leaders on the go
By Rev Sandy Brodine
“I’ve heard about the Leaders to Go conference for many years now … if I’d known it was this good, I’d have come sooner,” I said to Brendan Petty, conference organiser at the end of the biannual four-day conference in September.
Leaders to Go is an ecumenical Children and Families Ministry conference that takes place every two years, usually at the beautiful Stanwell Tops Conference Centre in NSW.
During the opening worship, Brendan had us add up how many years of ministry experience we had with children and their families.
There was over 840 years of practical ministry experience in the room.
No need to import an expensive keynote speaker, he declared, with that much wisdom here at the conference.
Participants were invited into creative and thoughtful worship by Beth Waldron Anstice, and introduced to the Converge Research by Naomi Swindon from Scripture Union Victoria (Naomi is also a member of the Common Ground Community, part of the Banyule Network of Uniting Churches).
Naomi led us through this provoking research in ways that helped us hear the voices of some of the 400-plus Australian teenagers who answered questions about their faith journeys.
Key findings include that building relationships with people of older generations is key to building a resilient faith, and having someone being prepared to listen to, and engage with a teenager’s questions, is most likely to support faith development.
Watch out for opportunities to engage with this groundbreaking research led by the YG Team and others in 2026.
If you’d like to read more about it, you’ll find the report here
As part of the opportunity to learn from the experience in the room, we heard Kate Clough, children and families worker from Living Faith Church in Greensborough talk about the project she is engaged in, setting up a Co-design for a Youth Advocates group in the Yarra Yarra Presbytery.
Workshops were given by a number of UCA leaders, including Emma Parr from the Pulse Team in NSW-ACT who shared Godly Play resources, and one from myself from the VicTas Younger Gen team entitled: ‘Messy Minecraft: forming faith in digital communities across geographical boundaries’.
In addition to all of this there was lots of great fun and games, networking, making new friends and catching up with old ones.
If you’re a children and families practitioner, or if working with younger generations forms a large part of your work, keep your eyes peeled for info on the next Leaders to Go conference in 2027.
You don’t want to miss it.