Most youth workers let discipleship be dictated by their purchased curriculum rather than having a strategic plan to reach and disciple their students. In this workshop, Dr. Ben Birdsong helps us to define discipleship for our student ministry and presents an intentional process to help your students move from seekers to attenders to disciples. Youth workers will be equipped to design their own strategic discipleship path for their ministry context to lead their students to more faithfully walk with Jesus.

In today’s digital world, students are being shaped long before they ever step foot into our ministries. With a swipe, scroll, or click, they are constantly absorbing messages about sex, identity, and relationships. These messages are often loud, distorted, and disconnected from God’s design. If we’re not intentional, culture will disciple them before we ever get the chance to.

This workshop will help leaders move beyond awkward conversations and surface-level teaching to intentionally form students with a biblical vision for sex that is rooted in Scripture and relevant to their everyday lives. Rather than simply telling students what to avoid, we’ll focus on helping them understand what God created sex for, how it connects to their identity in Christ, and why His design leads to true freedom and flourishing. 
Together, we’ll explore practical ways to engage topics like pornography, dating, and digital influence while creating a discipleship culture where students feel safe to be honest and are challenged to live set apart.

Children’s ministry isn’t best kept behind closed classroom doors. When best practiced, it cultivates spiritual formation and encouragement for all ages.

AI is revealing and remaking our world before our eyes. From education to work, companionship, death, and art, AI’s powerful influence is transforming and uncovering (apokalypsis) how we conceive of the most important aspects of human life. And it’s only just begun. Progress in AI will skyrocket over the next months and years, with each day advancing further into the unknown.

This breakout session will help you navigate the world of AI with wisdom and clarity while also showing how the gospel provides a better fulfillment for the promises of AI. The approach you’ll find here isn’t Christianity against the machine. Instead, you’ll see a turn toward the mirror as we consider the image AI is making humans into, and how the gospel offers us a better path for image bearers—being remade into the image of Christ. We will explore the range of human life—self, community, work, death, and more—uncovering the artificial ideas that threaten to malform us then declaring how the truth, goodness, and beauty of the Christian gospel might reform us.

Are college students adults or are they still kids? What could our relationships be with them, and who could they become in college and beyond?