RECONNECTING at IGNITE 2022!

On Saturday, 2 July youth and young adults from our BUV multicultural churches attended our Ignite 2022 Conference at Werribee Baptist Church. It was an incredible opportunity for the 1.5 and 2^nd generation migrant young people to come together for the one-day conference where they celebrated the diversity of our church communities — worshipping God together as one and many.

With the challenging and disorienting past couple of years for people across the globe, this year’s theme of “RECONNECT” looked at what it means for us to reconnect with God, our community, ourselves and with creation. Jesus prayed that his disciples may be one, just as he was one with the Father. It was his hope that his disciples would be unified, and that the world would know him (John 17:20-23).

Many young people and their leaders all came together, reconnecting in many ways throughout the day: sharing meals, praise and worshipping together, getting some snaps from the photobooth, being vulnerable about their mental health journeys with each other, and many other forms of connecting with each other and with God.

The coffee and other hot drinks were flowing throughout the day, giving our participants a chance to meet one another for the first time or to re-connect over warm drinks on a chilly Melbourne day.

Keynote speaker Way Lim opened up the first session with a humorous and challenging look at what it means to reconnect with our communities especially coming from migrant backgrounds before the group was split up in workshops spearheaded by Sarah Do, Andy Mitchell, Ben Chong and Yiqian Chua who addressed the key issues of making connections in high school, connecting faith, culture and life for young adults, and coaching young leaders for the pastors and leaders.

Following lunch, everyone got their groove on as the young people reconnected with music during the Colombian dance workshop, reconnected with each other by being vulnerable in their journeys during the mental health workshop or literally making connections (and reconnections!) during the pastors and leaders’ networking and open space discussion activity.

To top of the day is the highly anticipated Cultural Celebration for the closing session which saw participants in their cultural/traditional clothes celebrating our cultural diversity through musical performances that had the entire crowd joining along!

What an amazing day it was to finally reconnect again in person after not having done so for the past couple of years and we hope to see the IGNITE conference continue to grow to be a safe space and platform for our 1.5 and 2^nd generation migrant young people as they seek to develop their voice and contribute to our wider BUV movement.