So many things are happening or have happened I can’t keep up with the posts. I will make one entry today about Big Break where I will share the results of this conference, and then later this week show some of the media we created for this incredible gathering.

We call it Big Break. It is a week long conference for students to learn how to experience the gospel in more practical ways while at the same time teaching them how to share the gospel with other students who have come to the beach without a thought of hearing or thinking about the message of Christ. I am biased, but it is one of the best things our ministry does in terms of programming.

We host it in Panama City Beach, Florida. The students pile into a beach front property for a week. We have morning sessions that are loaded with worship, teaching and training. In the afternoons the students fan out all over the area and initiate conversations with other beach going students. In the evening the students gather again and share stories that reflect God’s spirit moving in and through them. Many students come to Christ, and it makes for a great celebration.

So what happened this year? We had just shy of 3,000 students attend the conference over a four week period. Those students initiated just short of 13,000 spiritual conversations. Out of those meetings 5,084 lead to the gospel being shared, which resulted in 486 students trusting Christ! We are so happy for these new Christians.

So I will close with the promotional video we put together for this conference and later this week I will post other media we worked on for Big Break 2011.

We’ve been matched. For months I collected documents which reveal everything about our lives. As we sat across the dining room table from Debra, our social worker, she worked to talk in code about “that document from Utah.” Keeg’s, whom we call elephant ears, happened to be eavesdropping at just the right moment and into the room boomed his voice, “What’s the Utah document?” So now my kids know their mom spent a day in jail when she was 18….shoplifting. Madison just sat down and began reading over my shoulder and apparaently was asleep when Keeg’s found out. Now she knows of one of my many skeletons. Her response was, “That was dumb.” Many cats are out of bags as a result of this adoption journey.

So, after months of collecting paperwork, my heart reserved, aware of my fears and the many mountains ahead, I saw their faces. And something shifted within me. My heart might have skipped a beat. Sisters…not at all the boy I was expecting would climb into the spare bed in the boys room at the close of this chapter.

Many have said I would know when I saw “our child.” I was hoping that would be the case. There’s something so stunningly beautiful about getting to pick the child(ren) we’re adopting. And holy. To be given the opportunity to taste an inkling of the Father’s excitement over choosing me to be His and that He wanted me, is a gift I never expected I’d taste.

We chose them a few weeks ago, 7 and 9ish year-old sisters from the Kamanchi region of Ethiopia, 14 hours from the capital city. They don’t enjoy the comforts of electricity or running water, paved roads, wood floors or carpet. They live in the village (likely with a relative), as the orphanage only accomodates boys and small children. At too young of an age, they waded through the deep waters of the death of the one who gave them life and first held them…their mother. We don’t know anything else of their story. Yet we’re going to intersect their story as mom and dad. How unexpected that our God, who is authoring the stories of two beautiful sisters from Ethiopia, and is authoring the stories of five Brockmans in Orlando, has chosen to weave our stories together into one beautifully imperfect narrative. Imperfect because of the cast members. Redemptive because of the author.

How crazily unexpected.

As a ministry we are most about people reaching people with the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ. So even in our conference nametags we want to communicate a social intimate gathering. We emphasize the first name and we carried the theme of “Refresh” through even here.

During the conference the leaders wanted to make available additional resources. To do that we created a simple letterhead that carried the brand of the conference forward. Remember my post about coherence? We tried to do that with everything we produced for this important event.

Every conference has a schedule. We choose to go very lean on our program by producing it on stiff card stock. We wanted it to be durable, but not bulky. This conference’s intent was to refresh, and we intentionally did not want to weigh conferrees down by a program loaded with information. We communicated additional conference information through slides on the screens. Reducing the program to a card also saved a bundle of money, and that alone is refreshing.

We are enjoying the company of Kyungsoo on our team this year. Kyungsoo is here from South Korea learning how to create a media team that he will direct once he returns. He did a beautiful job on our program.

Coherence when you are talking about a brand, or in the case of our National Leadership Conference, is obtained when there is consistency  with the brand throughout the customer’s, or again in our case conferee’s, experience. We tried to consistently support the theme of “Refresh” by taking cues from our opening video and program. Here we created background slides that could be used to post announcements, speaker notes and even words to worship songs. These slides were done by one of your interns Micah Linscott. We were pleased with his efforts to create these assets for the conference.

Each year we try and report, as creatively as we can, many of the ministry activities and results that we measure. This year our intern Erin showed off her motion design skills and Carrie Whelply, our conceptual artist, put together a script which they then assembled into a video that highlights many of the results of our ministry efforts. We found this encouraging and I hope you do as well.