Return from CCDA

Last week, Matthew & I joined our staff team to go to Cincinnati for the annual Christian Community Devlopment Association (CCDA) conference. It was my first time attending, although I've been wanting to go for the last few years, and it was well worth it!

It's generally a 20 hour drive, so with short stops (they're never that short when you travel with 20 others) we hoped to arrive in 23 hours. However, our bus was uncooperative and half way there we had to leave the bus behind with a mechanic, rent ourselves some last-minute vans and continue on that way (imagine 25 people in 2 vans with seating for 27, but no trunk or luggage space!) In any case, we made it there in 30 hours, missing the first evening's session, but glad to have arrived.

The next 3 days were jam-packed with learning, to the point that even those like Matthew & myself, who actually enjoy classes, lectures and workshops, were feeling overwhelmed! I took in workshops on racism, the culture of poverty, how to evaluate programs, marriage in the inner city and reaching out to youth in gangs. The one thing that was so refreshing throughout each of these seminars was I could relate! Working in urban ministry, I find I always have to "translate" teaching to my setting: often it's suburban youth ministry that I translate to make work for our youth, or African-American inner city curriculums that I translate for Aboriginals. I expected to still have to do some of that here, expecting American urban workers to face much harsher realities, to work with much poorer people, to deal with completely different ethnic groups... but they didn't. When stats were quoted, I found they were very similar to our own. When culture was explained, I found they could have been talking about my community. It was surprising and so refreshing to finally belong!

Some of the things I went away with:
- compassion for those in urban ministry. (Since I am in urban ministry, I find I don't have much patience for those in ministry and not doing well. It's a lot easier for me to be compassionate towards those I work with than those I work alongside.)

- encouragement for the realities of community development (so many stories just sound so amazing, and when we've been working in the same community for 20 years and not that much has changed, we wonder what's the point. Hearing from God's Word on faithfulness and love, and listening to the struggles of others helped me reconcile the God of miracles with the slow pace of change in our setting).

- role of political and economic advocacy. (I've always been interested in politics, but never really saw the direct relation between involvement in issues and actual change. Hearing that the churches in Ohio just pushed through a bill that restricted PayDay Loan centres to an interest rate of 28%, rather than the current average of 300%, was really inspiring! Hearing of groups that put together Credit Unions to provide alternatives to payday loan banking, or of groups that are actively working on immigration reform really inspired me to not neglect this arena as "secular" and therefore not "ministry")

- Finally, the resources we left with will take me a year to go through. We came home with a stack of books and a DVD of MP3s for all the talks we couldn't make it to. Having email addresses of leaders in other communities who gladly say "send me an email - I'd love to talk about your questions," and books on topics that I'm struggling with, written by people in the same arena. Having a database of seminars to go through, so when we get to starting a new program, or thinking of new ideas, or evaluating old ideas, or struggling with our work with gang members... any of these things, we now have resources to go back to and be reminded, or learn from the start, of things that worked and things that didn't in other settings - and remember we're not alone in this!

Thank you for those who made this trip possible! We had to fundraise an additional $700 each to make this happen and are so thankful for those of you who believed in us enough to provide training!

Kirsten