It has been one week since The Feast.  I have to say that it was a great conference.  We had three youth from our congregation attend.  This is the first year that we have participated in a Higher Things conference.  During the week, we had catechesis by Rev. Peter Bender and our plenary speaker was Rev. Prof. Brian Mosemann.  The theme of the conference was The Feast, focusing on the Lord’s Supper.  Each speaker had 3 45-minute sectionals where they addressed the entire conference, some 1265 participants. 

Since most of my work as a pastor is working with youth, I attended the HT-U sectionals, all about working with youth, resources that Higher Things has to offer, ways to get involved with HT and a general discussion about The Feast and how to make HT better.

There were also in-depth sectionals.  One that I attended was A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Liturgy by Rev. William Cwirla.  The three youth that I had also attended this sectional.  Even as I finished my first year in the ministry, I can say that even I learned something from this!  Rev. Cwirla took us through the history of the liturgy and broke down each part of the liturgy.  First class stuff here.  Even my youth thought that it was good.  So if they liked it, then it must have been good!

The other in-depth sectional I attended was Decoding the Code by Rev. Scott Stiegemeyer.  He went through The DaVinci Code and showed where Dan Brown failed in his research and debunked Brown’s entire premise of the book.  Again, my youth attended this and thought that it was very good.

If you have the opportunity to attend a HT conference, I strongly encourage you to do so.  The next conferences will be July 24-27, 2007 in Minneapolis, MN and July 31-August 3, 2007 in Asheville, NC.  Plan on attending one now.