Ocean Youth at Consumed Conference 2023

Hey everybody! My name is Ethan, and I’m one of the youth leaders here at OCEANYouth, as well as the church’s media intern. I thought that I would be a really good idea if I hopped on here to let you guys know a bit about the recent conference that we attended!

From May 5-7 we were at the twentieth annual “Consumed” conference in Comox. We were privileged to be able to bring seventeen of our students, along with eight of our leaders, to this incredible island-wide gathering of young people for Jesus.‍‍

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The theme for this year’s conference was “The Step Up,” encouraging students to first take that step of submission to God, and then teaching them how to walk that out in their daily lives. The idea of submission is often thought of in a negative light in our society, but Daniel (our speaker) did an amazing job of putting it into a Biblical context, and explained the beauty and peace that comes from submitting to God.

While the sermons were incredible, and deeply resonated with many of our youth, the only thing that may have topped it is the worship that we got to be a part of. As you would expect from youth conferences, every single session involved a mosh pit at the front of the auditorium, and countless toes were crushed in the process. But, not all of the worship had our students jumping up and down all night. There were many moments of pressing deeper into God’s presence, and getting ourselves into a posture of surrender by raising our hands and declaring his worthiness of our praise.

We also had an extremely valuable “workshop” session, in which students were able to choose from various topics that they wanted to hear about. The three topics that were made available to use were “How to Better Share Your Faith,” “Building Healthy Relationships,” and “Mental Health in a Biblical Context.”

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All in all, it was an extremely powerful conference, and us youth leaders are so encouraged  and ready to use the high of a conference to springboard our students into deeper, long-lasting relationships with Jesus. Thank you so much to all of the parents that trusted us with your beloved children (we didn’t even lose one)!

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