Thursday, March 23

So, our Emerging Leaders conference did start on Thursday...but not until the evening! I didn't know that, so I had the day off work and used it to get some things done around the apartment and catch up on sleep.
Plato's closet is about 45 minutes away, but I had a HUGE bag of good clothes that were good enough to get money for, so I went there in hopes of walking out of the store with my wallet filled with hard-earned cold cash. I got my hopes way up, unfortunately, because my clothes were "too dressy" for Plato's. They gave me the names and locations of some other consignment stores that might take the clothes...another afternoon wasted. I'll have to try to find these other consignment stores on another day.

Thursday night we made our way over to McCormick Place, the same building that held the Car Show. The Congress for Urban Ministries conference was close to ending and our tie-in conference, the Emerging Leaders conference, was just starting. Both were organized by SCUPE, where my Practicum Group leader works and also another CS student.

When we went to the Ballroom in the Hyatt motel connected with McCormick place we caught some of the last speakers from the Congress on Thursday night. Let me give you a background of what kind of people were there and the spiritual feeling in the ballroom that night:

Pastors, ministors, spiritual leaders, church-planters, people from all over the US and Canada come to this annual Congress for Urban Ministries conference. It's a conference with special speakers and workshops designed to inspire and excite people to spread the word of Christ in their jobs and on the streets in their urban sites. The feeling in the ballroom for the first speaker we went to (Thursday night) was a feeling of spiritual revival and excitement and standing ovations and high emotions, Amens and Halleluias.

We, as Chicago semester students just joining the event, felt out of place amidst all the pastors and strong leaders of urban missions and different denominations. Many of the students on our program showed up that night, took it to be what the rest of the weekend was going to be about, and never came back to anything else for the conference. A number of students did join in the rest of the weekend, but I'm SURE that no one participated in everything they said they would.

Our weekend was put together so that we would still be able to catch some of the workshops from the Congress, and then build on that as students on Saturday and Sunday. The events over the weekend include neighborhood visits, church visits, a few speakers, meals hosted by Chicago Semester staff and Wheaton College. It took a lot of planning by SCUPE to get all of this together, and it went very smoothly.