Onelife Conference 2025: Liz’s Reflections
The room had adopted a posture of outrageous, brave, undignified worship with many breaking into dance for the first time.
A teenage boy on the front row caught my attention. He was clearly longing to step into a space of being totally abandoned but was restricted by something else deep down within him.
As I watched it was as if the words of courage that we had been exploring in Joshua set alight within him. He took a determined step forwards out from the crowd and began to leap, dance and spin.
This wasn’t hype, this wasn’t going with the crowd – this was his sacrificial offering of worship and it was an honour to observe it.
This year’s conference was full of courageous moments: young people writing pages and pages of notes; asking for prayer for courage to stand against injustice; learning to hear God’s voice; prophesying over one other; exploring what Christian leadership looks like in business, on YouTube, politics, education, family and every sphere of society.
One memory I won’t ever forget is the excitement in the room when each delegate was given a copy of ‘Rhythm,’ our brand new devotional, to help them build a new habit of reading scripture. The cheer they let out when they found out the books had arrived sounded like their football team had scored the winning goal! Together we had explored that one way courage grows is through reading scripture and now they have a guide to begin to build their life on that foundation.
The young people I met over these few days have left a mark on me – I’m inspired by their pursuit of courageous leadership and am excited for what God will do through them.