The annual Cook Missions Conference at Biola University is currently the largest student-led missions conference in the world. Run entirely by students from start to finish, this conference is anticipated by many, and has become a place where students come, expectant for the Spirit to move in miraculous ways.
The majority of the practice, training and preparation for Missions Conference happens on Saturday morning “workdays” throughout the year until the week of Missions, when all of the conference staff, leaders and volunteers gather together. They start each day with worship and a devotional, announcements from the Missions Conference Directors Gaby and Katy, which is followed by any instruction from the assistant director, Makai. The rest of the workday is spent with each team divided and working on their part of the conference. They come together to help one another in their projects, and to enjoy a “stretch break” halfway through the day, where each pair of team coordinators leads the entire group of volunteers in some kind of fun, active, team-bonding activity or exercise.
Jeremy Caylor, one of the Coordinators for the Worship and Prayer Team, says they have team members who lead worship for them. The Worship and Prayer Team opens every Saturday meeting with a time of worship and prayer, emphasizing the importance of keeping the Lord at the forefront of every workday.
“We want to be covering the group in prayer, too, like, in the most minute ways, and just whatever it is that other groups need prayer for, we want to be giv[ing] space for them to share that,” stated Caylor. Each group has a specific role for the sake of bringing this conference together. The size of each team differs, although it is clear that the hearts of each and every volunteer is genuine, for this is not a required or paid position, but unpaid, purely non-obligatory.
Other groups, such as the Global Awareness Group, focus on activities that will be held throughout the conference. Luke Poarch and Eden Stratton lead the Global Awareness (GA) team, consisting of about eighteen volunteers. This team is in charge of creating an interactive room for each Missions Conference, bringing together the theme with the call overseas, and creating space for application in the lives of the students who walk through the room.
“We get so many connections to other missionaries, and, like, the stories that we hear just from them talking to their friends are…so cool,” said Poarch on working with a team of students who grew up as missionary kids (MKs). As an MK himself, Poarch enjoyed being able to connect with other GA volunteers with this similar background, and how it brought to the forefront opportunities to connect or reconnect with old friends from the field, and incorporate their stories into the GA room itself.
“We’re all called to live missionally in everything that we do,” said Stratton.
Each team covers every inch of Missions Conference. Not a stone is left unturned, nothing forgotten. Every volunteer acts as a part of a member of one moving body – a mechanical, well-oiled machine, made up of many different parts. This conference attracts not just students and faculty, but alumni, family and connections of missionaries and students and those involved in the Student Missionary Union at Biola University.
