NYC 2019 Phoenix: A Movement of Youth Giving Back

Jan 13

AN Interview with Justin Pickard, USA/Canada Youth Coordinator for Nazarene Youth International

Tell us a bit about your event, how it started, and what it’s like now.

Nazarene Youth Conference (NYC) started in 1958 as an opportunity for the Nazarene Church to gather young people from all over the world. It has evolved into multiple regional expressions (events) in South America and Africa. My focus is gathering high school students from the U.S. and Canada every four years for worship, discipleship, ministry, and leadership development.

The center point of NYC is seven big gatherings across several days. These sessions focus on worship, teaching and inspiring students toward mission. These are big moments, a time when we get to experience a large expression of the church that we rarely get to encounter. Outside of these gatherings, we provide opportunities of service and community with each other.

We’ve started to talk about NYC as less of an event and more of a movement. For Nazarenes, it has impacted the life of our churches and been a launching point for ministry and transformation, connecting the past, present, and future. This year was a growth year for us in Phoenix, with 8,834 participants! People came from all fifty states and every Canadian Province, plus students visited from countries around the world.

SEE MORE ABOUT NYC HERE: https://nyc2019.com

How are you building NYC as an ongoing movement (rather than just an event)?

We are very intentional to focus on NYC as a starting point, rather than an end point. It is a splash zone that continues to ripple wider and outwards when they get home. We ask students at the event to identify how they sense God calling them to make an impact, and we are tracking 3,000 responses with a digital app. Every layer of the Nazarene Church, our universities and missions areas, are working to help followup with these students, to pray for them, mentor them, and give them encouragement and tools to go deeper and further.

How do you innovate NYC?

For each event, we prioritized two or three areas for innovation. For example, we recently replaced our traditional workshops and seminars for students with The NYC Experience, a multi-sensory learning experience that unpacks our theme. Students enter The Experience in regional groups, and are able to actively engage in scripture through hand-on stations. It was important for us to create something that prompted students to go beyond being spectators and consumers to be participants who act on and live out the message in real time. We partnered with Imago Creative (publishers of Aspire Magazine) to help us create something unique and immersive.

What do the serving opportunities look like at NYC?

It starts with us meeting key leaders in the host community a few years before the event. We seek to find out what the needs are in the community and how we can help. In Phoenix, it was clear that a key need was to support education. We partnered with an organization called School Connect, and youth groups brought thousands of backpacks filled with items that kids needed. We called it our “Bring With Project.” So serving begins even before the event! We continue to get notes from people thanking us for helping to provide for kids in need.

We try to provide opportunities for every student at NYC to put hands and feet on the message that they are learning. We do this by partnering with nonprofit organizations, churches and schools across the city. This year, we packaged tens of thousands of meals for hungry people in the Phoenix area and beyond. We worked with schools and churches on community engagement projects.

It's exciting to hear stories of how this impacts communities. I went back to one of our host cities a few months after the event, and my Uber driver started talking about how a group of thousands of students helped people in need all over the city. He had no idea that I was one of the planners! This was a reminder of how impactful it is when a conference comes to a city and focuses on what we can give back, how we can leave it in a better place than we found it.

Why do you think it is important for events to incorporate hands-on service for participants?

I believe that there's a lot about life that's more caught than taught. When you give opportunities for people to be involved and be in proximity with others, our learning and connections go deeper. Serving is a chance to liveout what we believe. It can be a little risky, because you can’t predict what will happen sometimes. But it’s about putting our experiences in the hands of God to guide, direct, challenge and inspire us in ways we can’t imagine. That is good for me as an event planner, because I am a recovering control freak! Serving helps me let go and see how people will be changed and called to something new and fresh.

#givingback #wherefaithmeets