Making Your Life Count - Young Adults @ CrossCon25

I was initially introduced to Cross Con last year by my cousin who encouraged me to bring a group from my church. I was compelled by their mission, so I reached out to the young adult homegroup and a bunch of my friends to see who might be interested. I was very surprised when over twenty responded. This is a recap of our experience and a testimony to what God did in our hearts during this time away.

The Conference

CrossCon was started in 2013 with the goal of stirring up church-centered missions. Their core values reflect a desire to keep God’s Word and His Church in the center of an all-encompassing view of the great commission. Attendance in 2023 was 5,000, and so they decided to make the conference annual. In 2024, they saw their numbers double to 10,000, and this year we joined 15,000 other students in Kentucky. Louisville was practically overrun by college aged Christians from all over who had come together to direct their focus on God’s mission. Over three days, we sang together, heard sermons, listened to panel interviews, and attended breakout sessions. From small things, like how often we pull out our phones, to big things, like considering long term missions, this experience left our hearts and minds busy.

It was clear from start to finish that this conference was designed to inspire young christians to engage seriously in global missions. Not just short term trips, but lives devoted to reaching the unreached of the world. This strand ran through Garrett Kell’s opening call to holiness, Trip Lee’s reminder that our complete devotion to the church is vital, Mez McConnell’s burden that we need to do a better job loving our neighbors, David Platt’s plea for us to know what it means to have the Spirit of God in us, Kevin DeYoung’s exposition of the great commission, and finally, in John Piper’s charge to take eternity seriously. Our collective gaze was lifted out of our local circumstances and onto one fact: that God wants laborers to build his Church everywhere. We heard stories from panelists who left their high profile jobs in Washington to plant a church in the UAE, and a missionary who cut his way into the jungles of Papua New Guinea and translated the Bible into a new language. We also prayed for a stage full of previous CrossCon attendees who were to be deployed on their missions this year.

The impact on our group

The resounding theme among our group of 23 was that we need to be preparing ourselves for the mission. Whether goers or senders, the training needs to start now. Many of us felt the weight of the call of Christ on our lives in a new way, and resolved to take our faith more seriously. Many of us felt that it was time to put down our phones and pick up our bibles. We wanted to know God more and we also wanted to want to know God more. Here are some of our testimonies:

I’d like to be better at building Godly habits like David Platt talked about. As I was listening, I realized that I do not have a good habit of reading the Bible regularly. I was also convicted to memorize as well as pray better and more often, perhaps utilizing downtime during bus rides at school or driving.
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I also desire to grow in my relationship with Savior and not only know more about Him. We’re called to be constant in prayer and I don’t believe this is an exaggeration.
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I think that oftentimes my praying can become a “checking of a box” and I forget the craziness of what I’m actually doing when I pray. I’m speaking one-on-one with the God of the universe. Like wow!! When I pray, I want to pray with that realization in my mind and I want it to humble and amaze me.
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I want to grow the habit of daily scripture reading, planning and setting aside time with intentionality to reduce opportunities for distractions.
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David Platt made an awesome claim that the word of God ought to be of more value to us than the oxygen we breathe. For me this means not only increasing my time in the word, but also decreasing my wasteful time spent outside of it.

Another common takeaway was that we need to be cultivating a desire and openness to long term missions and be proactive in training ourselves now:

A point was made that missions are something that you prepare for your entire life. During the conference, somebody said that “getting on an airplane and crossing the ocean doesn’t make you magically ready to share the gospel”. Thus, whether or not I will be a literal “goer” to the nations does not change the fact that I ought to be an evangelist here and now, where I am.
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While I don’t feel called to be a "goer" at the moment, I do want to cultivate a category for that as an option. I don’t want it to be a “backup plan” or second thought.
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I also came away with more of a conviction for missions specifically and evangelism more broadly. I have always considered vocational, long-term missions but never very seriously. The conference helped me realize that the missionary could be me or anyone!
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I need to be ready at the drop of a hat to share the Good News. Whether I go to an unreached people group or never leave Fuquay again, the call is the same; the harvest is still plentiful right here.

To sum up how we felt, we wanted to make our lives count. We were freshly aware of the brevity of life, the poison of entertainment and distraction, the necessity of a robust church community, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the need of the lost on our planet. This conference showed us that the call to be a missionary could be ours, and it is a noble and powerful way to spend a life.

Speaking for myself now, I was grateful to be attending this conference as a 25 year old. Being a handful of years into my career, the reality of the mission hit me a bit differently. Contributing to the mission felt attainable in a way that my 17 year-old self would not have appreciated. I felt a deep desire and conviction to use my skills and abilities to benefit global missions in the coming years.

Another thing that struck me during this trip was John Piper’s earnest charge at the end of the conference to those who stay. It was to be a “valiant sender.” If we don’t go, we must send. The claim was that christians are either goers, senders, or disobedient. I was inspired to be that valiant sender today.

Conclusion

Jesus ends His sermon on the mount with these words:

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”

Extending on this analogy of house building, I like to think of how each brick must be laid. Our efforts to grasp the many truths of christianity can feel like bricklaying, for our bricks can only be laid once the materials have been collected and the shape formed and fired. Many such bricks were either formed or fired among our group during our time together in January.

For many, a proverbial brick was laid for a “gospel-fueled, gouge-out-your-eyes call to holiness.” For others, the brick was coming into shape for how to engage global missions faithfully. “What the world thinks is important is not what God thinks is important,” and “News and social media are smoke in our lungs” are some more slabs that were set and cured. Materials were gathered for new bricks that have yet to fully take shape.

There were also some bricks that have been foundational for years but are in need of repair, or removal. Of those bricks, the one that I may have laid years ago that said, “I will live in North Carolina and go to this one church and raise a family and never leave” now has a crack in it.

This conference challenged us all to look upon our plans with new eyes, and to realize that we must not rule out the possibility of the Lord redirecting us—even to a different country. Responding to the conference mantra of “Make your life count. Make His name known” demands a life that is fully submitted to the call of Christ. We all need to be ready and waiting to say, “I’m in” to whatever He has for us next.

Josh McLeod