The 600 men who attended the fifth Cardiff Men’s Convention in 2008 are still telling us that it was ‘the best convention yet’. Once more the All Nations Centre in Cardiff was filled with men who brought a compassion to worship, a real hunger for truth in the teaching and, maybe most important of all, the encouragement of being with other Christian men.
The title of this year’s convention was ‘Leaving a Legacy’, the central idea being that Christian men have a significant responsibility to create a positive legacy in their churches, their family, their workplace and in the wider community. The teaching was designed to challenge and inspire, but also to equip men to take on that responsibility.
We were so encouraged to see that well over half of the men who attended were under the age of 50, a statistic that does not match what we often see in churches or, indeed, what some of these men see when they go back to their own church. And that is the heart of the problem.
