Supported by Mission Australia

What is the Compass Summer Conference?

At the University of Queensland in January 2014, you can gather with 80 other like-minded young adults from all around Australia to explore the great Biblical Story. A story that invites, challenges, and seeks to actively transform - transform us, and through us, to transform the world in our re-presentation of Jesus.

At the conference, we start to imagine out from this story into the worlds in which we find ourselves, asking questions like:

• "What is this story of which we are a part?"
• "How does this story relate to and/or challenge the claims regarding reality that we hear in our universities, in the media, at our workplaces, and amongst our friends?"
• "What are the stories in our culture that shape us?
• "What does the gospel have to add to the realms of business and commerce, of science, of the humanities & arts...?"
• "How does this story relate to our ache for this world, and our creative imagining of ways to live as re-presentations of God in and for the cosmos?"

For many, the gospel is just a story for our Sunday lives, a story that shapes our private existence. Such a gospel tells us that we are forgiven, and that heaven awaits.

But for others of us, we find that this version of the gospel has precious little to do with our existence as working, studying, relating, imagining, and sometimes struggling beings. In these aspects of our living, the gospel's impact is minimal at best, irrelevant at worst.

At Compass, we want to challenge such a thin understanding of the scope of the gospel. We see the gospel, the good news, as a story that has as its focus the entirety of Creation, with a vision of and for all of life.

The Compass Summer Conference is a place to explore the richness of this understanding of the gospel in a thoughtful and open forum. At the conference, we dive into the biblical story in its celebration, nurturing, and development of a 'seamless existence', where faith is intricately interwoven with every single aspect of Life.