Connect22 Sessions

Featuring live entertainment from Chris Sebastian, special guests and the winners of the People’s Choice Awards for Artist of the Year!

Dave Adamson & Jo Bouris host the Excellence in Media awards LIVE from the Gold Coast!

The Excellence in Media Awards acknowledges the vision, passion, skill and effort of people and organisations seeking to share the hope of Jesus through media and the arts. The awards provide the opportunity to showcase and celebrate the stories and remarkable successes of those working in media and the arts. Whether you’re joining us in-person on the Gold Coast, or online during the FREE Livestream, dress in your best and let’s celebrate together!

Understanding your voice is a critical task for any person or organisation. It reveals your identity, your passions, the things you care about. In this first session we will be opening up a framework through which we can understand the voice of Christian media, arts and communication in Australia as we work together to bring a unified message saturated with the truth, goodness and beauty that is found in Jesus.

Brian Harris is Director at Avenir Leadership Institute, based in Perth, and he is an internationally recognised author in the areas of theology and leadership, a cultural thought-leader. Brian will be opening up the major theme of CONNECT22 with this overview session. Immediately following his brief presentation the discussion will be opened up for those in the room and online to participate and engage more deeply with the thoughts and ideas.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast hosted by Mike Cosper, Director of Podcasting for Christianity Today. It takes you inside the story of Mars Hill Church in Seattle – from its humble beginnings to becoming part of one of the largest church planting movements in American history, to its very public dissolution under lead pastor Mark Driscoll — and the aftermath that followed.

Karl Faase, (co-creator and host of the series Jesus the Game Changer and Faith Runs Deep) will interview Mike on his thoughts and experience of how we as Christian communicators can communicate the goodness of God in the face of bad PR from the church. This session promises to bring an insightful perspective through the lenses of truth, goodness and beauty.

We live in a world of contested truth, and as people of faith we can often find ourselves down in the mud, fighting about who is right and who is wrong. In this session we take a broader look at truth (the first element in our theological architecture) and realise that to follow Jesus means that truth is far more than a set of propositions. Truth is a person; and that changes everything.

Mandy Smith is pastor of St Lucia Uniting Church, Brisbane, and the author of The Vulnerable Pastor: How Human Limitations Empower Our Ministry and Unfettered: Imagining a Childlike Faith Beyond the Baggage of Western Culture and Making a Mess and Meeting God: Unruly Ideas and Everyday Experiments for Worship. She’s a maker at heart, always on the hunt for the places where art and faith intersect. Mandy and her husband, a New Testament professor, live in the manse where the teapot is always warm.

Living as a follower of the truth changes the way we engage with the world. As image bearers of God, we are to pursue and reflect the goodness of God through our character and work, but this isn’t always an easy task. This session explores how goodness (the second element in our theological architecture) can reflect the moral fabric of the world, and how media and arts contribute to the shaping of this morality in all that we do.

Jennifer is an Executive Consultant at Avenir Leadership Institute, based in Perth, and she is passionate about creating cultures where people can flourish and find a community of connection and belonging. Jennifer will be diving deep into the major theme of CONNECT22 exploring, Goodness. Immediately following her presentation the discussion will be opened up for those in the room and online to participate and engage more deeply with the thoughts and ideas.

Once every 5 years NCLS Research runs a survey enabling churches to ask their members questions about church life. The survey, begun in 1991, allows church members to express their voice on all aspects of church life. It’s been 5 years since the last survey, there’s been a pandemic, church online has become a thing, not to mention the changes in our political, economic and social spheres. In this live session Dr Powell will unpack the series of questions designed to understand Church attender views about media and local church media usage.

Dr Ruth Powell is Director of NCLS Research, the research centre that focuses on church vitality and community spirituality and wellbeing. She will bring us the numbers, facts and implications.

Alan & Debra Hirsch have been leading and influencing church communities in Australia, North and South America and Europe. They recently returned to Australia having lived in the USA for the past 13 years. During their time they were involved in ministering to the arts community in Los Angeles participating in the annual pilgrimage to Burning Man Festival in Nevada. The combination of their sensitivity of understanding and passion for the Scriptures has helped position them uniquely to develop a theological curriculum for living in missional communities while serving in the midst of creatives navigating self-expression, music, arts and sexuality. Alan and Deb will share openly about their experiences and how the church can reframe itself to be more winsome with the Good News.

As one writer said: “beauty can save the world” - but how? This session brings beauty (the third element in our theological architecture) to the forefront and examines how media and art is part of the great witness of Jesus in the world. Brian will be diving deep into the major theme of CONNECT22 exploring, Beauty. Immediately following his presentation the discussion will be opened up for those in the room and online to participate and engage more deeply with the thoughts and ideas.

An anamorphic image is an image or an object that is aligned in such a way that only by viewing them from a specific direction, or from a specific angle, will they become recognizable. Viewing them from any other angle will reveal a distorted picture. Mike uses this as an illustration, or a framework for exploring ways in which we can adjust our posture and position to help explore truth, worship, salvation, faith, holiness, missions, love, etc from a Christ-centred vantage point.

Phil Cooke shares his experiences in Hollywood as a Christian in a highly secular industry. While most of his work is focused on helping the Church (with a capital “C”) share the Gospel more effectively through media, he’s also done his fair share of secular media work - including producing a couple of Super Bowl commercials. He’s a long time member of the Academy of TV Arts and Sciences, and The Producers Guild of America. He’s also written for the Producers Guild of America magazine. His latest book “Ideas on a Deadline” isn’t a Christian book at all, and it’s endorsed by some of the most influential creative people in advertising and in Hollywood. He’s even been a speaker at the Sundance Film Festival.

Throughout all this, he has navigated an industry that’s often hostile to religious faith, especially Christianity. The question is, how can Christians work in high levels of the entertainment and media industry, who are engaging with other professionals, do it without compromising their faith?

At just 25 years, Nicola McDermott is a champion high jumper for Australia. She won bronze in the 2018 Commonwealth Games and silver at the Tokyo Olympics. At 16 years she gave her life to Jesus which changed her life’s focus. Alongside her sport she runs Everlasting Crowns whose mission is: to encourage, empower and equip athletes to transform culture through the love of Christ.

Nicola has said, “High jump was once a performance-driven passion to bring meaning to life, yet now with God, it is an international platform to make the unbiased, consistent love of the King known.”

Penny Mulvey, Chief Wellbeing and Communications Officer for the Bible Society Australia, and Chair of CMAA, will interview Nicola on the intersection of faith and career in a competitive world.

Will our special guest panellists rise to the challenge of holding generous disagreement, or will this session turn into an all-out cage fight? Most likely not (sorry to disappoint), but it will be an excellent opportunity to hear views from both ends of the breadth of opinion and learn how we can best model the practice of generous disagreement.

This final session looks at the “Sound of Hope” and brings all of the elements of our discussion together. How can truth, goodness and beauty - fuelled by imagination and undergirded by hope - reshape the world through the world of Christian communication, media and arts? This is the fundamental question we all seek to answer together.