March 2026 Ministry Reflection: Building Belonging With the Connect Conference
- Fr. Paul Lundberg
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
If God can work through Balaam’s donkey, He can work through me.
The Connect Conference for Orthodox Young Adults didn’t start with some inspiring vision or grand ambition of my own. It started unintentionally when my colleague Paula Marchman received a grant from Leadership 100 for the Family Life Ministry that she led. She asked if I were willing to develop a “curriculum” for young adults, and I agreed. I planned and publicized some dinner discussions, then visited various parishes in the Atlanta area, hoping some local young adults might be interested in participating. It was usually a small group that gathered, sometimes just a couple of people. By the world’s standards, it was a failure.
Little did I know that some of those who had attended those dinner discussions had afterward started talking to each other about doing something more, something bigger. When I learned of this, curious, I invited them to my home to hear what they had in mind. By the end of that dinner meeting in 2015, they had decided to organize a large gathering for their peers. Two years later, the first Connect Conference took place in Atlanta.
At that time, there weren’t very many opportunities for Orthodox young adults to gather beyond their parishes, and most of them were organized along jurisdictional lines. Connect was “pan-Orthodox” from the beginning. Although I’ve always had a pan-Orthodox mindset myself, laying the foundation for the Connect Conference would have been considerably more difficult without the efforts of local clergy who had built up the Atlanta Orthodox Clergy Brotherhood, which is now under the care of the Assembly of Bishops.
It didn’t take long to learn that organizing such an event is expensive. One of our main challenges—perhaps our greatest—was fundraising. It became clear that without sponsorship the cost of attending the conference would be prohibitive to most young adults, many of whom do not have much discretionary income so early in their careers. By God’s providence, we received what we needed from faithful and generous local donors to subsidize the event’s cost, enabling the participation of many of the young adults we sought to serve.
Although organizing the first conference was a lot of work, the young adult leadership team was so energized by their experience of the event that they decided to do it again. We had two more gatherings in Atlanta before the pandemic forced us online in 2020. Realizing the toll that annual, non-stop organizing was taking on our local young adult leaders, we had decided to seek other host cities. Dallas was slated for 2020, but had to postpone to the following year. To give our team in Minneapolis as much time as we could to support their planning, we brought the conference back to Atlanta in 2022. The next year, it was in Minnesota. In 2024, Nashville took on the challenge, and last year, the Connect Conference went to Washington, D.C.
But it was in the summer of 2022 that a second chapter of the Connect story began. If the first chapter could be called “personal,” I’ll call the second “institutional.” At my archdiocese’s national gathering in 2022, I learned about the formation of a new agency of the Assembly of Bishops called Orthodox Youth Ministries (OYM). I immediately thought, “This is just what we’ve been waiting for!” One of Connect’s struggles from the start was organizing a pan-Orthodox ministry, operating in multiple jurisdictions, initiated by faithful laity who wanted it to be of the Church. Each time we moved to a different city, we had to find a hierarch willing to take on the oversight of this ministry in addition to his already heavy load of responsibilities. God always provided for us, but operating as nomads without a consistent episcopal connection to the Church added complexity to an already complex project. So when I learned about OYM, I applied for a grant from Leadership 100 to explore the possibility of integrating the Connect Conference with this new ministry, which looked like it “checked all the boxes”—young adults, pan-Orthodox, and focused on faith. Beyond my expectations, our application was approved, which gave us funding for 3–4 years of annual events and a reprieve from the pressures of fundraising, enabling us to dedicate our attention to our relationship with OYM.
Reflecting on what I’ve learned from the first two chapters of the Connect story, I can think of at least three things:
Everything begins with generosity. This is first and foremost a theological truth: it is the generosity of God that brought the world into existence and which has given us every good and perfect gift. This theological truth was reified for me through Connect. It was the generosity of Leadership 100 that unexpectedly provided the seed for this ministry, and it has been through their hands again that Connect has been watered as a sapling. Between these two grants, God provided through the local faithful, whose names are too numerous to list here.
Orthodox Christian young adults are incredibly talented and capable. And thank God for that! Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m not especially good at getting things done—and there are a lot of things to get done when planning a conference. When asking one of our hierarchs for guidance, I remember sharing my opinion that Connect’s young adult leadership needed his protection more than his direction, and I learned that one of the best things I could do among such talented young adults was to stay out of the way as much as possible.
You get more of what you pay attention to. I owe this insight to Deacon Michael Hyatt. Ten years ago, there was much consternation about the loss of young adults from the Church. But if it were true that we get more of what we pay attention to, wouldn’t it make more sense to pay attention to the 10–40% of young adults who stay than to focus on the 60–90% who leave the Church? It’s true that the Good Shepherd leaves the 99 sheep to go after the one that is lost, but it’s also true that the Father does not run after the prodigal son to save him from life in the pigpen.
As my decade-long tenure of stewardship as the Connect Conference’s spiritual adviser comes to an end, I’m overwhelmed with gratitude to God for the amazing things I’ve witnessed through this ministry. Different groups of young adults, organizing this gathering in their respective cities, have enriched our experiences tremendously. Although we’ve intentionally eschewed anything that could give Connect a “matchmaking” vibe, desiring to stay focused on faithful friendships, some attendees have nonetheless been blessed with spouses through our gatherings. When this ministry began, we had especially in mind the needs of young adults from small and perhaps isolated parishes, who might be the only ones their age in their parishes. Now, with the historic growth of interest in Orthodoxy, the Connect Conference has unexpectedly begun to play a role in the experience of young adult catechumens.
My partners at OYM know that “one-off” conferences (and programs in general) don’t typically change lives; relationships do. Many of us are familiar with a similar dynamic with summer camps: youth attend, have a great experience, then often return to life as it was before, with a glimmer of a memory of camp too faint to support a new practice back home but bright enough to attract them back next summer. I’ve seen this limitation in Connect, too. As positive an experience as it is for attendees, it’s usually many times more meaningful for the local organizing team, who through working together on this event become faithful friends.
What excites me most about our partnership with OYM is the ways their values, guidance, resources, connections, and attention will help Connect grow deeper, not just wider, rooted in local communities. I look forward to the day when young adults will “come and see” a vibrancy of local Christian life beyond what a typical conference can offer, and leave inspired to co-create it back home.
In the meantime, I hope faithful young adults will continue to attend the Connect Conference, imperfect though it may be. Attending the Divine Liturgy on the Lord’s Day — or any Church service on any day, for that matter — is an act and expression of faith and hope, through which that faith and hope are strengthened. I feel something similar about Connect. It’s an act of faith to organize it each year. It’s an act of faith to attend. Whether I’ve gone in hope or in another frame of heart, Connect has always lifted my spirits. God gives me hope through Connect—hope that I’m not alone, that there are others who share my faith, with whom I am, and can become, deeply connected through our Lord, to whom be all glory for all things.
