International
Report on the AACC World Conference 2007
A view of the atrium of the Opryland Hotel. The buildings in the centre are restaurants and shops!
Overview
In September, as part of a 40th anniversary celebration trip, my wife gave me a leave pass to attend two of the four days of the AACC World Conference in Nashville, Tennessee. (Downside: she went shopping!)
The World Conference is an enormous event, attracting around 7,000 full time registrations. (Talk about finding a needle in a haystack – among that crowd, I ran into Dr John Court twice!) The venue is the Opryland Hotel (see photo), right next to the famed Grand Ol’ Opry, the home of country music (we caught a show there), and the Opry Mills shopping mall where my darling tried to abuse a Mastercard.
What is AACC?
AACC (the American Association of Christian Counselors) is the USA equivalent to this association - but much bigger. Look them up in the quite useful AACC website. The World Conference is their largest annual conference, featuring many speakers known only to us as authors of text and self-help books.
Plenary Sessions
The general format of the plenary sessions was as follows:
- Worship (30 minutes) led by Al Denson, and featuring artists such as Natalie Grant, Michael O’Brien, Micah Stampley, Steve Green, Avalon etc;
- an opening prayer;
- a plenary speaker (30 minutes);
- some sponsor messages;
- another plenary speaker (30 minutes).
I heard presentations by Gary Chapman, John Eldredge, Dan Allender, Gary Haugen. The room for these presentations had around 3,000 seats set out. One session that particularly interested me was from a lawyer who led a UN investigation into the Rwandan genocide, (my wife visited Rwanda last year).
Electives
There were 7 elective sessions, with an incredible 20 streams in each! I mainly chose the marriage stream, and particularly appreciated presentations by David & Jan Stoop, and Clifford & Joyce Penner. The Penners’ style of presentation was interesting – it sounded like they were interrupting each other continually, but that is obviously a style they have developed. Clifford kindly signed my copy of Counseling for Sexual Disorders. I considered attending the International stream, but none of the topics during my time there interested me.
Exhibition
A large hall was set aside as an exhibition venue, with a couple of book stalls, some overpriced food, but mostly organisations advertising their particular powerful ministry, and educational establishments.
My Impressions
This is an incredible event in an incredible venue – the logistics of organising it must surely be very impressive. I was surprised that in the sessions I attended, only one speaker used Powerpoint. There were some handouts in the electives, apart from that they were talking heads – albeit very interesting mostly.
Would I go again? If money was no object and I had seen the rest of the world, probably yes, but I really have other priorities for my travel dollar now. But I would say it was definitely worth going once.
John Bennett
