Why should you send your pastor to a conference? Here are five reasons:

1. Relationship Building
Conferences are a great way for your pastor to either make new friendships or strengthen preexisting ones. Your pastor needs to have friends outside of your church context. Conferences are one way to help your pastor cultivate necessary friendships.

2. Perspective
Pastors need to cultivate a birds-eye view of their church and pastorate. Conferences often help pastors rightly view their problems (perceived or real, self-inflicted or otherwise) in proper perspective.

3. Encouragement
Regrettably, pastoral ministry is often a lonely enterprise. Meeting with other pastors at a conference (some who may be going through similar trials while others are on the sunny side of the street) can buoy your pastor’s spirits. At a conference, he will either be able to provide needed encouragement to a pastor in dire straits or be a desperate recipient.

4. The Church
Conferences don’t exclusively benefit your pastor. If your pastor is fostering healthy gospel relationships with other shepherds around the gospel in a conference setting, gaining fresh perspective and encouragement in Jesus, your church will greatly benefit.

5. The Gospel
Ultimately, here’s the best reason to send your pastor to a conference: to deepen his grasp of and growth in the gospel, through the Word faithfully and prayerfully proclaimed among other shepherds.

In sum, send your pastor to a conference and he’ll thank you for it. (And your church may even thank him for attending!)

Upcoming Conferences to Consider in 2011

The Gospel Centered Life
The aim of this conference is to help you see that the gospel is not merely what ignites the Christian life, but that it’s the fuel that keeps Christians going every day.
January 21-23 (Ft. Lauderdale, FL)

Desiring God 2011 Conference for Pastors
The Powerful Life of the Praying Pastor: In His Room, with the Family, Among the People of God
January 31-February 2 (Minneapolis, MN)

Ligonier 2011 National Conference
Light and Heat: A Passion for the Holiness of God
March 24-26 (Orlando, FL)

Pastors: What are your reasons for going to a conference?

This article is reprinted with permission from Desiring God.