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On November 8, 2014, around 40 attendants gathered together at Leningrad House of Chicago UBF from Toledo, Wright College, Hyde Park and Chicago. The conference began with a delicious lunch and chatting to build relationships with each other.

Pastor Ron Ward delivered the keynote speech based on Mark 10:45 which led our conference main theme to give more to Jesus and his beloved little children. God didn’t spare his one and only Son for the sake of salvation for the whole world. So through the remembering of his one-side grace and love, he encouraged us to serve his little ones to find Jesus in their early life journey. He added thanks for all our teachers’ sacrifice and dedication for our growing second generation ministry.

There was a special lecture “Teachers Self-Development” by M. Isaac Choi. Even though there was not much opportunity to be trained or educated as a teacher in the youth ministry, teachers could find the way to improve themselves. There are two ways to develop as teachers:

One is to grow in one’s spirituality and the other is to develop better teaching methods. The lecture specified teacher self-development in several ways, such as why we need self-development, what it is about, how to do it, etc. Especially, the video clip about eagles’ discipline, “the Push,” was very impressive.

In the book report session for “The Five Love Languages of Children” (by Gary Chapman and Ross Campbell), there were three reports:

• Amy Stasinos (BBF teacher) --- Child’s love tank must be full before administering discipline.
• Ilya Ushomirsky (BBF parent) --- Child’s discipline and anger management.
• Tim McEthron (CBF teacher) --- Acts of service and finding your child’s love language.

The Discussion session based on book reading: We discussed about what we need to correct in our teaching and how we can create a more loving environment in BBF and CBF.

We finished our conference with Mother Sarah Barry’s closing prayer at 6 pm. Through this short conference, we as teachers learned a lot about the basics to develop and have insightful information from book reading as the teachers in our youth ministry. We also learned how to  co-work together to serve the ministry to little ones with one purpose and the same goal. We give thanks to God who enabled us to have this focused conference and to have vision to be excellent teachers for our growing children sooner or later.