Good communicators are good listeners. Less is more. Be bold – take a risk for the Gospel. These were just some of the many pearls of advice given at the inaugural Create conference held last weekend at the King’s School in Parramatta.

Run by the visual arts ministry FEVA and Outreach Media, the conference had its beginnings two years ago with the long winded title “Promoting the Word Through Image and Text”.

Heeding their own advice that less is more, its been renamed ‘Create’ with the aim of educating the whole church about a range of tools from powerpoint to parish websites.

Conference organiser Malcolm Williams(pictured right) says the FEVA ministry and Outreach media put on the event so that churches would not only be aware of emerging communication trends both socially and technologically but would be equipped to use the new developments for the good of the gospel.

“How do we bridge the gap between what the Bible says and our community - it’s that kind of conference..” he says.

Connect09 helped sponsor the event and encouraged rectors to bring key lay people along to learn from industry professionals who were speaking.

St Matthew’s Windsor had five people attending and rector Aleks Pinter says Mr Williams challenge that ‘We all make marketing decisions - we just make good ones or bad ones’ is particularly relevant.

According to Mr Pinter the key thing is “being able to learn from the people who’ve been trained in these areas so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, because frankly, we don’t have time."

Create presenter Matt Andrews (pictured right) works in advertising and is passionate about creative ways to communicate the message of Jesus.

His seminar “Writing to engage” was one of more than a dozen choices for the more than 250 delegates.

In all 30 presenters and 30 support staff were needed.

Malcolm Williams says the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

“The new thing for the conference this year were practical, hands on, workshops.  Lots of people said they felt motivated and inspired to go back to their churches and use what they’d learned. The next day we got emails and texts from people who said their church had done something different on the Sunday after the conference - the very next day!”

There’s plenty for organisers to thinking about for the next conference.

“Next time we hope to develop the different themes into ‘day long’ strands.  So for example, if you want to bring a group from church, someone can spend all day thinking about their churches ‘Media strategy’ or else all day working on ‘idea development’ or ‘use of visual media in church’ or ‘writing’ and so on.  We’ve got lots of ideas for different seminars and workshops, but won’t make any promises just yet.”