The Festival of Young Preachers will be held Thursday-Saturday, January 7-9, 2010, in Louisville, Kentucky. Registrations are now being received. The first one hundred Young Preachers to register will be admitted to this first-of-its-kind event.
But questions have arisen: is the Festival limited just to those Young Preachers in the target area; or is anyone welcome from anywhere in the United States; or the world, for that matter? We have received inquires from Florida, Colorado, Massachusetts, even England, and several parts of Africa.
The target area is a 150 mile radius of Louisville, Kentucky; this includes Cincinnati, Dayton, Indianapolis, Evansville, Owensboro, Nashville, and Lexington. This is the region identified in the proposal to the Lilly Endowment that was funded by a generous grant late in 2008. In this region are 70 institutions of higher learning that having some connection to a Christian tradition (from Commonwealth Baptist College in Lexington to Xavier University in Cincinnati).
All of the current registrants to preach at the Festival live in this region. We anticipate that most of the 100 Young Preachers who will actually preach at the Festival will be from this region and will be connected to either a church, a school or a denominational network in this region (even if they attend school elsewhere).
However a few may be from other parts of the United States. For instance: Saturday morning I received a phone call from a pastor in Philadelphia. He has just finished seminary studies at Bethany Seminary in Richmond, Indiana (within the region). He plans to come to preach at the Festival, and also to bring another Young Preacher, from Philadelphia, for whom he serves as mentor.
There is the probability that, eventually, the Festival (or Festivals) will be international in composition; in fact, it is likely that Young Preachers from America will take preaching missions to other parts of the world, and we expect that it is likely that Young Preachers from other parts of the world will desire to come to a Festival in the United States. We may even sponsor Festivals around the world. But (and this is the important point here) we have determined that this first Festival will be limited to registrants within the United States, so as to avoid the many supplementary issues (travel, expense, visas, housing, language, etc) raised by international registrants.
Follow the growing list of registrations; look elsewhere on this web site, under BE A PREACHER where there is a link to REGISTRANTS. And if you desire to come and preach: hurry! We hope to complete the registration list by July 1, 2009 (although the stated deadline is October 1).