Romania’s changing fast! Since 1990, Western influence has flooded in - both for good and for bad, and certainly enough to cause a lot of confusion.

But it’s exciting too.  For the last 15 years, we have held conferences with Hannah, to discuss some of the issues thrown up.  The main conferences are one week, and are designed for Romanian young people from all religious backgrounds and none.  They are held in a beautiful mountain location near Radauti, but attract delegates from all over Romania.

What do we do?  The conferences involve talks, small group discussion, debates, role-play, films and unstructured time too.  We generally have about 40 young people (from 16-25 ish), from all sorts of backgrounds.  

What do we talk about?  We have covered some interesting themes over the years, such as Fear, Truth, Civilisation, Identity, Relationships.  Our aim is to make faith relevant to every aspect of a changing society.  I try to keep in touch with our students over the year, and we supplement the main conference program with mini-conferences, discussion bulletins, facebook groups etc.

To supplement the summer conferences, we also hold one-day mini’s from time to time - spring and/or autumn - designed for those of our students who live in and around Radauti.  We usually get 20-30 participants.

These are a good way of keeping in touch with our students, and introducing further discussion.  They are also an opportunity for the students themselves to say what they want to cover in the summer conference.

Conference Website: you can keep abreast of the latest news on conferences by following our monthly newsletters.  However, I have also set up a conference website “zidul”:  click here.

There are some Summer 2011 conference photos here, and some videos here.

And some November 2010 mini-conference photos and videos too!