In this week’s episode, Beth celebrates our 50th episode and shares some DATC2023 stats, from geographic breakdown of attendees to number of snacks consumed.
Listen now in your favorite podcast app!
Quick Links:
DATC2023 main stage presentations
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035: 5 Reasons to Attend DATC2023 with Catherine Boyle
011: How to Make your Event Planning Go from Stressful to Successful with Beth Golik
Transcript:
Welcome to the 50th episode of Key Ministry: The Podcast!
I’m Beth Golik, one of your co-hosts, and normally numbers aren’t my thing, but I feel like fifty episodes is a bit of a milestone as is our recently announced 10,000th download of this podcast. It makes me want to quantify something else that’s happened recently. Two weeks ago, Key Ministry hosted our national disability ministry conference in collaboration with the Tim Tebow Foundation. The conference, Disability & The Church 2023, was held at Bay Presbyterian Church outside Cleveland, Ohio. There are so many stories to tell about the relationships that were formed or renewed, the cutting-edge content that was shared, and the momentum that comes from gathering hundreds of people with a shared vision for disability and mental health inclusion in our churches.
But, instead of stories today, I want to share some statistics. So please indulge me while I hit you with some numbers.
There were 354 registrants for Disability & The Church 2023.
They joined us from three countries: the United States, Canada and Albania.
From here in the U.S., we had one attendee from Alabama and two from each of the following states: Oklahoma, North Carolina, West Virginia, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Missouri.
New Jersey sent three, and New York and Iowa each had four.
The west coast was represented with five from Arizona, six from California, and seven from Oregon. Georgia and Minnesota each had ten, while Maryland and Indiana each had 11.
We had 13 from both Florida and Texas, which were inched out by Tennessee and Kentucky which each had 17. Our five most represented states were Illinois with 21, Michigan with 24, Virginia and Pennsylvania with 27 each, and Ohio with 99 registrants. Go Buckeyes!
So what did the conference look like?
There’s a 30-page program that I linked in the show notes for this episode. You can view it at keyministry.org/podcast. We had 77 speakers and two main stage hosts, author and speaker, and my fellow podcast co-host Sandra Peoples, along with WCRF Moody Radio host Brian Dahlen. You can visit the conference website to see photos of our speakers and learn more about each one. Again, it’s all linked in the show notes.
During the two days, we had three All-Conference Gatherings.
On Friday night and Saturday morning’s gathering, we had worship led by Delnora Reed, ICMA’s “New Artist of the Year” from the 2022 Inspirational Christian Country Music Awards. She provided a lunch break concert on Friday as well.
There were three featured presentations on the main stage. Dr. Erik Carter, the recipient of this year’s President’s Award from Key Ministry, kicked off the conference with his opening talk, “Flourishing Together: The Changing Landscape of Disability & Ministry.” On Saturday we heard from Kim Botto with “Treasure or Troublemaker?” and Key Ministry’s President & Founder Dr. Steve Grcevich with “The Courage to Pursue Our Callings.” During Friday night’s Pastors Panel on “Advancing Disability Ministry from the Perspective of Senior Pastors,” we heard from four lead pastors. Videos of all of those main stage presentations, along with 32 QuickTakes, which are like TEDTalks, can be found on our Vimeo channel. Click on the link in the show notes.
In addition to the 32 QuickTakes and 3 featured presentations and 1 panel, our 8 breakout blocks featured 38 workshops.
That is a lot of content!
Other conference fun facts:
Our culturally competent ASL interpreting team from Sonshine Interpreting had five interpreters. You can see them in action on the videos and social media postings from the conference.
Studio South Photography offered complimentary headshots to speakers and attendees and 104 people took up that offer!
Twenty members of our speaking team comprised our Christian coaching team for the conference and met with 33 attendees on Friday afternoon.
In addition to the catered boxed lunches, conference-goers were treated to snacks throughout the two days. In fact, two pallets worth of water, softdrinks, and snacks were needed to fuel folks before we went our separate ways on Saturday afternoon! Just for kicks, here’s a snackage breakdown: We went through 320 breakfast biscuits, 192 individual packages of string cheese, 144 Uncrustable PB&J sandwiches, 480 chocolate candies, 80 packages of trail mix, 108 bags of popcorn, 200 bags of chips, gallons of coffee, some fresh fruit, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Finally, DATC2023 would not have been possible without our five sponsors.
Thank you to the Tim Tebow Foundation, David’s Table, Walk Right In Ministries, Luke 14 Exchange, and Nathaniel’s Hope.
Well, that’s a breakdown, by the numbers of DATC2023.
