Lessons from the 2024 Sing Conference: An Introduction

This year I had the opportunity to attend SING! the Getty Music Worship Conference. The Sing! Conference is “A creative collaboration of hymn writers and expositors celebrating the greatest songs ever composed.”

“The conference includes two late-night concerts and…breakout seminars on congregational singing, songwriting, creative arts, choral music, children’s & family ministry, and global missions.” (Source)

Attendees include pastors, worship leaders, musicians, vocalists, and lay church members from local assemblies around the world.

Related: The Gettys’ Modern Hymn Movement Has Theological Pull

Our church has been sending a group to the SING! Conference since 2017, the first year of the conference, when it was still small enough to be held in a local church. (In 2023, over 8,500 people attended.) Our church is so committed to helping those of us involved in the music ministry that they help to cover some of the financial costs involved in attending. It’s a time of education, encouragement, and bonding for our music team.

Unfortunately, the SING! Conference is held the first week of September, which also happens to be the week of both of my children’s birthdays. Thus, I’ve always bowed out of attending. This is not a decision I have ever regretted, but it has been hard to miss such a great opportunity each year.

This year, though, we felt like this was the right time to go. Our boys are old enough to emotionally process things like Mom being out of town on a special day. This also wasn’t a “big” birthday year (9 and 14), unlike last year when Ezra became a teenager or next year when they turn 10 and 15. Also, I would only be missing Little Brother’s birthday, but would be home in time to celebrate Ezra’s birthday.

We planned accordingly, with a beach trip the week before the conference with special activities for each child. Grandma held a “Beanie Baby Tea Party” for LB while I was gone, and we had a small party with friends for both boys when I returned home.

Conferences, retreats, Bible camps, and other similar events are unique experiences. The immersion of being around a group of people gathered in a similar cause, where multiple activities are packed into a short amount of time, can be exhilarating, exhausting, and emotionally overwhelming. So I tend to be a bit wary and on guard against being “swept away” in any sort of emotional frenzy that takes place at events like these.

That said, they are also events that God has used to impact my life very deeply. You can read about some of those experience by clicking on these links below:

What I noticed while at Sing and in the month since being home is that themes started to emerge: experiential threads that run throughout my life and were woven into the conference experience.

For the next 3-4 posts, I’ll be sharing these themes and what I learned and experienced at the Sing Conference. This post will serve as a landing page where all the posts can be found.