|TOP|Nearly 1,000 people from across the UK gathered last week for the Building a Prodigal Friendly Church conference held last week at Minehead.

The gathered delegates, most of them church leaders, explored new ways to make their churches more welcoming for church leavers wishing to return.

The event was hosted by Spring Harvest’s Marion White together with Richard Hardy of Care for the Family, with guest speakers including Nicky Gumbel, Jeff Lucas, Gavin Calver, Roy Crowne and Celia Bowring who all expanded on the theme of building loving churches that welcome prodigals back home.

Rob Parsons opened the series of presentations at the conference organised by Care for the Family, Spring Harvest and Reaching the Unchurched Network (RUN) with a call to the church leaders to adopt “habits to be more loving” in order to build love into every part of church life.

Dary Northrop of Timberline Church, Colorado, also spoke on his church’s mission statement “Let Love Live” and love in the church, which developed into one of the central themes of the three-day conference.

|AD|Meanwhile, Jeff Lucas stressed the need for churches wishing to become more prodigal friendly to guide the ‘elder brother’ in the process of welcoming back the prodigal.

Conference organisers hoped that many churches would be “impacted by this message and change their outlook to welcome home the many prodigals who desperately want to return to church, but are afraid of the ‘welcome’ they might receive,” read a Spring Harvest press release.

Marion White’s daughter, Jo, herself a prodigal, spoke on the last evening of the event. She said: “We can’t make the step back to God on our own. We need people who can be honest to us, who will be patient with us and love us, because we desperately want to come back.”

Conference delegates testified to the success of the event, describing it as “an eye-opener”, “brilliant” and “exceptional in addressing the important questions”.

Joy, from Stockport, said: “I think it’s really important that we free each other up from meetings and ‘church things’ so that we have time to relate to people.”

Robin, from Worcester, said that he was now looking at the issues surrounding prodigals in a new way. “We’ve talked about prodigals who might have ‘baggage’. Now I think we’re realising that churches have ‘baggage’ too,” he said.