In winter last year I was asked if I would attend the ‘Churches Together in England Forum’ as a representative from ‘Churches Together in Lancashire’. I wasn’t 100% sure what I was signing up for, but I thought if nothing else it would be a great opportunity to gather together with Christians from all over the UK.

Forum was held at the Hayes conference centre in Swanwick, so after attending my morning lecture I headed over from York to Alfreton station, where I hitched a lift over to the conference centre. The theme of the conference was "Reconciling Hope - a broken Church for a broken World".

Throughout the three days we had speakers including Archbishop Justin Welby, Anthony Reddie and Ruth Valerio, to speak on this theme and we then got to spend time in small groups discussing the topics in further detail. My small group had a wide range of delegates from the Church of England, Salvation Army, Friends of the Holy Land and other member Churches of the CTE. It was really great to be able to share in discussions with so many different people.

A particular push for this years Forum was to encourage young adults to attend, so on the Tuesday afternoon the young adults got together and spent some time getting to know each other. For my experience of Forum, one of the great things was that I wasn’t treated as a young person who was attending Forum, I was simply someone who was attending Forum who just happened to be under 30. One of my highlights of Forum was the workshop I attended on Tuesday afternoon about intergenerational reconciliation. It was really inspiring and interesting to talk about where we see people from all generations in Church and how we can best be an intergenerational Church.

It was an intense three days and by the time I got home on Wednesday evening I was exhausted, but being able to spend those three days with all the different people I got to meet was truly amazing. Even just the conversations that we had at midnight in the bar, allowed me to connect with people from other denominations and really sparked my enthusiasm for ecumenism.