Over a thousand youth and college students gathered in San Diego from Monday to Thursday for Korea Campus Crusade for Christ (KCCC)'s annual missions conference, called 'Higher Calling Conference.'

KCCC has hosted an annual winter conference since 1996, and this year, the conference was centered on the theme, 'Go Beyond.' Organizers said in a press conference that they hoped to explore various ways God goes beyond expectations in his power and love toward his people, and to challenge the attendees to dream and take actions beyond their comfort zones in response.

Over the past several years, the conference has seen progressively more involvement from local churches in attending and leading the conference. KCCC opened up its once-exclusive winter conference -- which was then called 'Vision Conference' -- in 2009, and rebranded it to 'Higher Calling Conference' since. A consistent number of some 600 to 700 youths from local churches have been attending since then as well, according to Dong Whan Kim, national director of KCCC. This year also, while the conference saw a drop in the number of college students, about 640 youths have registered and attended, he said.

"We believed it had potential to be a blessing to so many more people," Kim explained. "The conference doesn't exist just for KCCC, but for the fulfillment of the Great Commission. We're hoping that it could continue to serve to be a good influence and blessing to local churches to encourage their young people to be mission-minded."

One development that occurred in this year's conference is that most youth attendees were placed in small groups with leaders from their own churches. Up until this year, youths were placed randomly into hotel rooms -- which became the attendees' small groups throughout the conference -- along with other attendees regardless of church or college campus.

"Youth pastors do like the conference because students enjoy it and grow from it, and because the conference offers a lot of resources like big-name speakers, big praise teams and performances, that smaller churches can't afford on their own," said Jacob Cho, college pastor at New Life Vision Church in Los Angeles. Cho has been serving as one of the leaders for the youth track of Higher Calling Conference since 2013.

"But they did tell me that one downside to the conference was that there was a lack of church time because the students would spend a majority of their time with their small groups," he continued. "Then after the conference, the whole experience kind of felt more like an individual one rather than a shared experience as a church."

Asking churches to bring their own staff and to lead their own youth in small groups allows for the church to have more time together and grow together as a body, Cho said. He added that it also serves as a way for church leaders to make the content of plenary sessions more accessible and understandable for the younger attendees.

This year, two lead pastors of local churches in Southern California were also featured among the main plenary session speakers: Mike Erre of EvFree Fullerton, and Harold Kim of Christ Central of Southern California. Higher Calling has generally been known to invite nationally known speakers or leaders of major organizations, such as Eugene Cho of Quest Church (who also spoke this year) and Francis Chan.

Harold Kim said he welcomed the invitation to be involved this year because "there are better things that can be done when many people, churches, ministries, come together."

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