Publicity and location were part of The Dawn’s downfall
By Allen Thompson, The Presbyterian Layman, January 13, 2000
Open the web site to The Dawn … An Epiphany and you will be asked the question, “Where will you be when the year 2000 arrives?” Now take yourself back to a couple of months ago, before you had plans for New Year’s Eve, and think of the place you most wanted to go to celebrate the coming of 2000. Can you remember? Well, if you answered, “Indianapolis,” you’re not alone (barely).
Of the 30,000 youth and young adults who were expected to attend the PCUSA’s celebration of the coming of the new year, only 2,000 arrived. It is unfortunate that so many Presbyterians missed what was undoubtedly a memorable and meaningful event, but it is also sad that the PCUSA fell so embarrassingly short of an ambitious goal.
The PCUSA cited Y2K travel concerns as the likely reason for the paltry attendance at The Dawn. While these concerns may have contributed to the weak attendance, there are other factors that significantly hampered The Dawn’s success.
First was a lack of publicity. I worked on the audio/visual crew at Montreat this summer, so I was present at every conference during the summer, including the six week-long Montreat Youth Conferences. The only Dawn publicity that I noticed consisted of short, incoherent promos done on Friday mornings of Youth Conferences. There may have been some posters or pamphlets advertising the event elsewhere, but if there were, they didn’t do their job, because I didn’t notice them during the entire summer. If the PCUSA wanted 30,000 young people to attend what it had dubbed “the largest gathering of Presbyterians ever,” shouldn’t they have made sure that the young people were well-informed of it?
Another of The Dawn’s problems was location. While the people who did speak about The Dawn at Montreat garnered some attention by saying they had scheduled performances by Jars of Clay, Kirk Franklin’s Nu Nation, David LaMotte, Jim Morgan, and Michael W. Smith, the publicists shouldn’t have expected the popularity of those names alone to draw 30,000 people from around the country – especially not to Indianapolis in the dead of winter. The only person that I can think of who is capable of accomplishing that feat is Peyton Manning, the quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts.
A third shortcoming in The Dawn’s planning was its inability to appeal to adults. All of the young people who attend need somebody to keep an eye on them. I can’t, however, imagine many volunteer youth advisers jumping at the chance to chaperone a horde of teen-agers in Indianapolis on New Year’s Eve 1999. I can’t even imagine any youth pastors I know being interested in going. Besides, churches’ youth budgets have probably gone dry by that time of the year.
One factor that cannot be blamed for the meager attendance at The Dawn, however, is lack of enthusiasm among young people toward church-sponsored activities. Every year, Montreat draws more and more teen-agers to its youth conferences. Attending the conferences has become a tradition for hundreds of churches around the country, and the conferences truly represent the highlight of the summer for about 8,000 teens who attend each year. Once every three years, Triennium draws 7,000 youth to Indiana (but during the summer). The strength of Montreat and Triennium show that the PCUSA’s youth ministry can draw big crowds.
The Dawn simply wasn’t planned well.
Allen Thompson, who has been a participant and leader in numerous youth conferences at the PCUSA’s Montreat Conference Center, is a sophomore studying political science at Duke University.
Dawn deficit ‘somewhere between $350,000 and $830,000’
The Layman Online
January 13, 2000