Ten Highlights from Advance Global 2026
A retrospective from our Cape Town Gathering
Every 2 years our Advance family of churches gathers in a different continent for our Global conference. This year it was in the fairest Cape, South Africa, hosted at New Gen Church in Somerset West.
Here are my 10 highlights of the week together.
A Global Family
This felt like the most global Global, with 800 delegates from 29 nations attending. It was breathtaking to hear stories of new churches being planted in new nations and new regions opening up to partnership. But the lasting impression was not one of an expanding empire as much as a gospel shaped people growing at the speed of family. That felt like lots of meals together, prayer for one another, language translation and new friendships forged that will last into eternity.
An African Celebration
We began preparing as a team for Global over a year ago, and from the get go we wanted to try and hold the tension between having a global gathering that also honored the particular hosting context of Africa in tone and tenor. That is always a bit of a moving target, but particularly in the worship, the joyful dancing, the singing in African languages and the percussive rhythm felt wonderfully African. (And I enjoyed leading one spontaneous song in Zulu, the language I studied and taught more than 30 years ago!) It was also amazing to sing original songs that had been written a year prior to the conference by a group of worship leaders from various nations.
Cape Church Hospitality
To be fair, the conference was co-hosted by day two great Cape Town churches - Common Ground Rondebosch and New Gen, but there is such a wealth of partnership among the Cape churches that extended a blanket of warmth across the whole time together. Hundreds of people were hosted in homes, countless homes were opened to host international guests for the inimitable South African braai, and many churches opened their pulpits either side of the conference to international preachers.
Strong Expository Preaching
Of course, I’m biased, because I was part of the team that chose to preach primarily from one passage and give each preacher a particular theme from that passage. It was 2 Thessalonians 3:1-6, which has become something of a prophetic text for us as a movement, and we chose it because it expressed our “Further Together” theme well. It was so satisfying to see preachers squeeze the juice out of this rich passage, drawing from the context of the Thessalonian Church who saw the Word of the Christ speed ahead and be honored, despite severe opposition. The pulpit from which we preached had emblazoned across it, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Christ was magnified and exalted in every sermon.
Prayer and Prophetic Depth
This conference was bathed in prayer, beginning with our Global Day of Prayer in October 2025, around the same Biblical text, and continuing through regular prayer and prophetic Zooms, ably co-ordinated by Ben Whittaker. It felt like this prayerfulness over-flowed into the conference, with prayer for regions after report backs and regular prophetic calls for people to receive the empowering of the Spirit through the laying on of hands. I heard a story of two young leaders who came from more conservative theological backgrounds, who responded to a call for prayer and experienced the electric presence of God in a way that convinced them of the present power of the Spirit in their lives. We are genuinely going deeper in prayer as movement, and we praise God for that.
Solidarity with the Persecuted Church
Of the different nations gathered together, 6 were in the the top 50 most persecuted nations in the world for Christians. Taking time to hear from and pray for people from Eritrea, Nigeria, India, Nepal and the DRC was both heartbreaking and faith building. I believe this will increasingly become a mark of our global family of churches - a genuine solidarity with the persecuted church and a willingness to receive the gift of their bold, joyful resilience in the face of such hostility.
The Silent Conductor
You had to be there, but if you were, you know!
A Resourced Movement
It was joy to release 4 booklets(available on the Advance website) and 4 books to help resource the movement. The books were Becoming Good Men by Donnie Griggs, Humbly Onward by Rigby Wallace, The Gospel for Respectable Sinners by Matt Hosier and A Fire by Night by Alan Frow. There are two more collaborative projects in the works too: a book on Christian Ethics called Pastoring on Thin Ice and a book on healing called The Great Physician. Watch this space.
9. Churches welcomed into partnership and churches exploring partnership
By God’s kindness, we were able to welcome a number of churches into partnership. This is always a joy. We also find ourselves in as season where many churches are looking into partnership with Advance. A number of these churches were at the conference, and were greatly helped by meeting the rest of the global family and able to experience more of our vision and values fleshed out. This will bear significant fruit in time.
New church plants commissioned
Our vision remains simple. We aim to plant and strengthen churches, so it was brilliant to be able to commission 9 new church plants in their various stages of launching. We praise Jesus for them and pray for Him to send out more workers into the harvest!
Thank you so much to so many of you who made the effort to attend Global 2026, and of course, all those who served so faithfully and joyfully. We hope you are back home safely and on the mend if you got ill on the trip. Thank you too for the many who watched online. We hope you will all be able to join us again in two years, date and venue TBC!