Hosting A Seminar

This is how you can stretch yourself into trying new things. I recommend committing to new experiences before you think them through all the way. Then, when panic is just about to hit, make planning lists and get down to some logistics work. This technique allowed my husband and I to host a seminar on forgiveness right in our home! Michael O’Shields agreed to come and do some teaching from his book Rethinking Forgiveness. This book means a lot to our family and we were glad for a chance to share it with friends. But, a seminar in our home was a first for us and it required some planning we’d never done.

The first thing we needed to grapple with was capacity.

Thinking through our home’s size, I wasn’t certain how many people I could squeeze into a living room. How many chairs would I borrow in order to accomplish that? What furniture would I move out of the way? We realized that we could handle about 20 guests at most. We also needed to consider children, since many of the people we invited have children. Where would these wonderful kids be safe while the adults took time and space to ask questions and focus? I needed to figure out how many babysitters it would take to keep the children alive and where to put them all.

Our friends from Bible study helped me think through parts of the plan. They live fairly close and volunteered their home as a place for the kids to play while the adults attended the seminar. Truly, more parents would have been comfortable with a location closer to my home, but that simply wasn’t available. We did our best with what we had.

In my normal compulsive invitation style, I emailed, texted and spoke to random groups of people about our plan. This is very friendly, comfortable and all, but for a while, I had no idea how many people were coming. That needed to change! I chose to use Evite as my solution there. I created a paper flyer to hand out when in person with friends. Then, I used Evite as my follow up.

Here’s how it worked out:

• I provided a simple dinner at both the seminar house and the kids house. Chicken, rice and salad for adults. Mac-n-cheese with fruit for the kids. The food made people comfortable and allowed them to not worry about scheduling in time for feeding their families.
• I moved some furniture around and asked one guest to bring 3 folding chairs. We had just barely enough for our 19 guests.
  

  Here’s how we set that up. The sewing table got turned into a book table.

• Singing a song at the beginning of the session helped gently nudge people toward the end of their conversations and toward their seats. After the song was done, I thanked everyone for coming and introduced our speaker.
• The evening sparked some lively discussions and some new ideas for everyone. I’m glad we gave it a try.

In the future I would change:

• Childcare! I didn’t have a good understanding of who was and wasn’t in need of child care. Many people didn’t bring their kids at all. To be on the safe side, I hired more babysitters than I needed and made more food than was needed. I could have saved considerable effort and money by getting a final head-count from attending parents.