Bridging the Gap: A Personal Response to NEC Conference

The National Evangelical Conference is being held at Brummana High School on 31st October and 1st November 2025. It represents, in many ways, a return to normality in Lebanon after seven years of disruption and torment caused by events as varied as the economic collapse, the Beirut port explosion, the global pandemic, and the war. Throughout this time, the continuing education of children in the country in preparation for a better future, has been one of the very few constants in our collective lives.

Now we return, however, to working across schools, to meeting to share our ideas, to experience very necessary professional development, and to bridge the gap which has grown in the time that we have been apart.

Bridging the gap is about making up for the educational deficit caused by online or hybrid learning during the pandemic, reflecting on our experience of that form of education and working out how we can get young people back to an awareness of the essential need for a strong work ethic, for social interaction, effective communication, and to develop personal ambition, with the realisation that they should want to, and can, make a difference in a world which will look very different from the one in which their teachers grew up.

Bridging the gap is about the advent of Artificial Intelligence, which has emerged during our seven-year absence, about how it can obstruct or aid learning, and for many who do not have access to regular education, how it can offer the tools to provide the learning they have been, and would otherwise, be denied.

Bridging the gap is about putting the joy of learning back into education, and about replacing the disillusionment associated with rote learning with critical thinking and creativity.

And Bridging the Gap is about learning for all, irrespective of talent and capacity, in the knowledge that everyone has a role to play in the world, and that every child and student has the right to be properly prepared and enlightened to make a meaningful contribution. Children who have learning difficulties or who face disadvantages in life not of their own making, have the right to participate and to succeed in the way that those with natural advantages do.  The key is to value all of God’s children, not only those who are favoured.  They are all blessed.

But above all else, Bridging the Gap is about bringing an end to isolation and division, and is a celebration of the many benefits which come from over a thousand educational leaders and teachers from all over Lebanon, sharing their diverse knowledge and experience for the good of the next generation who will lead the country tomorrow.

Bridging the gap is about putting the joy of learning back into education, and about replacing the disillusionment associated with rote learning with critical thinking and creativity.

The NEC conference turned out to be a great success. 1,600 delegates attended over 60 workshops and plenary sessions in two days on our beautiful Brummana campus in glorious weather. The workshops and plenary sessions were inspiring and energizing, but especially it was the fellowship amongst teachers who had gathered from Nabatiyeh to Akkar and who had either never met or reconnected after years of separation, which made the conference truly memorable for them.

The sessions were packed and there was animated discussion on topics as varied as the impact of AI, classroom management, teaching for inclusion and creativity in a machine age. I was struck by the excitement of the teachers in the knowledge that they would return to their school refreshed, rejuvenated and revived after a long period of self-imposed isolation.

A great conference! Thank you to all who organized it. We are prepared for a dynamic future.