NCF Tampa Bay
Delegation Invitation
The Global Gathering of Faith, Music, and Purpose
Grand Cayman
Emancipation Day, May 2027
Up to 4,000 flown‑in VIPs
Your invitation
In May of 2027, across several days anchored on the Cayman Islands' Emancipation Day holiday, some of the most influential faith‑forward organizations in the world are gathering on Grand Cayman.
Music on a real festival stage. Teaching worth flying for. Up to four thousand invited guests brought in from around the world, on an island where the water is the colour of a swimming pool and nobody is checking their calendar.
It is called Rise, and nothing like it has been attempted in the Caribbean before.
NCF Tampa Bay is holding a block of seats, and we are offering them to our own families before we open this any wider. You already give generously. What almost nobody gets is a week where you can see the whole of it at once, standing beside the people who run it, with your family next to you.
What Rise is
Rise is Caymanian owned and Caymanian built, founded by a family with roots on Cayman Brac going back generations. Guests are flown in and hosted, which means the room is invited rather than sold at a window.
Founding positions are being filled now across broadcast and radio, higher education, sports ministry, film and content, hospitality, and philanthropy. Each category holds one founding organization, and once it is taken it closes. When you sit down at breakfast next to someone you have never met, the odds are good they are running something your family already supports.
Nobody works a booth. Nobody is pitching you.
The date
Most of the British Caribbean received emancipation in stages. The proclamation was read, and then came the apprenticeship period, years of unpaid labour that looked a great deal like the thing it was meant to end. Freedom on paper, not yet in the hand.
Cayman is the exception. When the proclamation was read here in May of 1835, local slave owners had never registered with the British government, so the apprenticeship clause had nothing to attach itself to. Everyone walked free that day, immediately, with no conditions and no waiting period.
That is the day this country still marks, and it is the day we are building around.
If you have spent any time in generosity work, you already know why it lands. The whole message rests on a debt somebody else settled in full, at once, with nothing owed back.
Where it meets our mission
NCF states its purpose in five words.
Mobilizing resources by inspiring biblical generosity.
The second half of that sentence is the difficult half. Resources move once hearts move first, and hearts rarely move over a screen or across a banquet table with a program on it.
Anyone who has sat through a Journey of Generosity already knows what actually does the work. A small room. Unhurried conversation, other people's stories, and enough time together that the polite version of yourself finally wears off. What comes out the other side is the thing JOG names directly, which is freedom, purpose, and joy.
Rise is that same shape at a scale nobody in this movement has attempted, with the ministries themselves standing in the room and a festival built around it.
The festival
Rise is built around a real festival stage under an open sky, not a riser at the end of a ballroom.
Artist booking and festival production run out of Nashville. Stage and on‑island production are Caymanian. The sun goes down around seven, the temperature never turns uncomfortable, and the shows run late into a Caribbean night.
Your adult kids will come for this. So will your grandkids, and the friends you have been trying to get in front of something like this for years. The music is what fills the plane. It is rarely what people end up talking about on the way home.
Your days there
Roughly thirty hours of unstructured time across the gathering. That is the part a gala cannot buy, and it is deliberate.
You cannot schedule the conversation in which a family decides to do something significant. What you can do is build the week that makes it likely, then get out of the way.
Teaching and conversation, kept tight. You are out and into the day by mid‑morning rather than sitting in a ballroom until lunch.
Boats, reef, the Sister Islands, or nothing at all. No programming competes for this block, which is exactly why most of it happens here.
Hosted dinners with the organizations, then the festival. Built as a real show for a real audience on an island that knows how to run one.
Bring your people
The hardest part of generous wealth is handing it down as a value rather than a balance.
You can say it at the Thanksgiving table for twenty years and still not land it. What tends to work is proximity. A twenty‑six‑year‑old who spends four days around people who gave away most of what they built comes home different, in a way no family meeting has ever produced. So does a fifteen‑year‑old who shakes hands with the man running the ministry his parents have funded since before he was born.
Seats are allocated by household. Bring your spouse, your adult children, their spouses, the grandkids. Several families are already planning to stay on after the gathering closes and make a week of it.
The island
Seven Mile Beach runs most of the western shore. At Stingray City the rays come to you in chest‑deep water on a sandbar, which remains the single best hour of most people's first trip. Cayman Brac and Little Cayman sit a short hop away for anyone who dives, and Little Cayman's Bloody Bay Wall is on every serious diver's list.
George Town is worth an afternoon on foot. The food across the island is considerably better than Cayman gets credit for, and dinner reservations at the good places are the one thing worth booking early.
Getting there
Cayman Airways flies nonstop from Tampa International to Owen Roberts International on Grand Cayman, and the flight runs one hour and fifty minutes. Only five cities in the United States hold that connection. Tampa is one of them.
You leave in the afternoon and you are at dinner on the island. Passports are required, no visa, US dollars accepted everywhere, and the country runs on English common law. About as simple as international travel gets, which matters when you are trying to talk four generations of one family onto the same plane.
The block
Business owners who have sold, or who are circling the decision, and want the next chapter to count for something. Families running a Giving Fund who have never once met the ministries on the other end of it. Then there are the couples thirty years into generosity, quietly wondering whether the second half could be larger than the first.
If you have ever sat in a Journey of Generosity and thought the room was too small, this is the larger version of that room.
Seats at Rise are allocated rather than sold, and our block is finite. We are gauging interest now so we know how large it needs to be before allocations close this fall.
Nothing is due today and nothing is binding. Tell us you are interested and we will send details on the seat, lodging, and travel as each is confirmed.
The Tide Is Rising.
Grand Cayman. Several days anchored on the Emancipation Day holiday, May 2027.
