I rarely am getting time to blog or post things due to just being so full on this fun adventure of spending time with family, all that is happening with Vintage Faith Church, spending time with people outside of church, writing my dissertation and finishing up my latest book for Zondervan. So blogging and Twittering slip to a lesser priority. I'd love to hear how people (especially church leaders) who blog regularly keep up the time and energy and focus to do it amongst leading a church and everything else happening....
But a quick update - on Wednesday, November 4 - at the Outreach Convention in San Diego we have three of us on the Origins Creative Team from three different churches hosting an all day seminar. It will be myself, Eric Bryant from Mosaic in LA, and Marlon Hall from The Movement in Houston.
The seminar is called "Origins -The Realities of Evangelism in a New World". It runs from 8:30 AM until 4:00. It will be hearing the stories and lessons learned, mistakes made from 3 different churches on mission - and then having a lot of open discussion. We are designing this day to have time for those attending to be exploring and discussing their own churches and how they are on mission or blockades to evangelism there may be.
The hope is that no matter where you are, whether like our three distinct churches in Santa Cruz, CA - Los Angeles, CA, Houston, TX - that the churches may look and feel entirely different but underneath there are common philosophies about evangelism and mission. We will look at those and also have time to be exploring those in attendance and their unique situations. You can read more here and sign up to attend here. I love all-day seminars like this because you really get to have a lot of discussion and get to know the people there, so looking forward to next week! And the Outreach Convention itself, of course - and I am teaching another workshop as well later in the week.
The next week, I am happy to be teaming up with David Kinnaman who wrote the book "UnChristian". His book and "They Like Jesus But Not The Church" are very similar - from a researcher and me as a practitioner and we will be teaching together in the Cincinnati are at the Navigate event and you can go here for more info.
ORIGINS EVENT - We'll be announcing more things soon about Origins - but we have a date and place for our first major event - it will be July 2010 in Pasadena, CA. This will be the festival-like event and more details to come. But Erwin McManus, Dave Gibbons, Margaret Feinberg and many others will be there at this. More soon. If you are in the Atlanta area or going to be at Youth Specialties in Atlanta in 2 weeks, on Friday, November 20 we will be having an informal "listening session" where myself, Amena Brown and some others will be asking question of you to make Origins the best possible community to fuel and encourage evangelism and mission. Let me know if you are interested and I will let you know where and when.
Back to prepping for my sermon in a week and a half. I am prepping now, since I will be away next week and then preaching the day after I get back at 11 PM. Becky and Katie and Claire are coming with me to San Diego, so that shall be fun.
I am really looking forward to this Sunday, November 1 at Vintage Faith Church too as Ed Dobson will be speaking - for those that don't know Ed, he has an incredible story, he just wrote a fascinating book (look here for info on that). I will blog about Ed later, but he is a hero of the faith and we are honored he is speaking at our church this Sunday.
