I've Been Thinking About This…

Wrapping up thoughts:

1. An excellent conference and opportunity – worth a lot more than the price of admission. You sometimes do get more than you pay for.
2. There wasn’t a whole lot of new information for me – its value to me was in what was repeated and confirmed. Sometimes you need to hear something over and again for it to sink in (well, I do anyway).
3. The single most frequent repetition was – “Spend less time ministering to your congregation and more time ministering to your family.” (Perhaps a third of the speakers said this, either in the form of regretting they hadn’t or glad that they had.)
4. I was deeply impressed by the honesty of the speakers. Many of these people had made mistakes that they were sharing – that was gold they were mining and handing out.
5. I was also struck by how many speakers there are out there – people I’ve never heard of – who are excellent teachers.
6. One note hit a chord in me: the speaker (and I’m afraid I don’t remember which) said that people – including pastors – think that the most important job a pastor has is to lead the congregation. Not true. With every pastor, the thing God is building is the pastor, not the congregation. (That is: The most important relationship is the one a person has with God, not with the people God has called us to work with – and this applies as much to pastors as to anyone else.) This was a heavy thought, since we have always heard that the shepherd must be willing to sacrifice everything for the sheep.
7. Sound quality has been improved a little over the original “The Nines” conference, where the level was not balanced across the videos. This time it was – for the most part. However, the sound control for the live portions was very poor, and between that and the 4 or 5 videos that were not recorded at the same level as the rest we were running back to the sound board more than a dozen times during the session.
8. There were also some transmission issues that surfaced, which – considering the complexity of the project, and that it was pretty much a one-off – were understandable; they also gave us a chance to catch up, so they weren’t as frustrating as the sound issues.

My one wish for future conferences: Youse guys run all the videos through level-balancing software to limit the sound levels to one range (an easy step to improve the quality of the presentation). I’ll set up closer to the sound board. Next time will be even sweeter!

All in all, an experience that I (and others at Praise Christian Fellowship) really appreciated. Thanks, Leadership Network.

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