I've Been Thinking About This…

Just back from a great 2 1/2 days in DC at the Church Multiplication Network. Got Josh to drop by a couple of times each day to keep Biff company (thanks, Josh), and we conned a couple of folks in the small group to get us to the train station and pick us up on the return (thanks, Mike & Frank!). Naturally we had a heat-wave for traveling – over 100F in DC Monday through Wednesday – so that made lugging bags extra fun. Waiting in the sun on the platform for the Amtrak Vermonter that was 50 minutes late was a treat too.

Apart from the heat, though, this was an incredible trip. The Assemblies of God (http://AG.org) had laid the church planting conference on for free. I caught wind of it from Twitter, since I follow some of the presenters, and Pastor Ryan & I managed to sign up relatively early. (Some good responsiveness and follow-up from the AG staff during the leadup to the conference – thanks to Debbie Armstrong & Nicolle Rockenbaugh)

As it happens, there are a number of interesting events intersecting for us on this topic – first is the conference itself, of course; secondly the fact that we have just started a series called GOING – something very missional to encourage a more personal level of ministry and outreach. I’ll be taking the sermon “Mission (to the Promised Land)” based on Joshua’s invasion on 7/18 and then doing the follow-up to VBS on 8/1 (“Tidy to messy”) – pastor Ryan is covering the other 5 weeks. The third of these events is an elder meeting next week where Pastor Ryan is sharing God’s vision for Praise Christian Fellowship’s church growth.

So the timing of this was great for us. We’re also thinking of going to the Sticks conference (Nov 9-10) and considering a Grand Tour of a number of the churches whose blogs and pastors’ blogs we’re tracking – Mark Batterson at NCC, Pete Wilson at Crosspoint, Greg & Geoff Surratt at Seacoast, Dave & Jon Ferguson at CCC, Shaun King at Courageous Church and Andy Stanley at North Point and one or two others. It’ll be interesting to see how many we could fit into a weekend. Sadly we’ll not make it to Zak White at Revolution Church.

The other vital accomplishment during this trip was to get Ryan hooked on Doctor Who. All right-thinking men should be, so we watched the episodes written by Steven Moffett – one of the two best writers of current production TV (the other is Bob Larby, but you knew that).

More notes to come…

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