Thursday, May 25, 2006

vineyard great lakes regional conference audio

thought this post on my friend Donnell's blog nicely articulated the following news (cut and pasted directly, in italics):

Each year Vineyard hosts either a national leader conference, or a regional conference. This year's regional conference theme was A New Christianity: Rediscovering the Center. It's a time of ferment across the church landscape in North America as an ancient faith struggles to find fresh expression. You know the buzzwords: emerging church, post-modernity, and the like. It's time now to flesh it out. Vineyard churches are positioned to do just that. We believe the New Christianity involves a rediscovery, a new convergence toward the center, drawing from the treasures of the whole church. The conference addressed some major themes, such as contemplative prayer, social justice, and Spirit empowered and outward focused ministry. I believe this is core content for the emerging Christianity of the 21st Century. It is also central to Vineyard's contribution to the emergent church conference will be aimed at leaders at all levels in local vineyard churches, but it is wide open to anyone who wishes to attend.

Some of the audio from the conference is available online and is also available as a Podcast .

by the way, the conference deeply affirmed for me so many of the reasons i feel privileged to be part of a church in the community of churches called the Vineyard.

while you're at it (visiting Donnell's blog, that is), check out his link on an interview with Brian McLaren re: the DaVinci code - expresses eloquently what i've felt on a gut level but never thought about with enough focus to put into words.



Wednesday, May 10, 2006

notes from Cincy

the conference has been awesome so far. extraordinary teaching, excellent worship, great fellowship. add to that a couple of encounters with Jesus that have caused me to lose all my cool and a fair amount of snot, too, and it's been a definite winner.

i'm rooming with my friend Donnell, a pastor at the Ann Arbor Vineyard. he's finishing up prep for his message tomorrow. his talk will be the final session of the conference - i'm really looking forward to it. looking forward to the talk, i should say, not the end.

also looking forward to seeing Ronni, Colin, and Elle soon. Ronni tells me whenever she mentions my name on the phone, Elle looks around inquiringly, "Da-dy? Da-dy?" as if i might just appear around the corner. breaks one's heart, don't you know?

Monday, May 8, 2006

regional conference

heading down to cincinnati for the vineyard great lakes regional conference tomorrow. really looking forward to it.

experimented with motion backgrounds behind the song lyrics during worship at church yesterday. curious to see if it helped people worship, or if it was experienced as distracting/showy. it sure was easy to experience God's presence during worship, but i don't know if had anything to do with the multimedia, since the worship team was really in a groove. rarely get feedback on anything, so i'm not optimistic anyone will actually say anything voluntarily. i'll have to do a little investigating, i suppose.

also, going to see a chiropractor today; see if maybe some relief for head pain is available. should be interesting.

had batting practice for softball yesterday. while pitching, took one to the radius. can still see the stictches imprinted on my forearm. should leave a nice bruise, but nothing lasting, i'm sure.