Creative Scribble

This week was nuts. I was in Charlotte, Atlanta, and Nashville in four days with Knoxville in between each. Won't be doing that again anytime soon! But each conference offered a lot to learn for me. Here's a quick recap.

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THR3E - This conference was hosted by Elevation Church for only 150 people to learn the principles that have shaped this church in their first three years of existence. There are a bunch of things that stuck with me from this one. The biggest was probably this: "Don't try to mimic somebody else's miracles. Imitate their faith." I loved that. OneLife Church will not mimic what God is doing somewhere else. But we sure as heck can imitate their faith and learn from that.

Orange - This is a conference about family ministry held in Atlanta. It was huge - about 3,300 people in all. The biggest thing I walked away from at this one is that the traditional model of age-based ministries (pre-school, children, and youth) being the end and not a means to a bigger end has not been all that effective because the average kid is only in church 40 hours a year. On the flip side, parents have 3,000 hours a year with their kids. If the church (yellow) can intersect with the family (red) and empower parents to be the biggest influence in their kids' lives, the end result will be transformation (orange). That's awesome.

Collegiate Summit - This is the national conference for Collegiate Ministers that meets once every five years in Nashville. For this one, I was on the other end of the conference experience – speaking! To be honest, I was a little nervous which doesn't happen all that often for me. There were 600 ministers from colleges and universities from all over the country. I led one of the breakout sessions and talked about publicity and marketing in ministry. It was fun to talk about that topic again since I've been out of it for a few years now and even more fun talking about how we have the opportunity to market the best product on the face of the planet! What's more important on a college campus, wet t-shirt contests or the Gospel?! Our job is to push the latter The biggest thing I took away from this is my wife being in the room is an unbelievable support to me. Any nerves that may have been there when I started left as soon as I saw her smiling in the back the whole time.