A good day today. Dan Rempel and I delivered a talked entitled “clear.communication: Staying Relevant in a Changing World”. The session went well, it was full, and there was a lot of discussion. People have plenty of questions about social media and how to use it for God’s glory – and that’s a great thing.
For session two I went to Terry Hiebert‘s session “Engaging the Doubters”. Fantastic. It brought back a lot of memories of when I blogged through The God Delusion and had the opportunity to engage atheists and serious doubters in a conversation about faith and belief and God.
Had a great conversation with David MacFarlane about (among other things) Michael Coren, the emerging church, and Mennonite history. A very engaging, animated man… who wouldn’t quite tell me what he thought of Michael Coren.
Exchanged musical likes and influences with Glen Soderholm. Glen is the main musical worship leader at the convention. We share a lot of likes/sources/influences in Bob Dylan (have a listen to Glen’s cover of “Everything is Broken”
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), Bill Mallonee, Ron Sexsmith, Indigo Girls, Mark Heard, and of course Johnny Cash. We also talked church and theology. Glen is Presbyterian but with wide experience in other denominations.
Speaking of theology and denominations. My favorite thing to say this weekend as I get to know new people and we get around to theological influences: “Last year around this time I was at a Brian McLaren conference one weekend and in Minneapolis at a John Piper conference the next – and I liked them both. Both were missing something and both had something important that the other didn’t.”
That makes for a very good conversation starter and I’m more excited than ever about reading everything, weighing, sifting, and taking all the wonderful good and helping discern the bad in every author and leader.
I love conferences!
