The Haps

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged! Apologies to my dear readership, all four of you!

Truth is, I’ve been putting it off because of other stuff happening. In the last few weeks I’ve added a few things to my calendar:

- I’m teaching guitar classes at The Pursuit warehouse.

- Last Sunday I taught at church, and will keep doing so for the next two weeks.

- We’ve started a new team at The Pursuit called Big Idea Catalyst, where we meet to discuss ways to embody the Big Idea and take it outside of our building to fulfill needs in our community and inspire people to be like Jesus in their environments. We are still in the planning stages of our first efforts in that direction, but I’m excited about what’s being accomplished.

- I’m getting ready for a couple of trips this summer. One of them to Venezuela, where I have not been back in 3 years!

- I keep doing my regular stuff: music, planning for our celebration services, meetings, practices, hanging out with old and new friends, etc.

There’s a bunch of great stuff in the horizon. Stay tuned!

Francis Chan – Session 5 of Exponential 2009 on Vimeo

This is the video of the last session of this year’s Exponential Conference. Francis Chan told it like it is! Check it out…

more about “Francis Chan – Session 5 of Exponenti…“, posted with vodpod

Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch on Church Planting

Here’s a great video from the people at The Upstream Collective showing Alan Hirsch and Ed Stetzer talking about church planting at the Exponential Conference. Check it out, leave a note if you have an opinion.

more about “Ed Stetzer and Alan Hirsch on Church …“, posted with vodpod

Anything They Want

more about "Anything They Want on Vimeo", posted with vodpod

Exponential Confessional

As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I had the opportunity to lead a group of translators for the Exponential Conference. One of the things I heard from people during and after the conference is that they did not notice the translators most of the time, which is great news! All of them did a fine job! However, there were things that happened behind closed doors that were really funny to me. So, here are some of them…

- One of our translators was translating for a certain speaker whose accent is difficult to understand. So much so that this translator could not understand much of what the speaker was saying… until the speaker decided to talk about a stripper who came to know Christ. The translator was only able to translate the story about this speaker’s friend’s trip to the strip club… and could not understand the resolution of the story! So he only translated the first part of the story!

- There were three translators in one room, two of them listening to what the one person was translating. At some point, this person translated the phrase “Acts 29,” as in Acts 29 Network. The other two translators, having gone to seminary and worked in ministry for years, were appalled by this and convinced the person translating to translate it as Acts 2:9 since Acts 29 is not a real chapter of that book. So, if someone calls Acts 29 network asking for the Acts 2:9 network, that’s our fault!

- One of our translators was enjoying a certain speaker’s jokes so much he began to laugh out loud during the translation and forgot to translate the jokes! We told him later he should have said “I guess you should have been there…”

… I guess ya had to be there…

Expo 09 Recap: Craig Groeschel

My raw notes from Craig Groeschel’s session at the Exponential Conference.

- Preach a dangerous message.

- Lukewarm pastors build lukewarm churches.

- It’s about Christ breaking you, being born again AGAIN.

- It’s about the Kingdom, not your church! Don’t be obsessed with your own church, you cannot affect the city by yourself.

- Build on what you are rather than on what you are not. Don’t put other churches down by saying what you don’t do that they do or what you can do better than them. Be passionate about what you are.

- Think about the things you can do with other churches, and be humble.

- Don’t build a movement based on old measurements of success. These measurements are changing.

- Your identity is not in numbers, but in who you are in Christ.

- Don’t blame yourself on the declines, our you’ll be tempted to get credit for the increases.

- Success has changed. It’s got to be about less of us and more of Him.

- Think of the mission, not numbers.

- Megachurches are not necesarily “mega.” If you compared them with how many people still don’t know Christ, they are rather small.

- There are 3 levels of belief:

1. Enough to benefit (consumer mindset)

2. Enough to serve

3. Enough to give your life for it

- We may be tempted to go from 3 to 2 or 1 and settle. It shouldn’t be so. Always be at 3.

- Let’s take the world before the trumpet sounds!

If you think my notes are crappy, you are right! So check out Doug Gamble’s blog for better notes!

Expo 09 Recap: Erwin McManus

These are my raw annotations from one of the sessions at the Exponential Conference. Hopefully they’ll make some sense to you.

Session 1 with Erwin McManus.

- Church planting is dynamic, a movement.

- In Acts 17, we can see Paul’s movements (this is when he was in Athens).

- Paul was distressed by the idols in that city. Regardless, he went to the Synagogue first. This was his FIRST SPACE.

- There are 3 spaces to go to, most people go to their FIRST PLACE as it is the safest one.

- In church planting we do the same–we plant in safe places.

- “Love connects, it covers all irrelevancies” (paraphrased).

- We create spaces to invite people to–a community, a city of others where people who don’t know Jesus can belong. Church is that FIRST SPACE.

- Usually we bring people to faith and we take them out of their world. We shouldn’t. Instead, we should mentor them in their own spaces.

- The SECOND SPACE is the place where people outside of the church are open and comfortable. In Paul’s case he found it in Athen’s marketplace.

- This space is harder for most of us because we have learned to take ourselves out of the world forgetting how to relate to it.

- Therefore, we should communicate the Gospel in a way that makes sense, without watering it down.

- There is yet a THIRD SPACE–a place where we cannot go unless we are invited. In Paul’s case, he is taken to the Areopagus.

- We need to earn the right to be asked in and invited to these places.

- As we go to the THIRD SPACE we may loose our FIRST SPACE, and people in the latter may reject us for it. That is ok. We should strive to go that THIRD SPACE.

For better notes on this session, check out Doug Gamble’s blog.

Back from Exponential 09

I just got back from the Exponential Conference in Orlando where thousands of church planters gathered to learn about the latest trends and ideas in church planting. It’s been the third year in a row I attend, and this year I got the chance to organize a crew of Spanish translators for a bunch of sessions. I was afraid I would not benefit much from the conference because of all the work that it entailed for me, but I came out with a bunch of takeaways and impressions that I’d like to share via this blog later on. For now, here are the main things I experienced throughout the week:

- Serving alongside so many hard working volunteers was humbling. Some of them even traveled long distances just to support our crew (everyone in it did a fantastic job!).

- Gathering a mix of ideas was inspiring. Because of my duties with the translation crew I had to go from room to room making sure things were ok or helping solve issues. By the end of the conference I had heard a bunch of ideas that were wrapped up nicely and probably unknowingly by Francis Chan.

- Hanging out with my friends throughout and after the conference was great, although not easy. I was running around a lot, but I did get to talk and share with some of them and that filled my soul so much.

I will share in following posts some of the notes I took during different sessions. Stay tuned.

Fake Jesus

Tomorrow at The Pursuit we will find out what Jesus Christ would say to this dude who says he himself is Jesus. But he ain’t!

Exponential 09

I am really excited about the upcoming Exponential Conference next week, for various reasons:

- There’s a great lineup of speakers and very interesting tracks.

- I am helping facilitate translation for some of the sessions and workshops with a very talented group of people.

- We are going with a group of about 10 volunteers from The Pursuit, along with friends from other churches who are joining us as we serve church planters from all over the US.

It will be a great event! If you can’t be there, be sure to follow it via Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=exponential09