Conference Possibilities

Recently, I got the chance to attend Saddleback’s small group conference in Orange County and NewSpring’s Unleash in Anderson County. :-) Several times now, I’ve had opportunities to share things that I’ve learned at both those unique moves of God. I loved each experience and learned a bunch. Conferences are designed to mess up your thinking…to throw you off balance…in a good way. I’m going to share a series of posts on how we can put a conference in the proper context so that we maximize their benefit.

Everybody says at a conference… “Don’t go back and copy everything we do,” and yet people will go back and do one of two things. They will either go back and copy everything or fail to leverage the momentum that the conference gives. You go to a conference to glean from the corners of another man’s field. Instead, many folks try to dig up and bring back the soil only to find that the container they brought to hold the wheat won’t hold the dirt. That soil has been fertilized, tilled, planted, watered, and weeded. For us to assume that we can have the same crop without the same toil is folly. On the flip side, a conference exposes you to the white, hot passion of people who are on the same ultimate mission that you are. Why not capitalize on the momentum that an experience like that can create? What you are doing then is saying, “What if…” which is about the most powerful phrase in Christendom. Conferences allow us to see possibilities that before now have gone unseen and that is a good thing. What are some possibilities you’ve seen from the conference you attended?

Part two coming…