Emergent Brethren

A while back, I wrote about participating in webinars, and how distracting it can be trying to participate from your office vs. being at a conference. Yet, price-wise, there’s a big difference between sitting in your office and traveling to attend an event and pay a registration fee.

Leadership Network is putting on another free webinar next Tuesday, September 27th, at 10 a.m. EASTERN time. This year’s theme for The NINES is “How We Do It”. Each of the speakers has just FIVE minutes to tell us how they do it… with nine main themes: Family, Staff, Time, Vision, Money, Discipleship, Grace, Physical and Emotional Health, and Preaching.

This year’s NINES features 99+ speakers, and will last a little over 9 hours. They are planning a full day of input for you. I’ll probably be in and out with my participation. But, they have a great line-up of speakers!

To get people to sign-up in advance, they are giving away a $1,000 church leaders library to one lucky registrant as an incentive. Seriously. This is one killer book collection. Authors include many NINES speakers like Dave Ferguson, Leonard Sweet, Ed Stetzer, Philip Nation, Reggie McNeal, Mark DeYmaz, Scott Wilson, Carey Nieuwhof, Hugh Halter, Bruce Miller, Eric Swanson, Rick Rusaw, Neil Cole, Matt Carter, Darrin Patrick, Bob Roberts, Pete Briscoe, John Bishop, Dave Gibbons, Dave Browning, Amy Hanson, and Shannon O’Dell. 50+ church leadership books, in fact. It could be a great asset to you, your staff and church team!

Here’s the link you can look at for the library they are giving away: http://bit.ly/mYFTKh

Here’s the link where you can register for the conference:http://thenines.tv

If this looks interesting or you participate, please let me know! I plan to participate part of the 9 hours.

Jeff

I recently took my last Doctor of Ministry (D. Min.) class on thesis writing. The past three years have been challenging, but most stimulating and inspirational! The program has been through Gallup University (Omaha, at Gallup Headquarters) and Bethel University. I’ve shared class with 7 other outstanding individuals, including one from South Africa.

My thesis research topic is, “How Clifton StrengthsFinder can empower Christians who feel inadequate in faith sharing with non-believers?”. Part of my research will be to interview Christians who have been instrumental in bringing others to Christ. I would like to do this from an emergent perspective.

I chose this topic from all my experience as a pastor and Congregational Life Team member. During all these years, it was hard for a congregation to engage in evangelism. Many feel inadequate for personal faith sharing. For some, evangelism is a dirty word. But, God calls us all to share our faith, or give a reason for why we believe. It’s not enough to just do good works of service. But rather than learning a new program or things to memorize, what if Christians could experience empowerment by simply understanding better how God has created them? From the understanding that Clifton StrengthsFinder gives us, what if we could learn to share our faith out of this natural, God-given, and unique gifting?

If any of you are familiar with Clifton StrengthsFinder or interested in this research topic, please get in touch with me. I’d love to engage with you.

Blessings to you,
Jeff

I did not attend Annual Conference this year in person. However, I was impressed by the video quality of watching the services and business sessions over the internet. It was good to connect with the conference and Brethren in this way. The crew that broadcast the conference did a great job! Thank you!!

I woke-up this morning wondering, “How many people are affected by the decisions made at this meeting?” There’s no way to really measure this. Annual Conference doesn’t have the power in our polity to enforce any decisions made upon the congregations or membership of the church. So, congregations are free to abide or not abide by what’s decided. So, whether the decision has to do with what congregations should be about, what the U.S. government should do, or how we should live in this world and care for the environment, the Brethren have free will as to whether they will abide or not abide with the business decisions.

Another aspect of my question, “How many people are affected by the decisions made at this meeting?”, is this: if the money spent on holding and coming to this annual meeting were given to ministry agencies like Heifer Project, Int., or New Community Project, or split between the two, how many lives would be effected and changed? I don’t know how much is spent for and on Annual Conference. It’s got to be in the hundreds of thousands, if not over a million dollars (totaling-up all the attendee’s expenses). This is a pretty big chunk of money! A great deal could be done to make the world a better place, help the poor, and bring others to Christ by contributing this money to different agencies, like those named above.

I hope this post doesn’t come across as sounding too critical of the church and conference. That’s not my purpose in writing it. Instead, I’ve just been pondering the thought of how the church can best impact lives through the money that is spent to hold and attend Annual Conference.

What are your thoughts on this, or reflections from Annual Conference?