So I went to my first Catalyst Conference as a house-church participant, as opposed to a conventional church worship leader. I gotta say, the changes in my life in the last year has changed my perspective on this quite a bit.

Andy Stanley started things off with a good start, talking out of Daniel 4-5. The discussion cenetered on this line, repeated several times in Daniel: "the Most High is sovereign over the kingdoms of men and gives them to anyone he wishes." If found it ironic that he applied this to church ministry. Funny, I thought churches were supposed to be a part of the kingdom of God, not mini kingdoms of men.

Next up was Marcus Buckingham, who talked about playing to your strengths rather than always trying to improve your weaknesses. Good stuff, even if they've been talking about that kind of stuff at Catalyst for years. Still, he put it in more of a workplace/career context, rather than just trying to focus on church, which is good. Sometimes I think some of the speakers forget that a lot of the people at Catalyst aren't employed in ministry. Marcus certainly didn't ignore that.

First up, after lunch, was George Barna. I honestly felt like people just didn't understand Barna. He would say things, and people would just be completely silent. Here is a guy that has been hugely respected in the ministry world for years, but now that he's written a book basically predicting that conventional churches will lose about half of their market share over the next twenty years, and that it's not entirely a bad thing, people just tune him out. One thing he said, that should have gotten a response, and didn't: "Jesus didn't call us to go to church, he called us to BE the church." There were several more. I was annoyed.

Then John Maxwell took the stage. They did this as a Q&A session with Andy Stanley asking the questions. I've seen Maxwell speak numerous times, mostly at Catalyst, but also at other leadership seminars. Something clicked with me this time, though. Maxwell's ideas and leadership principles completely make sense in a business world. But in the kingdom of God, they completely rule out spiritual possibilities. For instance, he always says that you can only increase a skill a notch or two - so if you're a 3 on a scale from 1 to 10, with a lot of hard work and discipline, you can increase to a 4 or a 5, but never higher.

This starts to bug me though - because it rules out spiritual gifts. I don't believe that Jesus' disciples were 10's on a leadership scale when he picked them. I don't even believe that they were a 7. They were probably more like a 2. He picked the least capable to prove that with the inflow of the Holy Spirit, the least talented of us can become the greatest servants in the kingdom. People who have never shown any leadership potential can, with the direciton of the Spirit, become great leaders in the kingdom of God. I've never heard Maxwell acknowledge that there's a difference, and many (if not most) conventional churches are run more like a business than as a part of God's kingdom, so this makes sense.

Then there was a special guest - Jeff Foxworthy had the chance to share. He started with a definition of what a redneck is: "a complete and utter lack of sophistication." He then talked a little bit about his background, told a few redneck jokes (and even managed to make fun of West Virginia in the process), but then started talking about examples of rednecks in the Bible.

The thing is, he was challenging as Barna, but because of his delivery style, I suppose (and probably the fact that he hadn't written a book predicting the decline of the influence of the conventional church), his reception was much warmer.

But he basically gave every indication that he is a revolutionary. He can't stand churches that are stuffy and require everyone to dress up (where rednecks would NOT fit in). He said he specifically won't join a church that requires membership, because he's a member of the kingdom of God. And that when it comes to church leadership, we're all sheep leading sheep, and there is only ONE shepherd.

Overall, Jeff Foxworthy gave the most challenging and thought-provoking talk up that that point. It's pretty interesting that he beat out Andy Stanley and John Maxwell in that regard.

The last speaker of the day was Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, which is a group of lawyers that works around the world to provide law enforcement the evidence they need to break up forced child prostitution and illegal slavery rings. Pretty awesome stuff. His talk really centered on the command for Christians to be God's agents of justice in the world. He was quite challenging on the need to get out of the "visitor's center" (implication: going to church) and go "out there" where Jesus is, where it is dangerous, and show people that God is good by bringing justice where there is oppression. Awesome stuff.

All in all a good day. I was actually expecting to feel more on the outside of things looking in - but I think this year, with the inclusion of Barna, Catalyst is at least trying to throw a bone to people like me: formerly disillusioned Christians who are finding a deeper call to the kingdom of God outside of conventional church.

Looking forward to day two.

Labels: Catalyst, church