Last week my church hosted the Anglican 1000 conference, a gathering of current and future Anglican church planters in North America. It was a great time of vision and training for the ACNA and their church planting initiatives.
Being a future church planter myself (at least I think I will be) it’s always great to be around innovative church planting leaders. It’s inspiring and motivating! Church planting is a hard work—they often say the hardest work—and also the most rewarding. I’ve always sensed this and therefore have embraced what I believe to be a call to church planting with fear and trembling, along with patience and prayer. We shall see when God opens the door and leads the way for my family and me to enter into this venture. For now I will just hang around church planters, glean good ideas and be inspired by their faith and determination.
Being the host of a conference was a very different experience. My church was busy and the staff I work with had a lot of duties as well as name tags that you would have thought said, “Ask me anything, I have the answers.” Which was awkward for the new guy, only having worked at Christ Church for 5 months now, because there were a lot of questions I didn’t have a clue how to answer. Luckily I know people who know the answer, which is half the battle, right?
One of my duties, which I rather enjoyed, was to be a chauffeur. I was able to drive around a few of the speakers—you can listen to their talks here. I would recommend any of Scot McKnight’s talks and also David Taylor’s talk was amazing. Really, they were all pretty good, Fr. David Roseberry, Mike Breen… all of them! But my primary assignment was driving around Sir Scot McKnight. I was excited about this because the word on the street was that Scot is also a pretzel, a Freeport pretzel. This was my high school mascot; everybody gets a chuckle out of that. And sure enough, Scot McKnight was also a Freeport pretzel. Gave us a lot of good conversation, talking about good old Freeport.
Scot was great! I enjoyed talking with him and picking his brain a bit about blogging, writing, traveling and speaking, as well as theology and ecclesiology kinds of stuff. Always fun to chat with fellows who are far smarter, well read and well traveled than yourself. Scot was very gracious and I really enjoyed chatting with him.
One thing we talked about was blogging. Scot blogs about three times a day and plans out much of his blogging at least one week in advance. WOW! I struggle blogging once a week. But aspiring to write and speak more in the future, I realize how valuable a blogging platform can be. So once again I’m inspired to do a bit more blogging. I know I say this and blog about blogging once every 6-8 months, so here it is again—my hope to blog a bit more. I have about two pages of blog ideas, now I just need to write them and schedule them out.
Here’s to blogging and inspiration.
