It's Saturday night and I am home working on my message for tomorrow. We are working through Ephesians and cover 1:7-14 tomorrow. I am taking a break from reviewing to share a little update from the last couple days.

First, let me say that the National Outreach Convention in San Diego was, as usual, well done and challenging.

It inspired me to write my Catalyst Monthly article on the need for "change" movements to work to convert people to Christ, not just to another (albeit perhaps important) agenda. If I publish it as written, I anticipate complaint mail from emerging, reformed, Baptist, contemporary church, charismatic, denominational, and missional people (except the ones in those groups who are actually reaching lost people-- they will forward it to those who are not which will then generate more mail.)

But, that is OK. I will probably tone it down a bit. But, honestly, I am tired of hearing about everything but evangelism from some movements. Or, when I do hear about evangelism, it is attacking, mocking, or criticizing how others do evangelism. So, bring it on. Send the mail. If saying that we need more converts makes people mad, I say, "Let's get 'em mad!" I am mad that people are going to hell.

Rant over...

Anyway, here are my presentations and other bits of info from the conference yesterday. From my church planting session early yesterday, I promised I would post all the research I cited. Well, you can find it here. Everything I mentioned (and much more) is there.

During my afternoon session, "Learning and Discerning from America's Largest and Fastest Growing Churches," I referenced this article about how we can learn from each other. And, here is the PowerPoint I used. Feel free to steal it and pretend you came up with it.

Just before Francis Chan spoke in the final session, they showed a couple of videos. I told some folks I would post them here. Unfortunately, I can't find the one for the Compelled By Love small group study (sorry), but I do have the one from Sent: Living the Missional Nature of the Church. You can see the video here:

By the way, if you want to follow along with all the videos from Sent (there are several more coming), you can do so by adding this widget to your blog (it is already on the right sidebar on this blog). The code to embed is part of the widget and it will automatically update with the new videos as the Threads Media people load them. The first of our Ed-vs-Al videos are already posted here. I promise you will enjoy the Al videos. It is funny how the name "Al" comes up in so many missional and theological debates, so you can expect to hear more.

You can follow Al on Twitter here and participate with the widget here:

Grab the Embed Code

Thanks for saying hello at the NOC. I hope it encouraged you to reach more people for Christ. It encouraged and challenged me.

Gotta' get back to working on my message now!