36 Hours

Sat­ur­day morn­ing we were up ear­ly to go hear Doug Fields and Bo Bash­ers talk about youth min­istry at an event spon­sored by the Church Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Net­work. It was great–CCN does these simul­casts from the Bay Area and they want a live stu­dio audi­ence. If you show up, you get in for free! There were prob­a­bly twen­ty peo­ple in the audi­ence.

It was inter­est­ing to see how well Doug worked the audi­ence. He’s a real mas­ter at con­nect­ing with peo­ple. Before the satel­lite broad­cast began he learned most every­one’s name, where the lead youth pas­tors were sit­ting, and made small talk with sev­er­al peo­ple. He remem­bered names and called on peo­ple direct­ly dur­ing his teach­ing. I was chal­lenged to get bet­ter at that.

Side note: I don’t think Doug real­ly liked me. He did­n’t dis­like me, either. It was just a weird vibe. Maybe it’s because I was­n’t dressed like a youth pas­tor; I mean, my shirt had but­tons and every­thing! It might also have been relat­ed to the fact that when Paula and I showed up one of the direc­tors asked us to sit in the cen­ter of the front row because every­one else was hang­ing back. His first impres­sion of us walk­ing out was prob­a­bly that we were some sort of weird groupies: we were dressed up and sit­ting in the cen­ter of the front row. And then we gave him weird respons­es: he asked all the youth pas­tors to raise their hands (and we did­n’t) and then he asked all the oth­er church staff to raise their hands (we did­n’t). I think we con­fused him.

Still, it was great mate­r­i­al.

After that we drove up to Tehama, CA. It’s way north, and pret­ty remote. We were to speak at the local Assem­bly of God church Sun­day morn­ing, so the pas­tor put us up in a hotel overnight.

I have to say that Tehama AG has the nicest church build­ing that we’ve been in so far. It’s the old­est AG church struc­ture in Amer­i­ca (built back in the 1800s) and it’s the old­est church in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Sim­ply gor­geous.

After the morn­ing ser­vice we drove down to Cuper­ti­no to speak at Abun­dant Life Assem­bly of God’s mis­sions ban­quet. That was fun.

Then we came home. It was a long week­end (with over 500 miles on the car), but it was great!