{"id":145,"date":"2003-02-08T11:31:08","date_gmt":"2003-02-08T19:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2003\/02\/08\/tony-campolo-john-gallegos-jeff-bills-and-eddie-rentz\/"},"modified":"2003-02-08T11:31:08","modified_gmt":"2003-02-08T19:31:08","slug":"tony-campolo-john-gallegos-jeff-bills-and-eddie-rentz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2003\/02\/08\/tony-campolo-john-gallegos-jeff-bills-and-eddie-rentz","title":{"rendered":"Tony Campolo, John Gallegos, Jeff Bills, and Eddie&nbsp;Rentz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday morning I went to hear Tony Campolo speak at \u2018<a href=\"http:\/\/mppc.org\/mppc_ministries\/adult_ministries\/straight_talk\/straight_talk.jsp\">Straight Talk<\/a>\u2019, a really cool ministry to businesspeople sponsored by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mppc.org\/\">Menlo Park Presbyterian Church<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>He was really funny\u2013I\u2019d always heard that he was a funny guy, but he was REALLY funny. He was also insightful. He contrasted two basic orientations to life (emotional and rational, people and principle, yin and yang, Pentecostalism and Prebyterianism) and talked about how Jesus was able to integrate them&nbsp;both.<\/p>\n<p>Whenever I\u2019m around a world-class speaker I always try to glean some tips. He didn\u2019t do a good job of connecting with members of the audience beforehand (we shared a breakfast table separated by one person and barely exchanged two sentences), although I think some of that may have been due to the structure of the event rather than his proclivity (there really wasn\u2019t much of a chance to talk). He did an excellent job of using humor to make profound points, and was an outstanding storyteller. In fact, his talk was really a series of stories connected by some logical transitions.<\/p>\n<p>He was also outstanding at localizing his message. He had tons of jokes about Presbyterians and Menlo Park and other things his audience would resonate with. I\u2019ve got no doubt he\u2019s given basically the same talk many times before, but it felt fresh and special because of the localizations.<\/p>\n<p>Side note: Tony mentioned that he thinks Pentecostalism is theologically inconsistent. I wish I had been able to talk to him about that\u2026 but duty called.<\/p>\n<p>As soon as the meeting was over, I had to book it up to Woodland to meet with two pastors (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.agts.edu\/\">AGTS<\/a> classmate John Gallegos and Jeff Bills), and then I drove to Sacramento and met with another pastor (Eddie Rentz, the former national youth director for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ag.org\/\">Assemblies of God<\/a>: check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?q=%22Eddie+Rentz%22&amp;btnG=Google+Search&amp;hl=en&amp;lr=&amp;ie=ISO-8859-1&amp;safe=on\">his google<\/a>), and started to drive home just in time to catch the traffic jams.<\/p>\n<p>After returning I visited a student in his dorm room, and then came home around 7:30pm. Twelve hours on the road\u2013not a bad&nbsp;day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tony Campolo and three Assembly of God pastors. No\u2013this isn\u2019t a joke. Why do you&nbsp;ask?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-2l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}