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I posted my Christmas 2011 poem here. Check it out.

Anybody out there go to Catalyst 2011 in Atlanta? If so, I would love to hear what happened there and what you took away.

Scott Lees, Executive Pastor at Christ Church in Memphis, Tennessee, agreed to send me his take. It follows:

Why would a 39 year old Executive Pastor from a 50 year old United Methodist Church attend a conference designed for a bunch of urban progressives who are planting new churches in city centers? That’s the question I kept asking myself as I made my way from the hotel to the conference center for Catalyst 2011 in Atlanta, Ga. Since I wasn’t sporting a messenger bad, skinny jeans or a faux-hawk why in the world did I choose to participate in this leadership experience?

First, Catalyst was more than a conference. It was a runway for new ideas and initiatives. How many times do we as leaders get stuck listening to the same people, reading the same authors and executing the same ideas? Sometimes Jesus needs to step into our comfortable temple courts and turnover the table of old paradigms. Listening to leading edge leaders forces me to see the world from a different perspective and the result is a broader imagination for the church that encourages more people to bring their sacrifice of praise to our King.

Next, if Methodists do not engage this next generation of leaders we will miss our own party. Over-and-over again, speakers and musicians articulated the message of social justice as a natural response to personal holiness. You could hear our founder John Wesley’s influence when he said, “you cannot have personal holiness without social holiness and you cannot have social holiness without personal holiness.” Speakers like Blake Mykoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, reminded the audience that we have a responsibility to serve under-resourced in the world because eternally that’s more important then making a profit. Sound familiar? If the Methodist Church does not participate in the conversation, and prepare leaders to reach this urban progressive culture, we will give up our seat at the banquet table to another neo-Calvinist or, worst yet, fail to invite post-Christians to the table who are hungry for the message.

Finally, pastoral leaders need to be reminded of the gospel. We preach it. We teach it. We live it. Sometimes we need to sit and be present so we can simply hear it. Catalyst, and really any Christian conference worth the investment, provides space where we are reminded that we are sinners saved by grace. We are not defined by the numerical growth of our churches, the creativity of our programs or the effectiveness of our leadership. Our righteousness is in Christ and we are successful because we are adopted children of God, period. Nothing we do can add to, or take away from, our true identity in Christ and I was reminded of that truth throughout the week. And I needed to be. You do too.

So next year, consider Catalyst for leadership training. You don’t have to own a pair of skinny jeans to register.

Before you push send on your next email, tweet your next tweet, update your Facebook status, Instagram your next photo, Recommend your next Linked In friend, upload your next video, tag your next picture, Foursquare your next location, post your next blog entry, publish your next opinion, text your next ex, flickr your next find, publish your next angry manifesto, dump drivel on someone’s wall, repost your next Tumblr, comment on your next blog post, like the next entry on your Facebook newsfeed, share the next inappropriate youtube video, (and add what I’m missing in the comments). . . . . .  REMEMBER THESE 3 WORDS:*

INSTANTANEOUS

EVERYWHERE

FOREVER

Perhaps the best wisdom for our online lives is this: when in doubt, don’t.

*The idea of destroying anything online is a mythical pipe dream.

I’m working on a little guidebook to responding to the call of God and wanted to test a line of thought by you with this entry below. I welcome your feedback, push back or back pat in the comments section.

Dedication to devotion is not the goal. Discipline in spiritual practices is not the goal. Abiding does not consist in ratcheting up your “quiet time” a few notches. So what, you ask, is the goal? The goal is the life hid with  Christ in God. If the secret to abiding is not dedication or devotion or discipline then what is it?

Desire.

“One thing I ask of the Lord,” says the Psalmist, “this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple.” Psalm 27:4

Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, famously said, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

Our desires determine both our direction and destination. Yet so much devotional energy gets spent fighting against desire. Certainly, the desires seated deep within our broken human nature lead us in the wrong direction.  Freedom from these broken desires comes not from striving to overcome them via our devotional habits. Doing so leads to a place where our habits stand in the way of our holiness. We become devoted to our devotion.  One may look the part on the outside, while inside the war rages.

We need a reorientation of desire which comes from a total renovation of the heart. This is why Jesus doesn’t spend his time developing strategies of sin management. The repentance he calls for and empowers cuts to the core of our desires and reorients them in such a way that they can be trusted instead of resisted. This is the liberty of the sons and daughters of God. This is what pruning and abiding are all about.

To move forward in responding to the call of God might mean trading in the consistency of your devotion for the constancy of His abiding. It might seem a subtle distinction. In the end, it will make all the difference.

“It is very unlikely that (this) isn’t going to take a while to bottom out.” Alan Greenspan

Can anyone tell me what this means?

Yes, this is the response of one of the smartest guys “in the room” in response to the S&P downgrade of the credit rating of the United States of America.

Adding to the malaise, Tim Geitner, the treasury secretary, has the audacity to basically call the S & P idiots.

When an organizational crisis produces this kind of response from it’s leaders, it doesn’t take rocket science to understand how the crisis happened in the first place.

Where are the clear thinkers?

What would “real” leadership look like in the wake of this mess?

Between March and May, the population  of the Khumbu region at the base of Mt. Everest grows from 40,000 to 700,000.*

The climbing season attracts thousands of climbers. Every year somewhere around 100 people make it to the 29,035 foot summit. People always die in the quest as well.

100 people make the summit to the highest point on the planet. Well over half a million people gather around to help make it happen in one way or other.

It’s the battle of gravity. Every ounce of the Earth’s gravity resists a climber making it to the top. Something about the resistance attracts hundreds of thousands of people to try and help a few achieve escape velocity. (of course, there’s money to be made– but. . .)

We commonly talk about the forces of resistance to high achievement. Maybe the opposite is true.

Or maybe where 1 person goes “all in,” tens of thousands gather around.

Come to the mountain and the world comes to you. True?

What if this is some semblance of the way faith works?

The American Criminal Justice system is built on this stunning premise:

It is better for 99 guilty people to go free than for 1 innocent person to go to prison.

I think that explains the Casey Anthony verdict.

Your take?