I spent the last three days of last week in Chicago, at Willow's Small Groups conference. There were five keynote speakers, and three of them were mediocre at best. But the other two...well, they were Donald Miller and Erwin McManus. And that was fine by me. One of my favorite thoughts from Erwin is the fact that we shouldn't be trying to get people into church, get them into our programs, etc. What we really should be trying to do is give people life. This was my favorite quote from Miller: "Sometimes God says to me, 'You make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I'll run the cosmos.'" Both men said things I needed to hear and things that reminded me of my vision for small groups ministry. I truly long for BCN to experience authentic, genuine, biblical community. It's going to be tough.

Jason went along on the trip with me, which was a lot of fun. He reads this, so I'm really just kissing up to him, but it was great spending some time with him and getting to know him a little better.

I recommend reading this article, which was published in Time magazine a couple weeks ago. Dave B. linked an article on his blog which alluded to this article. I concur with his analysis. Jason's message yesterday in EPIC was on materialism, and it included the scary quote from Terrell Owens' publicist last week in the wake of his pseudo-suicide attempt: "Terrell has twenty five million reasons for living." Wow.

There's also something interesting happening on October 15. We're looking into the possibility of organizing a Dayton gathering here at BCN that day. There are two gatherings scheduled in Ohio, one in Cincinnati and one in Columbus. An interesting method of going after a worthy cause, to be sure.

And the focus of Nazarene Compassionate Ministry Magazine's last issue was social justice. It contains some interesting stuff. You can subscrube to this magazine (I think it's free) here.

And the Cardinals ended up making the postseason after all. Baseball is a great game of hope. And hope is a good thing...

Hope things are going well for all of you. Really interesting reading today at James', Corbin's, Brandon's, and the Whartons' blogs, all linked to the right, not to mention some great fun pictures of my sister and her husband (notice the evil eyebrow look!) at her blog. Peace to all...