Willow Creek

I'm at Willow for a couple of days with 20+ junior high pastors from around the midwest. It's been pretty amazing. Scott and Jason are hosting and doing a superb job. I love their humility. It's pretty incredible.

We started out yesterday by getting to know each other, sharing info but no ministry numbers (I like that). We ended the first night at New Community with Dr. B. I absolutely loved how Bill Hybels intro'ed his friend. It was "a moment". Dr. B talked about community and oneness. Two random points I wrote down.
1. God's first command to man - go and multiply.
Jesus last command to man - go and multiply.
Church is a human invention if it has no community.
2. It is better for there to be no lighthouse than a lighthouse with no light. Wow.

Today we finished the introductions and decided on three topics to discuss.

The first one, "spiritual formation", was pretty deep - kinda of made my head hurt...in a good way. I came away with more conviction than ever to figure out some quantitative measures - not to determine our success, but our progress. The difficult part will be to determine what the right measurements will be. I need to think about this a whole lot more.

The second topic was on ministering to parents. I got some great ideas and a renewed passion to invest in parents more - both our churched and our unchurched. Good stuff.

We ended tonight at GameWorks were I got lucky and beat a couple of guys in basketball...and then I got smoked.