CAT West 2011

Tuesday night I flew to Orange County/Santa Ana/John Wayne — only in CA can you have three names for one airport — and on Wednesday I spoke to the LABS audience. For a number of years I’ve worried about whether or not evangelicalism can remain a coalition, and I have said over and over that Christianity Today is one of the major, and sometimes I wonder if it is the only, safe space for all voices.

I want to add the Catalyst event as a coalition event. My first Catalyst event was last year at this time, and this second opportunity gave me words for what I experienced there: a culture that breathes a common missional unity. Catalyst makes me think of “faithfulness and creativity.” But this faithfulness and creativity — and the place was filled with energy and experiment and vision — is all set within a common gospel mission. This event may become the singular event that holds the young evangelicals together.

Getting the opportunity to speak at Catalyst is an honor, and this year I developed one chapter in One.Life: Jesus Calls, We Follow. The chapter I worked from is called Imagination.Life, and so I connected our dreams, and the dreams of some of my students — and one of them told me she had “possibility overload” — to the Parables of Jesus. Those parables invite us to imagine a world, a kingdom world, and then send us back into our world to live it out. And I suggested that Jesus’ parable dreams take up our dreams, subvert them at times, and then transform our dreams into kingdom dreams. We probed briefly into the mustard seed, leaven, treasure, pearl and the wheat and weeds.

Always the highlight, and it never lasts long enough for me, is the time with folks I’ve heard about or read or have already met and want to spend more time with — or folks I’ve not yet met. I don’t want to get into listing everyone, so I’ll mention a few: I met Rick McKinley and Adam McHugh (author of the excellent book, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture), and went to dinner with Adam and Mike Goldsworthy (at Long Beach Parkcrest Christian Church) … and saw Brad Lomenick again (thanks brother for all Catalyst is)…and it was great to hang out with Bryan Price (at Mariners) and I will be in contact with Bryan about his high school ministry.

… let me say this again: Catalyst is a coalition event that brings together wonderful people, creative young leaders, and all within a solid gospel commitment.