This week I attended to brand new conferences, Cultivate and Story. I can only say the teams in charge of both events did an exceptional job. I was especially happy with Cultivate because it was a format I'd never seen before. It was driven almost completely by conversation – presenters shared for a brief amount of time and the rest of the session was driven my questions and comments from the attendees. I'd say it was a huge success.
I took several pages of notes from both events. Rather than post my notes I decided that I'd take some time next week and process what all of it means. That's probably a more useful exercise and certainly more interesting to read than my random notes.
If you happen to want to know what happened at the events this week, my friend Tim Schraeder (from Park) took and posted some outstanding notes. You can also follow the key points by searching through twitter for the hashtags #cultivate09 and then #story09.
My initial takeaway from both events is that through the modern era the Church has generally increased in communicating the what of faith while sharing the why of faith less effectively. As people have become more overwhelmed with marketing messages and quick access to information our ability as leaders in the church to translate information into story, helping to express the why, is more critical than ever. It brings us to a decision: do we tell the story of faith and why it matters in compelling ways or do we just bury people in more useless junk?