Live from the ACU Lectureship

Yesterday I drove across not-so-dusty-because-we've-had-rain-this-year West Texas. All the way from Amarillo to Abilene. (There's got to be a country song in there somewhere, but I think it's already been written).

Anyway, I got to the campus of ACU just in time to hear the opening speech. You can read the story from the Abilene News-Reporter here. Jerry Taylor's sermon on "What Does the Lord Require?" really was excellent.

Afterwards I went to "Gospel and Culture Coffee House" session on "Dirty Little Secret: The PostSecret Phenomenon." Have you heard about PostSecret? The session gave some basic information about this extremely-popular (and powerful) site. Towards the end, the presenters raised questions like,

What does PostSecret teach us about the therapeutic value of revealing secrets?

And what does this huge phenomenon say about the importance of confession in the church?

Today, I went to a morning class on "Telling a Better Story," taught by John Siburt. At 11:00 I got to experience a fantastic keynote speech by Fred Asare, a Christian minister (of the Word and to the poor) from Accra, Ghana. I haven't heard anything so moving in such a long time.

At lunchtime, I went to the Leaven Journal Luncheon. There were eleven for Leaven (just one of the jokes the group came up with). I was happy to meet or meet again the folks who were there. But I was disappointed that a meeting about a common interest and the future one of our better print journals was so poorly attended. What's happening to serial publications among the Churches of Christ? Do people simply not read religious magazines anymore? Is this a result of the demise of the strong doctrinal consensus that used to characterize the Churches of Christ?

I bet a lot of folks will turn out to hear Landon Saunders tonight. He's speaking on Micah 3:1-12, "Night Without Vision."