from NYLC part II

here are some snippets of opinions and conversations and just what I've been doing here in Joplin.

-I only saw Craig once today (see part I) and he probably didn't recognize me, but that's okay. I doubt he was as interested in our 3 hour friendship as I was. I actually wasn't interested, but I just found it funny and thought about it enough to write it down. He probably didn't.

-Worship is being lead by the Robbie Seay (pronounced, "see") Band, and they are pretty good. I am not sure they are very good at leading however, because Robbie sings like a rock star, which is cool, but tough to follow. Sometimes I feel like I am singing the wrong song because his version of any melody is a little different than normal. So I just end up watching the drummer or trying to see what pedals the guitar player is using. Anyways, their sound and vocals remind me a lot of U2 only without the accent and not as hip.

-Mark Driscoll was the first main session speaker, and he was good. His church in Seatle sounds cool too. The average age of the average church attender there is mid-twenties...and it's a church of 3000 people. He also said that over half the congregation is single. Wow, sounds like a church that I would certainly fit in. His message was good, but a little simplified. He just told us that we should have two goals in ministry: 1. make the kids Christians and 2. make them missionaries. He didn't give us much that was practical. Maybe he would have if he'd had 1.5 hours to speak like he gets at his home church. He seemed to be a very opinionated man, and also didn't seem to care much for the emergent/postmodern church movement. One of the first things he said was that, 'there will be people who are going to talk to you about postmodernity and emergent and that kind of stuff but they are wrong and I don't agree with hardly any of it.' Later in a kind of Q&A seminar he referred to Brian McLaren as a heretic. So he did a crappy job of setting the stage for the rest of the week considering that today we're hearing from Dan Kimball and tomorrow Brian McLaren. Well, I am excited anyways.

-I went to this pizza place yesterday called woody's woodstove pizza. When we were given our conference notebooks there was a list of restaurants inside. The restaurants were rated and only 3 places were given the highest 4 star rating, and one of them was Woody's. So I drove to this place, and it was a dive but the pizza was awesome. They cook it a huge wood burning stove. They had a lunch buffet so when I was getting to the point where I thought I could eat maybe 2 more slices, they brought out what they called 'greek' pizza. It had some kind of white sauce, blue cheese, mozerella, garlic, spinich, and a few other unidentifiables on it. It was great...at least the first piece. The second was good, but way too much garlic and it kicked my butt. On my way back to the conference, my breath was so bad that I was offending myself and my stomach was crying out in horror, so I opted to head back to my hotel and chugged some pepto bismol for comfort. Anyways, i ended up missing one of the seminars, but it was worth it.

-last night, I got a chance to chat with Rondel Ramsey. He's the youth ministry prof. at LCC and more than that, he was my youth minister from 1st to 12th grade, and my next door neighbor. So we go way back. I asked him if he'd like to go get a coffee and he said he wasn't old enough to drink coffee and so we went to Steak n Shake and had cokes and chili. Good converstation especially since I haven't really talked with many people since I got here. I told him the story about Adam and the Rhode's thank you notes, and the one addressed to the dog. He completely lost it and had to just stop his vehicle and finish laughing before running us off the road. We had a good time.