Main Themes
1.    Missional Living. It seems that most of the churches represented are striving hard to have some type of “missional engagement” in their city. There are obvious things like adopting schools, etc. but there is also an overarching paradigm of moving away from purely attractional to missional models.
2.    Church planting and multisite. Most of the larger churches are engaged in both multisite and church planting efforts. Many have even started or are partnering with church planting networks.
3.    Gospel centered preaching. There seemed to be a consistent theme of preaching and teaching the gospel to congregants and in interactions with other pastors. The speakers often did a good job reminding people about justification but also talking about how the gospel plays out in sanctification. There was much talk about “gospel centered Christianity or living” and pastors were continually reminded to not seek righteousness from outside sources, as well as the dangers of doing so. I was encouraged to see some real theological depth at a LN event.
4.    Favorite talk was by Reggie Mcneal he spoke and also did a dinner where he fielded questions. I felt like he did a good job painting a picture of where the culture is and where the church could go as a result.
5.    All Conference notes http://www.innovation3gathering.com/downloads/

Main Session 1 – Risk and Failure
Pete Brisco
Honest about how the older crowd left Bentree for Stonebriar and the younger crowd left for The Village and how the made him question his motives for ministry.
Success is to speak the gospel in spite of opposition.
Tim Keller
“Functionally we determine or worth by ministry success which is against the gospel.”
Jacobs life is a quest of blessing from others and finally gets it from God.
“My breath of life was hearing people say Pastor you changed my life…”
We have to seek after the blessing but it the person of Christ.
“You Can’t be compassionate until you are wounded.” “We need to be pinned by God.”

Stacy Spencer
Shared lots of cool stories about engagement around the area of their church and the favor they have in their city.
In regards to the shift to a campus and being established “When we didn’t have anything we got out on the streets.”“We became maintenance not mission driven”

Craig Groshel.
Peter had tons of failure and was chosen by God to preach at Pentecost.
“Try, fail, learn, adjust”
Antidote for failure is small doses of failure.
1.    Create Culture where is it ok to fail.
2.    Tell people you will fail.
3.    Don’t undervalue failure
4.    Debrief afterwards.
Story of large mega church that started out taking lots of risks and recently told him “We are too big now to fail.” Willow?

Mark Driscol
How we handle failure ultimately reveals our functional practice of the gospel. Do successes or failures:
1.    Affect how close you feel to God?
2.    Cause you to feel more or less holy?
3.    Do they alter how you see and understand God? His existence?
If we are off then we become risk adverse or risk addicted. We all have our own proclivity. We try to horde our righteousness or gain more of it.
“Religious repentance” If I say I am sorry he will give me more.
Only in America do we say that we fail so that we can win. God may just have you fail.

Church Planting Breakout

Ricky Bradshaw (Street Talk, Houston)
Started 96 churches out of his church. Hip Hop churches, in Airport prayer chapels that are located before security areas, neighborhood clubhouses, etc.

Brian Boyle (Westridge Church, Dallas GA)
Has started Church planting school and planted 28 churches. Wants to get to 10 per year. Churches need.
1.    Clear God Given Vision
2.    Strong financial commitment
3.    Complete buy in by all leadership of the church.
4.    Clear Understanding of the cost.
5.    Clear understanding of staff expectations (they are to help church planters as much as possible)

Tim Hawks (Hill Country Bible Chruch)
*”You must own the lostness of your city”
I love their vision to plant church and partner with other so that everyone in Austin hears the gospel continually.
Moved away from hiving off sections of the church because these people would simply attend another location and not be missional. They now send 10 missional families who break all ties with the church and their Christian friends. They need to report 3 contacts a week with lost people.
This starts the dna of the church with missional people and recent converts who don’t know any better than to share their faith.
Church starts when you have a group of 50 people that will show up to any event you do.
Success and movement breeds success and movement. It took 7-8 years to solidify the movement.
John Harrington director of church planting. Residency program on jump drive.

Dinner with Reggie McNeal

3 things leading to missional renaissance in our culture that the church can leverage.
1.    Rise of the altruism economy.  Americans want to help and serve and are the most generous nation on the planet.  (The church received about 100 billion dollars last year – what in the world did we do with it?)
2.    Desire for Personal growth.  People will sign up for opportunities to grow and learn (This plays into WM’s strengths of equipping and all things recovery. Could we further brand ourselves in the city as the place to be trained for life and get healing? What other “recovery niches” could we explore. What other things does our city need “training and equipping” in?)
3.    Search for spiritual vitality. Americans are wildly spiritual. (What could WM offer Dallas that would immediately resonate with people that are devouring the Eckhart Tolle and the like?)

3 Proper Responses
1.    Shift from internal to external focus in ministry.
•    “Americans have looked at the kingdom of God through church lenses.  Instead, we should be looking at the church through kingdom lenses”
•    Jesus didn’t say, “I’ve come to give you church and give it to you more abundantly.”
2.    Shift from program development to people development. Without this shift you add community service onto people’s already busy lives and burn them out even quicker.
3.    Shift from church based leadership to apostolic leadership.  We normally train people who lose their heart in the black hole of the church leadership system. Apostolic leaders led movements.
•    Stark-  Rise of Christianity. 3rd Century Christians fasted for 3 days and week and gave money to the poor, went into places to care for the sick when others were fleeing the cities, etc.
•    In the future established churches will help with theological guardrails but new churches and pastors will become less administrative, life coaches, and will support raisers.
•    Kids Hope helps churches enter into relationships with local schools for mentoring, etc.

Neil Cole
My small group time…..
1.    Discuss what we read in the 35 chapters we read from the same book. If someone doesn’t complete it we assume God doesn’t want us to move on and we stay in the same book the next week.
2.    Ask accountability questions
3.    Pray for the lost that we are building relationships with.

Main Session 2 – Shaping The Culture
Matt Chandler
Admonitions from 1 Tim 4. 7 participles in the passage
1.    Get you doctrine straight
2.    Avoid myths/train in Godliness
3.    Don’t be timid
4.    Let no one despise you.
5.    Scriptures are sufficient
6.    Don’t neglect the gift – remember the call
7.    Be watchful – progressive sanctification is for pastors to.

Main Session 3 – The Dangerous Church

Ed Stetzer
-Find his marks of a biblical church
Dangerous church in the future will:
1.    Have seized the current economic opportunity
2.    Addressed Sexual brokenness in our society
3.    Wrestled with gender inclusion
4.    Navigated post seeker environment.
5.    Regained confidence in the gospel
6.    Clarified what is means to be an evangelical
7.    Rethought discipleship
8.    Worked through denominational catharsis
9.    Found networking strategies without giving up distinctive.

Nancy Ortberg
People change when they are on a quest or in crisis
Way to kill fear is to increase curiosity
Compromise – Lencioni – mutually agreed upon mediocrity
Check out http://monvee.com – great new tool for discipleship/spiritual growth

Church Planting/Multisite Breakout

Greg Surratt
*Lead planter must have gift of teaching
*Campus pastor communicates out of his leadership gift.
Went multisite bc city denied their building permits for a 4k seat auditorium.
“Always trust your gut feelings, unless you are wrong a lot.”
He talked a lot about how he was very involved in his church planting network initially but now when he shows up he agitates everyone so he leaves them to do their own thing.
His church planting movement - Association of related churches. http://www.relatedchurches.com/

Dave Ferguson
Churches grow 23x faster in their first 10 years
Community Christians Church planting network http://www.newthing.org/

Mark Driscol
Goal is 300k. 50k in Seattle and 250k in a29 churches (in next 10 years?) “Right now it looks like we are on track and will hit our goal.”
Each church commits 10% of funds to church planting
Good discussion on how he has kept Mars Hill, a29, and resurgence separate so as to not neglect the mission of each.
“Once you get to more than 7 plants you need a network”
Lots of discussion about the importance of assessing church planters

Main Session 4 – Missional Communities

Dino Rizzo
“Our fruit hangs on other people’s trees”

Matt Carter
Our small groups were selfish dysfunctional places and when they moved to missional engagements all of that fixed itself.