TIME TO BUZZ OFF

Day One of the Buzz Conference here in DC was a huge disappointment. Don't get me wrong, I didn't say the trip was a waste of time, but as I have found at some conferences in the past, the time spent with other church planters has been far more beneficial than the scheduled program.

It was particularly disappointing that what had been advertised as a round table discussion, a forum for theater church senior pastors, actually turned out to be little more than a a talk from conference host and local pastor Mark Batterson on why it's good to do church in a theater and how to do it.

No disrespect to Mark, but I reckon most of us there already worked out that a theater makes a great venue for a church and we really didn't need the nuts and bolts advice like "make everything as mobile as possible for set-up" and "the great thing about movie theaters is you already have a big screen you can use."

I had hoped to be able to have a true forum where ideas could be exchanged among pastors in like situations and where I might have learned a few ways to fine tune what we do. I didn't come here to hear almost exclusively what National Community Church is doing, especially as their set-up is no better than any other theater church I have seen, ours included.

I booked an earlier flight home tomorrow and will cut out of the conference early, but will return encouraged that we seem to be doing things as well as anyone else I know and better than many.

That's not to say there isn't plenty of room for improvement - there certainly is. And we'll be working at that over the next couple of months as we stop looking at our theater as a temporary place while we wait for a building and instead make the very best use we can of it right now.