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From Urbana…another quick post

Written by Mark Van Steenwyk : December 31, 2006

I’m tired and ready to go home. I miss my wife and feel pretty fried out. Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be flying back to Minneapolis, so this will be my last post from Urbana.
I don’t want to give you a play by play of the last two days, so here are just the highlights:

Biblical Seminary has a booth here. It was exciting to hear about how they are trying to reimagine seminary education around missional ideas. Most folks within the emerging church or missional movement recognize that seminary education needs to change. Few are trying to change. I thank God for Biblical Seminary’s approach and hope they succeed.
I was unable to go to the track offered by Shane Claiborne yesterday…the room was packed and a line was forming outside. I realized that if I got a seat it meant that someone else wouldn’t, so I decided to skip it. I was hoping to not only hear what he had to say, but to introduce myself to him. There really aren’t that many neo-monastic communities around, so it would be good to be networked a bit.

Once again, InterVarsity impresses me with their open-handedness. They’ve given a good deal of stage time to World Vision. Two nights ago the emphasis was on the aids crisis in Africa. We heard from a world vision spokesman, Princess Zulu, and Bono (via a satellite feed). It is exciting to see God’s people take a proactive role on something so important (for a change).

Rick Warren spoke last night. He shared briefly from his P.E.A.C.E. plan. I have some issues with a lot of what Rick Warren has written in the past, but I am truly glad that he has made this most recent shift in his ministry focus. I hope that other suburban pastors jump on this bandwagon.

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Comments

One Response to “From Urbana…another quick post”

  1. Ann on January 10th, 2007 9:51 pm

    Yeah, I agree about InterVarsity’s openness to promoting other organizations other than their own (I think that’s what you mean).

    InterVarsity began Urbana missions convention even before they had their own missions programs. Nice!

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