ICYMI Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
The Catalyst Conference has been around for about 20 years now. It’s a leadership conference primarily targeted at church leaders. I had never been (or heard of it for that matter) when I was invited by my church’s Senior Pastor Jim Matthews. 
All expenses paid. Which was nice, because at the time I had gone back to school and was a work study and my wife was also going to school full time and working in Americorps. Money was not something we had a lot of. I told Melissa at lunch that I was asked to go and she didn’t say much then besides that I should. That night, however, after I had been my typical depressed jerk all afternoon, (that I had been for too long) she did everything but give me an ultimatum to go and demanded I start to pull it together. I did not want to go. I figured it would be a bunch of old white dudes preaching and quartet singing, which in my defense was pretty much the only kind of church I ever knew. It was the exact opposite of that.
That Wednesday night we departed for Atlanta in the church van. Me and 7 other guys. I instantly regretted going when the discussion turned to politics, and I realized I was very much in the minority in the van on my views. I just remember sitting there fairly quietly on the way there. Thursday morning the conference started with a band doing worship I had never heard, but it was phenomenal. The group was the Steve Fee Band, from North Point Church, which of course I know now but I didn’t then. The first speaker that morning was some guy I had never heard of named Andy Stanley. I’ve been doing the church thing since that day, so I have listened to a lot of communicators and sermons and talks, etc. over the last 15 years but for me, there is no one better than Andy Stanley. His God-given ability to tell a bible story you’ve heard 100 times seem like the first time is just unsurpassed. He talked about integrity, and I had literally never heard anyone like him in “church” before.
Catalyst managed to do something for me that church had not the first 27 years of my life; make me lean in. And my guard went down. And then right after lunch, a guy named Donald Miller spoke, and my life hasn’t been the same since.
The one and only Donald Miller
Donald Miller is the author of multiple books, his best known and perhaps most controversial is “Blue Like Jazz” which came out back in 2003. That day I had no idea who the guy was. I looked all over the internet for a video of this talk since now it had been almost 15 years ago, but alas I found none. His argument was essentially that part of the problem with Western Christianity was that we have spent the last 100 years building a culture around people that just validate our opinions. And then he talked about an illustration his Pastor did at his church one day. Miller said his Pastor wrote “City Bus” on a marker board and asked the people in his church to say what adjectives they thought of when they thought of the city bus. The responses were predictable; smelly, dirty, loud, a hassle, etc. When they were done with all these adjectives that were almost entirely negative the Pastor erased the words “City Bus,” and its place wrote the words “Other People.” That morning I leaned it, that moment I took the punch God had set me up for square on the chin.
Miller went on to warn the 10,000 Christian leaders attendance that we were shutting off other people and if we didn’t reach out and listen instead of being obsessed with “telling” we were heading for…well EXACTLY where we are now as a culture. And he talked at length about how we’ve made the world all about us. We love me some me. One of my favorite lines I’ll always remember from his talk is that he said, “If we don’t get cheap crap quick, we are frustrated.” He talked about learning to see the world from other’s point of views, and he closed with this thought, “Life is not about me. It’s not about us. It’s about God.” As he prayed to close, his session tears welled up in me because I remembered the first line of a book my Dad loved, The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. The first line is “It’s not about you.” My Dad loved that line, he quoted it. And he lived it out.
I went into the bathroom stall at the Gwinnett Area, and I sobbed, and I repented. Because I had made it ALL about me. I had not dealt with my anger and pain and resentment and grief, and I had projected that all over the people who didn’t deserve it.
Not the actual stall
And in that stall, I directed it all at God, and he took it, and there was nothing but an enormous weight lifted and this feeling of love. In that bathroom stall, for the first time really, I really gave my life to God. And as I pulled myself together and went back to my seat trying to act like nothing happened, that’s when I heard it.
“The harvest is plenty, but the workers are few. Will you be my worker?”
Crap. Not this again.
TO BE CONTINUED
Two Time Seminary Dropout 