Long Time No See--NACC

Sorry for my blog-absence. Sometimes I just don't feel like it. But here are some pictures from the North American Christian Convention in Louisville. The NACC is a yearly event that helps Christian Churches stay (get?) connected to one another.

The NACC gets a fair amount of bad press for its ... its ... convention-ness (I think that's the right word). I quit being hyper-critical of it a few years back when I realized that I enjoyed catching up with folks I hadn't seen in a while and that EVERY thing didn't have to be to my liking.

The main sessions look like this:

The music is pretty loud and drifts from worship into concert. That bugs me as much as anything else. When the lead singer starts holding out notes and bouncing them in R&B fashion, I kind of want to tell him to get a day-job. Be a "performer" or worship leader; you can't be both at the same time. Okay ... enough of the whiney complaining. I don't want to lead that kind of blog.

Max Lucado preached the final session on Friday morning and then our own Ben Cachiaras (senior minister at Mountain Christian and former Grandview minister) received the gavel as next year's president of the NACC. The big event will be in Indy. Check it out if you can.

In the below picture you see a street preacher preaching the gospel to Christians walking from the convention to lunch. I wanted to tell him that he was preaching to the choir ... then I realized that's what some of the main convention speakers were doing, too.

This is our view from our hotel room.Here you see Rob Castens and Ethan Magness (Ethan is our former youth minister) as they explain the Milligan College/Mountain Christian partnership for internships. Very well done. Ethan is doing good work up there (between Mountain Christian Church in Joppa, and First Christian Church in Johnson City, it's amazing we have any staff left at Grandview).

The Kentucky Visitors' Center was almost in the lobby of our hotel. I couldn't help but get a picture with the Colonel.
This interesting photo is one I took while Dr. Hull was introducing me as the speaker at the Emmanuel breakfast. I like how it came out!

This is a picture I took as the breakfast was starting. Everyone was digging into their "support Emmanuel" breakfast.

My talk went fine. I enjoyed being asked to do it.

Here is our own Bill Greer, preparing to lead his workshop. I paid a guy in the audience $10 to ask, "Why do you drive an SUV?" incessantly until the session was over. It was the best $10 I ever spent!