Francis Chan @ RightNow Conference, pt. 3

Friday Night, Nov. 6, 9:45 pm

This was Francis Chan's final session with us @ RightNow. It was late Friday night and I had been awake for almost 15 hours at that point, much of that time spent in sessions. My brain was mostly fried at this point and several hours earlier a pain had begun in my left shoulder and had worked its way through my neck into the back of my head, but still God spoke.

Chan began this talk with a statement that went kind of like this: We're not worried about living; we're worried about our standard of living.

Francis Chan is a gifted communicator, but is also a best-selling author. When the profits from his first book began to come in, he and his wife decided to allocate that money to a specific charity. He said he was confronted with well-wishers who told him he should save some of the money for an emergency. His question to us was, "What qualifies as an emergency?" Is it only an emergency if it applies to me? Does Darfur not constitute an emergency? Does the AIDS pandemic not apply in this situation? Is the fact that there are 138,000,000 orphans in the world not sound like an emergency?

Why are we so concerned with self? Why do we hang on to money simply to die and pass it on to others, who will then die and pass it on to others?

This is not to say that we should all liquidate our assets and run out to the nearest United Way advocate. What it does mean is that we should at the very least be thoughtful with what we've been given, to be good stewards of the blessings we've received.

He went on to discuss our methods of preaching and teaching to the church. We who have a different perspective on the way ministry should be done must be more thoughtful about how we approach change. I am certainly guilty of this myself. I want things to happen my way, right now. Perhaps this is not the way it's supposed to happen.

Chan made this statement: "For so many years we've spent our lives trying to move the church along by our own power. The church in scripture, though, moved itself because of the power of the Spirit." His point is this, if we will focus on the Spirit, on following Jesus, the church (us) will become more like Jesus. This means our leadership should honestly be seeking the leadership of the Spirit, but it doesn't mean that we as members of the Body shouldn't begin ourselves to see life this way. We can lead by simply following Jesus. Instead of trying to use our own power, shouldn't we simply spend more time in prayer, more time in scripture, more time seeking God himself? We can't create movement. Movement comes from God when we humbly seek Him.

Everything comes through knowing Jesus. Scripture says everything we need for life and godliness is freely given to us through the divine power of God. We are divinely prepared. Perhaps if we feel like we don't have enough, we haven't spent enough time with the Father.

This post seems a bit disjointed to me. Perhaps that's a result of my being zombie-like during this session that night, not able to take adequate notes. I'm sure my notes made sense to me at the time, but this is the best I could get out of them today.