Origins Event Highlights (Dan Kimball)

eric posted on July 27, 2010

For a full update on day one of the Origins Event from Dan Kimball, go here.  Here is an excerpt:

“…we headed off to “The Banquet on The Row” – which was part of the pre-Saturday part of Origins for people to go to and be part of. Newsong Church in both LA and Irvine who are part of Origins partnered with the Fred Jordan Mission and Rolling Hills Covenant Church. Dave Gibbons and his team launched Origins with a huge outdoor banquet for the homeless of what is considered “skid row” in Los Angeles. It was a collaborative effort put on with the Fred Jordan Mission.  It was an honor to meet Willie Jordan (Fred Jordan’s wife) and also his son and learn about what this mission has been doing in Los Angeles for the poor and needy for so many years. They had blocked off about 2 city blocks and set up outdoor tables and served a meal, had music, worship, some sharing and I don’t know the exact numbers but it had to be 1,000 people at this banquet….”

For a full description of Origins Day Two from Dan Kimball, go here.  Here is an excerpt:

“There were such great moments, Amena Brown was incredible. Erwin interviewed Blake Mycoskie from Tom’s Shoe’s. The panel Dave Gibbons had and the stories shared were so inspiring with Tara Varga Russell and others doing incredible things. Rick McKinley had great insight on never forgetting all we are doing is as worshipers. I could have listened to Alan and Debra Hirsch for 3 hours. Eric Bryant’s new book “Not Like Me” was released.  It is hard to list everyone here without leaving others out, as it was a blitz of so many ideas and encouragements. Very difficult to get it all in a single day like this and glad next year will be a 3 day event with evenings as part of it too.

For my session which was the third part of the day on “Equip”, I focused on how if we are passionate about activism and creativity for the mission of Jesus… and if we care about justice and serving those in need – that we also need to be very strategic about making new disciples of Jesus. Because if we aren’t, if you play things out in 10 years, 20 years, 50 years – as the current church dies out (and I mean literally dying) and we aren’t seeing new generations of Christians made, then we won’t have as many people out there serving on justice in the name of Jesus. So the church must be “equipping” people for evangelism. But we need to redeem what “evangelism” is. It is not weird, funky, awkward things to do out of guilt. But simply a sharing of life and caring and being invited into the lives of people who then we naturally share the wonderful grace of Jesus is.

Francis of Assisi supposedly said “Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.” I shared how I feel the evangelical church mainly used a lot of words more about the gospel only being about getting to heaven when we die. So we didn’t focus as much as involvement in compassion and action on injustice. But now we focus so much on injustice and action, that we aren’t using words and training for evangelism as much anymore. When you study St. Francis’s life, he did use a lot of words too. And poetry. And preached. So we have to never forget that most of us came to faith in Jesus through the proclamation of words and dialog and talking. But, how we go about that is what we need to reclaim and re-vision as evangelism was turned into primarily a sharing of a reductionist gospel. So we need to re-envision what healthy evangelism is as well as equip the church for it….”