Finally, a long overdue post (one of several, it seems) on my trip to Atlanta last week for the Catalyst conference.

Eight of us from First Church of Christ piled into a van and hit the road for Atlanta last Wednesday afternoon. The trip down went by very quickly, due to good conversations and the comedy of Brian Regan. We reached our destination after midnight, only to find that the guys didn’t quite have a destination after all. Somehow, one of our rooms at the hotel had been canceled, which left only one room for the eight of us which was not going to work. With 12,000 people in town for the conference, lodging was tight and most hotels, including the one at which we were originally booked, did not have any vacancies, so the guys went on a search for a place to stay. We found a nearby Motel 6 with plenty of vacancies (surprise, surprise) and crashed there (but we did hit the breakfast buffet at the other hotel).

The theme for this year’s conference was Together. Thursday was the first official day of the conference and first up, after the intro and music, was Andy Stanley, one of the founders of Catalyst (this was the 9th year of the conference). Stanley talked about moral authority, referencing Nehemiah chapter 5 and drawing an interesting parallel between the “bailout” Nehemiah did for the Israelites and our current financial situation. What goes around, comes around, it seems… As Solomon states in Ecclesiastes: “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

Stanley spoke further on the alignment between our creeds and deeds, that it takes a long time to gain moral authority, but only a second to lose it. He mentioned three areas of application for this authority:

• Forgiveness (we have been forgiven, so we should be the first to forgive others)
• Family (family should be a priority)
• Finances (give, save, live on the rest)

The second speaker was William Paul Young, author of The Shack. For those of you who have heard of the book, you may be familiar with the controversy surrounding it. Luckily, I was only a few pages from finishing it, so I was aware of the storyline and had previously heard plenty about the controversy. Young didn’t give a talk, per se, but was instead interviewed by Ernie Johnson, a sportscaster on TNT. Looking back, I can see why the organizers choose to go this route, as Young wasn’t much of a speaker. He was awkward at the start of the interview, but got more comfortable as the interview went on, even becoming passionate and emotional when prompted with certain questions. I might write more about the book in specific at a later time, but the interview was my least favorite session at Catalyst. It didn’t have anything to do with leadership or the theme of the conference, but instead was a promotion of the book and a rebuttal to the critics. I did enjoy hearing about his background and reasons for writing the book, as it helped me better understand the context and writing style.

My disappointment quickly disappeared with the next speaker, Jim Collins. Collins, author of Good to Great, Built to Last and a number of other books, was one of the speakers to which I was most looking forward and ended up being by far my favorite of the conference. I scribbled PAGES of notes and took away so much from what he said that I’m hesitant to even start writing about his talk because it will cause this post to be forever long. I will mention one of the things I took away from his talk but the rest might be grounds for a completely separate post… Collins talked about the infinite amount of work to needs to be done in a finite amount of time (there are still only 24 hours in the day – revelation!) and that many of us have to-do lists that keep filling up – but where’s the stop-doing list? He went on to say this was a lack of discipline and we have to figure out what gets in the way, what is not at the intersection of our passions, what we do best and what drives the resource engine.

At this point, we broke for lunch, so I’m break the post here as well. Part 2, with the second half of the day, will hopefully come shortly.

Pictures from the conference and trip are up in the Gallery.

Related posts:

1. Catalyst Recap – Part 4
2. Catalyst Recap – Part 3
3. Catalyst
4. Catalyst Recap – Part 2
5. Christmas Recap