Tony Dungy gave a real nice talk. He wasn't very ... umm ... powerful, I guess. What I mean is that he didn't fit my usual idea of the screaming, raving football coach but was very soft-spoken. He had some good things to say, including the very encouraging fact that he was doing a study of Romans with his coaching staff.

Let's see, what's another event I didn't write about? Wednesday night I attended something called Soul Cravings. The program began with three songs by Natalie Grant -- one of which I went right home to buy on iTunes until I realized it's from her new album which doesn't yet have a release date. Drats!

Next, Erwin McManus was invited by CBA to give us a worship experience. He was introduced as the pastor and 'cultural architect' of Mosaic in Los Angeles, and from my experience in SoCal...he was very LA. He talked about all our souls having cravings and that Adam needed Eve in the garden when he was in perfect relationship to God, so that proved we had valid emotional needs outside God...and that's about all I was able to understand. He would talk for a few minutes, then the drama team he'd brought with him from Mosaic would get up and do some sort of interpretive dance or skit, then he'd talk again, then another skit.

The first interpretive dance had the team dressed in mechanic outfits with metal, robotic looking facemasks on. They danced around for about ten minutes and then Erwin got up and said 'did you get the nuance of that?" and I was like "no."

Actually, during that entire dance I felt about a million years old because I just knew it was deeply touching some young punk. ;) I got the gist of the other dances <I think>, but throughout the whole hour I kept thinking to myself -- what's the point? I tried desperately to have an open mind, enter in and try to figure out what God wanted to show me. It didn't help that he spoke in that whispering tone that implies I'm conveying something really important and emotional. It's a personal thing, but that tone for more than a sentence or two drives me up a wall.

However, as I said, I'm sure that it was deeply moving to someone and I realize I'm squarely outside their target demographic -- if that type of program brings the younger generation into worship, I say more power to them. Of course, that focus on experience brings up a topic that's bothered me for a couple years, ever since a youth worker at my church told me they tried to give kids personal experiences because those couldn't be challenged when kids went off to college. He meant that they focused on creating experiences as opposed to doing something like apologetics training. I completely disagreed. To me, the personal experience is too susceptible to relativism and gives you no sturdy foundation when speaking with non-believers. It falls more into the 'if that works for you, great' line of thinking.

But I digress.

I felt a little better when I walked into the next room after the program ended, sat down at a table and the first words out of the mouth of one of the ladies was "did you guys understand that?" ;)

The next event was a show put on by Bananas Comedy. Apparently that was more appropriate to my intellectual level because I laughed through the whole thing, including the set of the guy whose entire shtick was him talking to a series of puppets. :p