I recently started doing “Conference Notebooks” as a simple way to compile notes from each conference I attended in PDF format. And as a Christmas gift to you, I have compiled some of the notes from key conferences I attended this year and am pleased to share my 2011 Conference Notebook with you.

My 2011 Conference Notebook includes notes from presentations at Catalyst West, ECHO Church Media Conference, Willow Creek Association Global Leadership Summit, STORY, Catalyst Atlanta and Catalyst One Day. Speakers featured include:

• Andy Stanley
• Dave Ramsey
• Dr John M Perkins
• Christine Caine
• @Jack
• Eugene Peterson
• Seth Godin
• Scott Belsky
• Steven Furtick
• Jon Acuff
• Matt Chandler
• Blaine Hogan
• Bill Hybels
• Andy Crouch
• Patrick Lencioni
• Erwin McManus
• Ed Dobson
• Ann Voskamp
• Jim Collins
• Joel Houston
• Blake Mycoskie
• Mark Driscoll
• Craig Groeschel
• …and more!

My friend Chad Jarnagin shared the idea for this gathering with me late this summer and I’m stoked to see  it come together. Unlike your typical conference or even “un-conference” events that are happening, Luminous is going to be “an experience and movement designed to facilitate a sacred encounter with the Artist of the universe.”

I’m thrilled to attend the event and have the honor of being a presenter there, too.

If you are looking to gather with likeminded creatives, definitely add Luminous to your radar [along with other great conferences like STORY and the ECHO Church Media Conference!].

Here’s more info on Luminous:

Our vision is to see a resurrection of creativity in the lives of those who attend as well as the churches and organizations they serve. The keynote sessions & workshops will provide inspiration and revelation in a creative and encouraging environment for creative arts & communication leaders around the USA, UK, Canada, and other countries.

Anyone from a variety of creative arts, communications, and ministries are invited to attend to be inspired and encouraged at Luminous. There will be artists, communicators, filmmakers, writers, musicians, designers, and many others in attendance; the young, the seasoned, and the aspiring are all welcomed.

2012 Keynotes

• Ian Morgan Cron - Episcopal priest and acclaimed author of “Chasing Francis” and “Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me”
• Blaine Hogan - Artist, actor, writer, producer, Creative Director at Willow Creek Community Church.
• More to be announced soon!

Musical Artists

• All Sons & Daughters – David Leonard & Leslie Jordan: worship duo rooted in Journey Church in Franklin, TN.
• Derek Webb – Singer, Songwriter, Producer, Remixer, Noisetrader, Agitator
• Michael Pharez – Poet
• One Sonic Society - led by Jason Ingram [vocals/guitar], Stu Garrard [guitar/vocals] and Paul Mabury [drums]; an international collective of respected artists, united in creating music to serve the Church.
• Bellarive – Atmospheric post modern rock band.
• More to be announced soon!

Workshop Environments

Workshops will be great times to dialog, and converse around various topics and ideas.

• Stephen Proctor - curator of visual worship, illuminator, missionary of beauty, experience designer, VJ, projection artist, globe trotter, overgrown hobbit, co-owner of @gi_inc
• Nate Ragan - Director of Product Development @MediaShout, VJ, artist, musician, all things creative
• Dan Wilt - Dan Wilt is a writer, and is the Founder of WorshipTraining.com and Worship Development Nashville.
• Stephen Brewster – Creative Director at Crosspoint Church.
• Jeff Goins – Writer, idea guy, and difference-maker.
• Tim Schraeder - Church Communications. Loves to spread ideas that lead to action. Co-director of @CMSucks. Church Relations at @CSGupdates. Creator of @OutspokenBook.
• Jeff Simmons – Lead Pastor at Rolling Hills (@rhcc)
• and more discussions TBD. 

There are many surprise possibilities in the works, so keep checking the Luminous website for updates.

Speaking of conferences… Which conferences are on your radar for 2012? 

Billing itself as a conference for “geeks, artists and storytellers,” Echo is kind of like band camp for church nerds. You’ve never seen so many iDevices, black rimmed glasses, plaid shirts and man bags in your life. And, it’s one of the rare conferences where it’s actually a good thing if the audience is all looking at their laptops and typing away when a speaker is talking.

All joking aside, Echo is like a giant family reunion and one event I look forward to every year. Not only is the content practical and applicable, the relationships and connection that happen there are invaluable.

This year did not fail to disappoint and strangely, it seemed like all of the speakers seemed to be echoing the same message: DO THE WORK.

Having attended my fair share of church conferences [and many related to creativity/media] it seems like we’ve been on a journey as a group of church geeks, artists, and creatives.

A few years ago, we were seeking affirmation for our role in churches. We didn’t know many people like us were out there and we were just beginning to get our bearings and find our voice.

Then, we focused on creativity… where it comes from, where to find it and how to express it.

In the last couple of years the idea of story or storytelling has been central. We’ve all recognized that regardless of our craft and our day-to-day job title, that central to all we do is the narrative we express through our art. We’re all storytellers.

And, it seems like the message coming across the loudest and strongest lately is the idea of making all of our ideas and creative pursuits a reality. To stop talking and to start doing. To move from ideation to execution. To move from thoughts to action.

Jon Acuff reminded us that God has given us unique gifts and talents, and we can’t sit on them, we must use them to help rebuild people’s lives and build the Church.

Blaine Hogan, who has literally written the book on the creative process, challenged us with the idea that our art is our confession. “Your job as an artist is to journey through self-reflection and inner work and to take what you find and carry that light into the darkness.”

Culture-maker Andy Crouch admonished us to remember our goal isn’t to make culture safe for people, but to rather, embrace the full catastrophe, showing God’s grace amidst the chaos.

Focusing on our desire to be known, Bianca Olthoff (formerly Juarez) said, “Our identity changes when we encounter the living God. Our art should reflect that.”

Scott Belsky brought the house down in a rapid-fire dissection of his book “Makig Ideas Happen,” which is a must-read for anyone in the creative field.

And Kem Meyer challenged us with the idea of gaining more influence by giving up control.

There were many other great session and voices at Echo this year. Here’s a link to more notes and I highly encourage you to check out the recordings from this year to get the full dose of awesome from Echo.

My personal take-away from this year was to define my process. Instead of having scattered ideas or thoughts, I need to define my process and create the mechanism to capture and catalog my ideas. And, most importantly, to articulate the process to get those ideas into action.

What we all do matters.

The day and age we live in demands we all do the work of the creative process for the Cause that’s greater than ourselves.

Our world is waiting and it’s longing and we, through our various creative endeavors, can bring the light of hope into the darkness. We just have to do the hard work of cultivating our skills and talents to bring that light to bear.

We can have all of the right tools and talents but unless they [along with our pride] our surrendered and committed to Christ, we’re hopeless to do the work that truly matters.

Echo is a unique and fitting name. While it seemed like a lot of the speakers were echoing each other, they were all communicating a message we need to hear.

We’re called to echo God’s truth, grace, beauty, and love to our world. In order to make an echo, we have to speak. We have to work. We have to do something.

So, I hope those of you who were there or those who followed online will chose to act and be an echo to your community and your context.

The work we all do matters too much for us not to act.

A huge thanks to Rob Thomas, Scott McClellan and the entire team behind Echo… hats off to you for creating space for us church geeks, artists, and storytellers to learn, grow, connect, and be inspired to do the work!

Make Space

• We have too little time.
• We have too many answers.
• We have too much self importance.
• If you have too little time, make some space.
• A lot of the work we do is insecurity work.
• When you work on the right things, God makes sure we get it all done.
• Make space for conversation.
• Start with what’s hurting most.
• It’s difficult for departments to share information with each other because we all have projects we are trying to accomplish.
• Listening can be a disturbing experience.
• It requires a level of self-awareness and self-criticism that is not easy to endure.
• We can’t control anyone else but us.
• It’s more of an attitude than it is a skill.
• This should empower you.
• Adopt an attitude of wonder and curiosity vs “how is this going to slow me down?”
• It doesn’t come from technique but from being genuinely interested in what matters to the other person.
• It’s not just space on your calendar, it’s space in your heart.
• When you are making space, it’s a trip… not a destination.
• It IS a trip!
• If we are always focused on the outcome we will constantly feel the frustration instead of the win.
• If we focus on the people over the project, or the process over the event, relationships will gradually increase.
• Managers do things right. Leaders do the right things. – Warren Bennnis

Man to Man

• We can get territorial because we are responsible for something.
• We need to run point.
• We are highly talented, equipped and resourced… we have passion, calling and a cause.
• The simple things are what hold us back.
• We might not look like this guy but we may look like him to others:
• Take the time to learn about your audience.
• We are more effective if we do man-to-man vs zone defense.
• Zone defense protects the turf.
• Man-to-man allows the team to make the right decisions.
• Be less concerned about defining the process and more concerned about the right people to be involved in the process.
• Personal conflict can get in the way.
• We have to be willing to learn about one another’s worldviews.
• Learn other people’s vocabulary.
• Define a common vocabulary.
• The more we communicate the less we communicate.
• When all lines of communications are open for input, decision-making becomes paralyzed
• Build rapport. Develop relationship.
• Don’t strive for consensus.
• We should be less concerned about consistency and more concerned about cohesiveness.
• We all don’t need to tell the whole story, we all need to tell the same story.
• If you want to maximize the response, minimize the options.
• Give people one, clear step.
• Have you ever noticed how we judge ourselves but our intentions and others by their actions?

Do the JFK

• Ask yourself, “what I can do for the other person instead of what can they do for me?”
• Think less about what we have to say and more about how it will come across to others.
• What can we do to free others to do the work they were meant to do?
• It’s hard to take something away from someone without giving them something back.
• Are you in love with your process or the people you are serving?
• Can your job description.
• Instead of focusing on your task or your talent, focus on what impact will you leave.
• Condense your end goal to one sentence that answers the question, “At the end of the day, if I do this then I have done my job.”
• The secret to changing others starts with changing ourselves.
• If you stop learning you will forget what you already know.

The Creative’s Pitfalls

1. A Love for Idea Generation.
2. The Gravitational Force of Operations.
3. A Lack of Feeling Organized.
4. A Lack of Accountability.
5. A Lack of Feedback Exchange.
6. Disorganized and Isolated Networks.

What Behance Does

• To help organize the creative word’s work.
• Created a network of creative professionals by developing a platform for them to share their ideas.
• The Behance Network is a “LinkedIn” of the creative world.
• Build a platform for creatives to get more exposure for their work.
• You can organize the creative world’s work when you have it on the same platform.
• Action Method is a method they’ve developed to help people make their ideas happen.

Genius is 1% inspirations and 99% perspiration. – Thomas Edison

• Focus on the 99%.
• There’s too much discussion of where ideas and creativity come from.
• Focus on the execution of those ideas.

How Do Some People and Teams Defy the Odds and Make Ideas Happen?

• Organization & Execution
• Communal Forces
• Leadership Capability

Organization

• We are being inundated with “stuff.”
• Emails, texts, messages, etc.
• We spend our time trying to whittle away at the collected inboxes of our lives.
• We live in an Era of Reactionary Workflow.
• We react to what’s coming at us instead of being proactive to the work that matters.
• We can be constantly reacting and never be proactive.
• We can longer rely on being forced to deep thinking.
• We need a window of non-stimulation in our day where we aren’t reacting or tuning in.
• We need to focused on a short list of 2-3 things that are important to us in the long-term.
• Think about things that are important.
• Spend energy on staying organized.
• Organization is the competitive advantage in the creative field.
• A Formula for Impact: Creativity x Organization = Impact
• You can have all of the greatest ideas and creativity but if you have no organization around them, you will never have impact.
• Spend more time organizing around your ideas.
• Organized teams and companies have a greater impact.
• Organize with a bias to action.
• The best systems for organization or made by ourselves.
• Be proud of what you are developing for yourself.

The Action Method is Just 3 Things:

1. Action Steps
2. Backburners
3. References

Action Steps

• Leave meetings focused with next steps beginning with verbs.
• “Call this person…” “Email…”

Backburners

• Things that could be actionable but aren’t ready yet.

References

• Notes, attachments, and handouts

Meetings

• Meetings are extremely expensive.
• People pull for agenda items to have
• Meetings are an arbitrary measure of time.
• We leave without anything actionable.
• When we have meetings that have no action, should they have been an email instead of a meeting?
• Have a standing meeting… knees get weak as people commentate instead of content-making.
• Have a bias towards action.
• Have a culture of capturing action steps.
• Take time at the end of the meeting going around asking people what they are going to do next. What are their actionable steps?
• Ask people, “Did you capture that?”

Backburners

• Create a backburner ritual.
• File ideas.
• Make a ritual of going through your backburner and taking a pen, editing what is actionable or crossed off the list.
• Something that came up in a meeting 6 months ago could finally be actionable.

Surround Yourself with Progess

• Show your goals and milestones in a visual way.
• The ability to come up with an idea is easy to do when you love what you do.
• The execution is difficult unless you surround yourself with progress.
• Progress is an impetus for action.

Prioritize Projects Visually

• Create an energy line focused on how much energy should be allocated for projects.
• People put too many projects on high or extreme.
• Focus on what’s almost due not on what you are most excited about.
• When teams miss deadlines it’s because you disagreed over where a project should be on the energy line.

Optimize to Surpass Your Horizon of Success

• We are always told to fix what’s not broken.
• However, to make things happen you have to build on your success.
• Success has a horizon that’s blinding.
• We tend to spend a lot of our energy on what’s not working instead of building on what’s already working.

Communal Forces

• How do you leverage your comunity to find traction for your ideas.

3 Types of People

• The Dreamers – have a tendency to come up with something new.
• The Doer – the “Debbie Downer” of the world. Constantly at odds with the dreamer.
• The Incrementalist – rotates between being a Dreamer and a Doer. They do too many things.

Regardless of who you are, you need people. Ideas don’t happen in isolation. The idea of the lone creative is a myth.

Share Ideas Liberally

• The benefits of sharing your ideas outweighs the cost.
• The community provides accountabillity.

Share Ownership of Ideas

• You have a decision to make about an idea.
• Do people work with you?
• Are you empowering others to make decisions?
• Are you willing to share ownership to engage your team.

Seek Competition

• Competition is a dirty word.
• We are all colleagues.
• The impetus to act on an idea can come from your community in the form of competition.
• Pace yourself… with other people on your team and people in your community.

Find Your Way to Breakthroughs

• There is a benefit to fighting.
• People have strong opinions about how execution should happen.
• Explore one another’s opinions.
• Unfortunately, we get heated… we care about the solution.
• Suddenly, someone will let go of the rope.
• Apathy hurts our constituents.
• Fight apathy ruthlessly.
• Care enough to battle.

Don’t Become Burdened by Consensus

• What are the sacred extremes?
• What are the 1 or 2 things that cannot be compromised.
• Don’t settle for the least common denominator.
• What will move people?
• Hold 1 or 2 things dear.

Overcome the Stigma of Self-Marketing

• Our community needs to be aware of what we’re capable of doing.
• BUT, we can’t be overly-promoting of who we are and what we are capable of doing.
• We don’t want to be overlooked.
• We have to overcome the stigma of self-marketing.
• Have a respect-based self-marketing strategy.
• Gain credibility by becoming a curator.
• Share about things that interest you.
• Build a following.
• Whenever you embark on a new project, everyone will already know.
• Care for the stream that you create for people.

Leadership Capability

• What great leaders are doing or not doing in the creative world to keep their teams engaged with projects.

Leaders Talk Last

• Silence the visionary.
• Buy engagement from your team.
• People will leave their jobs because they don’t feel fully utilized.
• They aren’t being asked first about what we should do.
• We need to listen first.
• We shouldn’t tell people what we think the plan should be.
• Engagement leads to involvement in a project through its completion.

Find and empower the “Hot Spots”

• Your contributions should outlast your stay.
• Who are the nodes that people look up to in your organization?
• It’s rarely the senior leader… it’s the assistants.
• The nodes to be kept and empowered.

Value the Team’s Immune System

• The human body has an immune system that keeps us healthy.
• It kills anything new that tries to enter into our body.
• In a creative team, the doers are the immunes system.
• The doers kill off everything that is new.
• They keep us healthy.
• During a brainstorm, the dreams are empowered and the doers are suppressed.
• You need dreamers and doers.
• Great creative teams often fail because their leader is a dreamer.
• A group of dreamers are intoxicated by ideas and have no sober monitors.

Seek Restraints

• Failure in most teams centered around the problem of not having a l
• In the creative community we shun restraints.
• Restrains are empowering for the creative process.
• When they aren’t given we need to seek them.

Be the Bureaucracy Breaker

• The best way to break it is to ask the annoying questions:
• “Why can’t we try this?”
• “Who needs to sign off on this?”
• “Why do we have to wait?”
• As stewards of ideas, we need to ask our bosses to make decisions.
• Ask difficult and annoying questions to keep things moving.
• They pierce with annoying questions.

Push People Into the Intersection

• Successful people live in the intersection of their Interests, Skills, and Opportunities.
• How can we make sure we are working in our overlap?
• How can we push people into working from their overlap?
• Give people opportunities that match their passions and skills.

Gain Confidence From Doubt

• The more people doubt you the more you are probably onto something.
• Society is hypocritical.
• We shun people before we celebrate them.
• Gain confidence from being doubted.
• Nothing extraordinary is ever achieved through ordinary means.

See Yourself As the Steward of Your Ideas

• Responsibility > Opportunity
• Are you a prototypical creative mind?
• Where does the responsibility lie?
• See your creativity not as an opportunity but as a responsibility.
• Make your ideas happen.
• Embrace the practices that push ideas to fruition.
• That’s what moves the world forward.
• Ideas are greater than ourselves.

Discussion

• In your art, how do you find you infuse your art  or your work with your identity?
• Keep your identity intact but manage the broken parts of who you are.
• I.e. if you are emotional, manage your emotions.
• The greatest weapon you have is doing what only you can do.
• Our life is the best Gospel we can preach.
• Don’t deny who you are.
• If we can explain it God probably isn’t in it… God works in the impossible.

The Structure of a Story

• Every story is driven by a sender that wants to deliver something [the object] to a receiver.
• The fundamental engine of story is at quest to get the object from the sender to the receiver.
• The sender sends someone, the subject.
• The subject is what we traditionally call the protagonist.
• The sender is more like a quasi, God-like figure. Not always present, but necessary.
• In Lord of the Rings, the object is the ring, the subject is Frodo, the sender is Gandalf, the receiver is Mt. Doom.
• In the course of the story, the subject encounters oppositions, so there are two other forces that enter into the story: the helpers and the opponents.
• Every Pixar movie is asking the question, “What does it mean to be a human?”
• Our job isn’t to make culture safe for people.
• Christian music says it’s “Safe for the family.”
• Great culture is rarely safe for people
• In every story, Act 1 ends in frustration.
• In Act 2, the subject becomes the receiver.
• In Act 3, the situation of the first act comes back, but all of the ingredients are in place for the quest to be fulfilled.
• Act 3 brings new opposition.
• Some people only know how to criticize culture.
• Christians don’t just like culture, we love it so much we hate it.
• We never show that we love culture.
• The role of a critic in creativity is to articulate and defend what is new.
• Gains that are won without opposition are no gains.
• If you win without an opponent you haven’t actually won.
• We demand real oppositions from our stories because our life is about real opposition.
• If you don’t have a credible, real opponent in your story you don’t have a story at all.
• How often do Christians tell a truncated story that doesn’t do justice to the real opposition in our world and in our own lives?
• The greatest opposition to creating what we were meant to create comes from inside us.
• The reason we don’t create what we were meant to create isn’t because of anything outside of us, it’s because of ourselves.
• Our inner critic can convert from being our opponent to being our helper.
• To create good work you need an inner critic.
• The conversion fo the opponent and the happier ending are what make the difference between formulated stories and great stories.
• Stories always have an enemy and an opponent.
• There are often enemies that don’t convert.
• All you can do with an enemy that doesn’t convert is to eliminate them.
• The opponent begins in opposition but ends as an ally.
• A happier ending… more happily than you could have ever anticipated.

Story of the Gospel

• Why is this the structure that we expect?
• It’s because this is the structure of the cosmos.
• What is our story?
• There is a sender, the creator of the world who wishes to deliver something to the receive.
• God wishes that the world He created will be filled with His image-bearers.
• That we would be fruitful and multiply.
  God sent His image into the whole world.
• He send us, humans, His image-bearers.
• Act 1 ends in frustration because we have an opponent but no helper.
• The opponent was the voice of opposition.
• In Act 2, the original subject has to receive something.
• A new subject enters into the story to deliver something we could not acquire on our own.
• God sent the Incarnate image of God… Jesus.
• Jesus delivered to us what we needed to fulfill what we were meant to be.
• Act 3 ends with a happier ending.
• If it were a formulaic story, we’d go back to the garden… to the way it should have been.
• God works differently.
• In Act 3 of our story, not only are God’s image-bearers restored and filled… there is a new city.
• This is the story human beings are hungry for because it’s the one true story.
• Every story has a “Jesus” figure.
• Otherwise, people won’t be satisfied with them.

Andy ended with Prelude & Figure #1 from Bach

The Ingredients of Excellence

• A happier ending.
• Is the culture you are creating giving people a glimpse of something glorious beyond what they would expect?
• The best culture in the world deosn’t deliver expected resolutions, it takes you beyond the expected and into chaos and noise, that it provides a happier ending.
• The full catastrophe.
• The only way to deal with long-term chronic pain is to experience the full catastrophe… to focus on the pain.
• Most human beings try to avoid the full catastrophe.
• The human story is dissidence.
• Great art always acknowledges the full catastrophe.
• Is what you are creating do justice to the full catastrophe?

Faithfulness to the Form

• Great works do not break most or all of the rules.
• Be faithful to the form before you improvise and create.
• Our creativity should cultivate our world.
• Until you know the form you cannot create excellence.
• Innovate in form.
• Respect form but innovate.
• God is a creator of order and abundance.
• In the order of creation, God has given us to the work of filling the world with good things.
• The greatest works of art eliminate what’s not necessary.
• Great art calls you to listen.

This is Hard Work

• Creating on demand is very, very hard.
• There’s no magic to making inspired and meaningful arts.

No one cares about your ideas. – Paul Arden

• No cares about your ideas, they care about the execution of the vision.
• Execution is everything.
• Never, ever ever under-sell something so that you can over-deliver.
• It’s counterintuitive.
• We want to self-protect.
• Great art is only made in the face of fear.
• Really great ideas come at the cost of many other good ideas.
• Creativity is work.
• It’s a discipline.

Scratch When You Don’t Itch

• Establish a discipline of cultivating ideas even when you don’t need them.
• Hunt for ideas.
• Gather them together.
• Catalog your thoughts and ideas.
• Make a routine of cultivating ideas.
• You can’t afford to not have a practice of cultivating creative ideas.
• Always let the back of your mind be working so when the front of your mind is asked to work there are a cache of ideas waiting.
• For blogging, write down phrases that could be a blog post.
• Even though it feels tedious, your work will never be done.
• Do the work now so you’ll have the ideas later.
• Inspiration comes to someone who is available.
• It has nothing to do with ideas, it’s about practicing the idea of being available.
• Creativity is more about being than doing.
• It’s a way of thinking.
• To think differently you need to still yourself to hear.

Remove

• Our tendency is to add more.
• For some reason artists in the church are rarely OK with mysteries.
• We want facts and clarity.
• We think to clarify we need to add more, and more, and more.
• Remove everything but the essential bits.
• Take all of your ideas but as you get closer to execution ask what are the absolute essentials to telling a story. Toss the rest.
• It’s not about being simplistic.
• You have to have all of the content to start with before you can whittle it down.

Constrain

• “Full creative freedom” really means that we won’t submit to a creative process or deadlines.
• There needs to be something to contain your work.
• We need something to push against to make something really good.
• To create meaningful work, artists need constraints.
• Creativity and art-making only happen in tension.
• Tension happens when we give ourselves something to push up against.
• Creativity is not a noun.
• Without constraints, nothing grows in me – or the art.

The Importance of Inner Work

• The best art in all of the world comes from a place within the artist.
• If people skip on their inner work, their outer work will suffer as well. – Parker Palmer
• Most people don’t put themselves in uncomfortable situations intentionally.
• Awkwardness creates space.
• There’s something about putting yourself in a situation that makes you uncomfortable that can free you.
• Example: Happy Friday Dance Parties
• Increase your capacity for discomfort.

Content Before Medium. Don’t Prove a Point. Tell Me a Story.

• There are many artists who have great tools but don’t have anything to say.
• Tools should be used in the purpose of telling a greater story.
• Have something to say.
• Use the tool to say it.
• The lack of tools can be a blessing… you have constraints.
• Instead of focusing on what you don’t have, focus on the story you’re telling.
• The medium must always be in service of the content.
• You are storytellers not salesman.
• We confuse that in the Christian world.
• It’s easy to sell people something, it’s something completely different to get them to believe.
• Great stories don’t tell us what to think.
• Great stories help us believe.
• Don’t prove a point.
• Dont’ talk for people, talk to them.
• The creative process is like making a wild animal human.
• We get to make something beautiful that changes people.
• What we do is worth it.

What to do when you encounter the gap…

1 – Ignore the voices.

• Artists rarely have a positive internal voice.
• What are the voices you hear?
• What tensions are you facing?
• We always hear voices that say someone better or smarter than us can do something better than we can.
• Social media makes it easy for us to compare ourselves.
• The comparison game is deadly.
• Never compare your beginning to someone else’s middle.
• We will always hear “who are you to do that?” at the beginning of a project.
• The Bible is littered with mess-ups who God used to do amazing things.
• If you feel like a mess up, you’re amongst good company.
• The right question is, “who is God to do that?”
• God is bigger than your project, your budget needs, or the challenge you are up against in your community.
• Ignore the voices.

2 – Face your fears:

• Other fears get louder when
• The fear of starting – the blank page fear.
• When you start something the dragon of perfectionism is awakened.
• Perfectionism looks like a character trait, not a flaw.
• We burn people out in the church.
• Perfectionism always presents itself as “close.”
• Just one more tweak, one more edit… an endless chase that can’t be caught.
• If you going to start and finish projects you have to murder perfectionism.
• 90% perfect and shared with the world changes more lives than 100% perfect and stuck in your head.
• 90% is OK.
• The blog posts you never get comments on are the ones you don’t publish.
• The programs that never succeed are the ones that never start.
• Allow room for God to finish the last 10%.
• The fear of failure.
• God is about filling hearts first not rooms.
• If you are going to risk and maybe fail, fail gloriously at something that matters.
• Even in failure, lives will change.
• The worst kind of failure is to work on things that don’t matter.
• The fear of success.
• Fear is brilliant… it’s both sides of the coin.
• Expectation is present when good things happen.
• A diamond is just a rock unless you think it has value.
• There’s a lot in our lives that can clamor for our attention that appear to be diamonds.
• [Social media, Klout score, number of friends and followers, etc.]
• We can treat the right things as rocks.
• We go to the Bible for research, not renewal.
• Ideas instead of our identity.

3 – Have friends

• Social media is in a weird place.
• If the Internet is a teenager, social media is a toddler and we’re all fumbling.
• It never sleeps… it’s never done.
• It’s awkward and fumbling.
• You never finish… it’s always wanting more.
• Are you paying attention?
• When you start to work on something that you care about you can lose sight of things that are important.
• You can lose sight of your friends.
• The ROI on friendships suck.
• They are ineffective and messy.
• They don’t behave.
• You can’t measure them.
• We need friendships and relationships.
• Real, face-to-face relationships matter… not circles or lists.
• Make relationship decisions.
• You’ll get motivation.
• You’ll get validation.
• You’ll get challenges.
• You need people who love you enough to speak the truth into your life.

Why Does it Matter That We Close the Gap?

• It matters because God cares about art.
• God cares about art more than we do.
• Sometimes we don’t use our best creativity to honor the author of creativity.
• We sprinkle a little Jesus on pop culture and call it creativity.
• The church isn’t a leader in the creative movement.
• God deals with the leaders and the artists in Exodus.
• The pastors and the creatives.
• Exodus 31
• God loves art.
• In Exodus 36 they start to build the ark.
• Something crazy happened… everyone who had the skill and were willing to work came…
• People had the skill who sat on their art and missed their chance to build the Temple.
• We’ve got the same opportunity every day.
• 1 Corinthians 6:19
• We use our skills to help people rebuild their lives… and that’s our way of rebuilding the Temple.
• We are room builders.
• That’s why we do what we do.
• That’s why we face fear.
• It’s not about our art it’s about the Temple we are building.
• We have an amazing chance and an amazing call.
• We need to be artists who answer that call.
  We’ve been given a skill.
• We need to be willing to come and do the work.

It’s no secret that I blog my notes from sessions and conferences and the content and lineup of amazing speakers this year at ECHO makes it near impossible for me tot pick.

So, help me out.

What breakout sessions should I blog?

You can read the descriptions here and let me know what I should blog by filling out this form. This isn’t a competition, just a way for me to pick from the great options and to provide you with the content you want!