Who I saw at Emergent 05

Baby Girl Becca and her mama, Jenni 


Funny how people want to know "Who was there?" when you go to these conventions. But at this event my strongest memories are ongoing conversations with nobody-you-would-probably-know. Still I'm not immune to star-gazing, so here's my rundown on actual connection with "stars."

Of course, I co-led the Embracing Church thing with Glandion Carney, Lillian Smith, Jay Voorhees, and Brian McLaren. I'll let you decide for yourself which ones are stars.

After our course, I was debriefing over coffee and tea in the hotel restaurant with Glandion (His Upper Room book on Job, which I edited is A Hard-Fought Hope). We're sitting there, and these two guys are staring in the window, waving frantically. Turns out it's Richard Foster of Renovare Ministries and his son Nathan. Glandion does some work with Renovare. They join us and talk about movies (mainly Kingdom of Heaven) and about Richard's crazy antics while producing serious Christian teaching videos through the years. It's family reminiscing for him and Nathan. I also commented on Richard's intro to his new Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible. I was inspired to order the Bible later.

I think it was Thursday when I walked to lunch by myself. I stepped into Provence, and walking in the other door were my friends Becca and Jenni (see above). They're stars in our lives (I'm Grandpa Tony to Becca). I opted for Subway instead of Provence and ended up running into Philip Yancey who had just spoken at the Natonal Pastors Convention where they gave out his new book, Rumors of Another World. The two of us walked two or three blocks back to the convention together. I don't remember exactly what we talked about. I was thinking about the report back to Laura who's a big Yancey-fan.