Off the Blogs – The Recap

Pete Wilson said it best when he introduced the Off the Blogs event on Thursday night, “We’re not sure what’s going to happen tonight.”

And that was true. We had a loose idea of how the night was going to go, but at the core of the whole thing was a big “what if?”

What if we all got together and talked about the things God is doing in our lives?
What if we took the crazy, weird, ridiculous, funny things God is doing on our blogs and experienced them together in a live setting?
What if I sat impossibly close to Carlos Whittaker on a stool?

I think we were able accomplish all three of those things.

I ended up talking about porn and what happens when we use the Christian F word “fine,” and why sometimes we only pretend we believe all sins are equal. And I told a story about an ice cream bowl from the second grade. Anne and Carlos told their stories with an authenticity that astounded me and Aaron Keyes led worship in a way I’ve never experienced before. Pete Wilson held the whole thing together like some sort of super cool, super kind, super glue.

A lot of interesting things happened that night. Katdish came and gave me a really cool gift bag for my kids that included smurf dolls because of the blue face photo I posted on here. The famous Steph from the Red Clay Diaries was there and a really cool girl named Abby actually skipped her feminine spirituality class to come, but it worked out because I think I said the word “ladies” during my little ditty so that’s kind of like class credit. All in all there were maybe about 125 folks there.

I’m hoping to speak more in the future. I talked with a friend in Tennessee about speaking at his church in the fall. I’m also going to include one of the central ideas from the night in my book. I’m going to post the ice cream bowl on this site at some point. And I have a 35 minute message I gave at another event that I called “Booty, God, Booty” that I’m trying to figure out how to put online, but I’m kind of web dumb. Bottom line, hopefully if you couldn’t make it the other night there are other ways for you to connect with what we talked about.

I shared a photo that Ben Arment took. In the photo you can see the cool painting hanging in the church and me on the far right of the stage sitting wicked close to Carlos on a stool. We’re both wearing white and are kind of blurring together like a bright ball of white hot sarcasm. If you’ve got a better photo from the night let me know and I’ll try to post it.

Special thanks to Catalyst and Brad Lomenick and Ben Arment for taking a risk on me, Carlos, Anne and Pete. Their One Day event was awesome and massive and that they were willing to do this in the same day was incredibly kind of them. And shout out to Derek Sweatman and Christian Church Buckhead for letting us hold it there.

Hope to see you guys off the blogs again sometime in the future.

Jon