(I’m using the hash tag in the title to make it easier for people searching on Twitter to find this article.)
Below: my thoughts on the format, the videos (a few quibbles), Chris Deckert’s tech area, and a few other items.
So we had our first “day” at Cape Town – really, it was kind of a half day, mostly taken up by the opening ceremonies. Here are a few of my thoughts and experiences.
- Apparently we are dividing up between morning presentations, early “multiplexes” (these are larger presentation style events with several hundred to perhaps a 1,000 people in them), evening “dialogue” sessions (much smaller conversational pieces—perhaps 50 to 100 people in each), and evening plenaries. I had thought I would be able to attend different dialogues—that they would be shorter—but apparently they run in tracks. I still might try to attend more than one track. We’ll see.
- Lausanne has everyone divided up into tables of six (all 4,000 people). Today they had the opening presentations welcoming people and explaining how some of this would work. Then they let us have an hour to get to know the people in our table. I thought this was pretty well done. In a table of six each person had 8 to 10 minutes to share (a) something about their family/work, (b) one expectation of the Congress, (c) what their strength was, and (d) one weakness or hardship (“we have this treasure in jars of clay”). They chimed every 10 minutes to let you know it was time to switch people. Nice touch. At our table it worked very well but we only had 5 people at our table and we were all pretty concise. Don’t know if it worked so well at other tables but I was pleased with the result.
Dinner, of course, was fabulous, as all Lausanne meals typically are. There will be no problem with my adding a few extra pounds from good food. 
But I won’t belabor that point – I don’t want to tempt anyone to the sin of envy. - I had a good meeting with Lausanne’s social networking group – they are a wonderful, humble, friendly bunch of folks. Oh, and I met the tall, skinny kiwi for the first time. Nice to know ya!
- After dinner came the “opening ceremonies” – short presentations interspersed with African dance, drummers (really good), welcoming messages form Billy Graham and John Stott (heavy on “make evangelism the center”, “share the uniqueness of Christ with the world”). I very much appreciated the fact that a prayer for the number of UPGs and the number of languages needing Bibles “both to zero by the next Congress” was made. It’s not often that UPGs are mentioned in a plenary session of a major world congress.
- One interesting thing in the opening ceremonies was the video of the history of missions they showed. Rather similar in content to my history of Christian missions powerpoint (but of course in video much better done). Nice. I only had a few quibbles.
- Christianity is not the fastest growing religion in the world – unless you’re talking about Evangelical Christianity (which they may very well have been, although throughout the video they talked about Catholics and Orthodox as part of the stream of Christian history). Islam is growing faster than Christianity, as my bud Jayson Mandryk points out, in part because they have more babies.
- I did not really care too much for the little triumphalist note at the end where they said essentially that every generation has thought it was nearly the end of the world, but one day one of those generations would be right. E.g. conveys the idea that if we just engage all the UPGs Jesus will come back. I know some folks interpret Matt 24:14 that way, but the vast majority of folks in the UPG stream would not. Reaching the unreached is simple obedience to the command of Christ, and it is linked as a “birth pain” to his return, but it is not the “stop watch timer.”
- Also, the video didn’t include anything about the Vikings or, even more importantly, about the Mongols. But that’s probably due to time. But still if you’re going to say something about Islam, I think you should say something about the Mongols. They were the largest empire in the world, ever, and a huge chunk of that empire was Christian. They had just as much impact, and arguably more, than the Romans. C’est la vie.
- Then they had a bunch of skits, some of which were funny, others of which felt a little forced, but all in all I thought weren’t bad. They told the stories of Christian evangelists in various places around the world. If you get a chance to watch the recorded versions, the skit based on Renee Padilla was classic.
All in all I thought they were fine for opening ceremonies. You probably could have missed them without a big deal. Eddie Arthur disagreed and thought they were a waste of time but he was glad one of us was inspired. And I honestly did think many parts of the opening ceremonies were really quite good and some were inspiring (you dancers were phenomenal in my book! and those African drummers were fantastic!).
One thing that does concern me about this format: yes, we do get a lot of interactivity with the folks at our table—but that’s only six out of 4,000. The problem I’m running into is how to find people I want to meet, and even how to meet people that later I discover I really value. If you’ve got 4,000 people you can’t meet them all. It’s a huge challenge. Just sticking with the 6 at my table isn’t the solution. We need some bridgers. What would be great is if the Congress had “professional introducers” but … they already have 1,000 staff on site running this thing. (Amazing job, guys.) I hope that we’ll be able to “break out” during the Multiplexes and Dialogues and meet other folks who share interests. (If anyone out there is working among an unreached people cluster or with a people group partnership and you want to meet – please email me at justinlong@gmail.com or twitter me at @justindlong – my table number is C453 and I’ll be there in the morning, and in the Missing Peoples dialogue track in the evenings. And I tend to hang around the main ballroom during meals.)
BTW If you’re at the Congress be sure to go to level 1, all the way down past Auditorium 1, and check out Chris Deckert’s tech area. They have smart boards up – touchable white boards where you can rotate maps of the world. Amazing stuff.
So that’s it. Tomorrow we begin the really long schedule: 8:30am to somewhere south of 10pm, for two days, then a break, and then 3.5 more days. (If I remember the schedule right.)
If you watch the online versions of the conference, comment below and let me know what you thought of them!
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