San Diego...The Rest of the Story

Corie and I flew out on Wednesday, and the "delay" in Vegas, then on to San Diego, where we got our rental car and headed for a drive downtown. What a lovely place. We headed over to the zoo, but there wouldn't have been enough time, so we headed over to Coranado "island" (actually a peninsula) and drove up to the beach, and put our toes in the cold water. (Did you know the Pacific is always cold there because the currents come down from Alaska? I didn't.)

Then off to our hotel, checked in and headed to Corie's favorite restaurant "The Cheesecake Factory". We ate outside that night and it was very nice. I made up a jingle for the restaurant, but it was full of enough cheese to make a cheesecake so I'll spare you the details.

Thursday a.m. we went to the Zoo and spent about 3 hours. It was great, I heartily recommend it. But make a day of it, and take your time.

Thursday afternoon we went to the first of 9 sessions. It was very good 3 of the sessions were conducted with 3 speakers who would share the time to talk about their stories. The first one included Mark Batterson, Lee McFarland, and Scott Bruegman. Very good and inspiring session. It was followed up with a Q and A time. I found all of these sessions to be good. I would have liked to give the keynote sessions to them for expanded opportunity to share stories and field questions from the audience.

The three sessions were called affinity groups. There was one for young leaders (for me), one for planting in the inner city, and one for Churches looking to mother.

My affinity group was really good 1 out of 3, pretty good 1 out of 3 and didn't connect the other time. BUT! The resources in the really good session were really worth the whole trip. Thanks to Scott for sharing those things. Wow.

The Keynote speaker was David Garrison, a Southern Baptist missiologist. He was rather boring, and not inspirational, but I felt he deserved some grace because he was 12 hours opposite from our time. He is currently a missionary to India. I bought his book, because I wanted to learn more about Church Planting Movements. (I'll do a book review as soon as I'm finished.)

We flew out on Saturday morning, a quick hop to Phoenix and then back to Baltimore. Apparently nothing fell apart while I was gone, our church had an increase in attendance up to 31. They must have heard that Matt was preaching...

--Ben