Initial Q Afterthoughts

I’m sitting at the Atlanta Airport thinking about Fermiproject’s Q conference. This is the first real opportunity I have taken to download my thoughts and take a look at what I’m really leaving here with.

Wednesday

Q was held in an old Tabernacle next to CNN. The location was awesome and really was inspiring for progressive thought. Whenever I looked around I felt like I was in a rock concert slash think tank. Each session was only 18 minutes, which created a rapid fire thought process. If a great idea came around, we didn’t have much time to think about it or we would miss the next presenter’s ideas.

What stood out to me?

For me, this was the best day in terms of new ideas and thoughts, which is like saying chocolate ice cream is better than chocolate chip ice cream. They’re both good. But my clear favorite was Catherine Rohr, with Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP). This is clear one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Catherine’s group restores prisoners by selecting the natural leaders in prisons, restores their dignity, loves them, and then prepares them for business when they get out. They’ve never had someone return to prison and the dropout rate was I believe 3%. To me Catherine was Jesus because she took a risk to love the unlovable. I dig that.

Andy Crouch broke down trends in culture and how we process culture. He helped language that process. It kind of felt like someone who helps you realize what you’ve always known but never had the words to describe it. He broke them down into postures over the last forty years (or so). First we condemned culture. Then we critiqued culture. Then we copied culture, and then we consumed culture. Each posture was simply an attempt to deal with how culture shows up. He then did something I really liked. He gave us a holistic approach to posture as people who love: create and cultivate culture, which is a reflection of our Father. Nice.

Rick McKinley, from Imago Dei, was supposed to be speaking today, but for some reason, which ended up being divine, he got pushed to Friday. More on that in a little bit.

Kevin Kelley spoke on the future. He was the former editor of Wired Magazine. I’ve never heard of Kevin but he helped encapsulate culture in a unique way. But one thing he said that struck me was the population growth will not continue. In fact, we will see it decline dramatically over the next generations. This caught everyone by surprise.

Donald Miller was as humorous and funny as he always is. But I’ve heard most of his presentation of narrative through articles and podcasts so it wasn’t new. It still was a joy to see him. He did have the most humorous moment of the conference that I think helped lighten the spirit of a leader’s conference, which can often get intense. The Q group chose to use a clock, which counted down to zero. At zero it pulsated, almost like it was coming out at you. So imagine for a second, two large zeroes pulsating, and Donald said, “My time is up. The boob’s are flashing.” Everyone laughed. Thank you so much for the humor Don. I love you for that.

Blake Mycoskie, from Tom’s shoes told his story, and if you don’t know about this guy, you should. It’s very simple. If you buy a pair of his shoes, he’ll give one to someone else for free. It’s that simple.

I’ve never heard or seen Chris Seay, but what he said caught everyone in the stomach. His conversation was passionate and somewhat angry, (which may have just been lunch) which made me wonder what other conversation’s he had about this. His point was that as a culture we are consumers, which was validated by data. No one could move or ignore what he was saying. At the end of the session we had a breakout to discuss how we could spend less. And the two guys next to me were stunned. It was clear this was a tough topic to look at. Chris’s point was that if we took a small portion of the money we spend frivolously at Christmas we could solve (yes solve) the world’s clean water problem. Think about that. What if we as a church got together to solve the world water problem? And this is why God pushed Rick McKinley to the end. You’ll see why later.

I got to meet David Batstone, from NotForSale campaign, which I’ve blogged about. He was extremely gracious and passionate about what he was doing. Human trafficking was a thick topic at this conference and I loved learning more about it.

If you’re getting the gist that the people just keep coming, realize that we’ve barely gotten past lunch at this point. It was almost too much to be honest. But I loved it anyway. It forced me to think and rethink, and rethink again.

Jeff Johnson gave a fiery dialog on the hip-hop culture. It was really cool to hear the true origins of hip-hop and how it all started. He did say that hip-hop was representative of the disenfranchised, But I thought Jeff missed an opportunity to connect everyone to a deeper point and that hip-hop is representative of the oppressed, the disenfranchised, people that we all are. Unless I misinterpreted him, which is always possible.

The highlight of the evening, which felt like the crown jewel of the day, was getting a private acoustic concert from Jon Foreman from Switchfoot. We got to hear a song he had never played before and was so beautiful. It felt like a great honor to hear him play.

I honestly went to bed numb. I’ll process Thursday when I get home.