Shane Claiborne spoke tonight and one question he asked stuck out at me. YS did a very cool thing with tonight’s general session; they had 3 speakers who each spoke for about 20 minutes, then about 10 for conversation with little groups of people, then 10ish for questions that we text messaged in, either during the speaker or during the discussion time. Very web 2.0, although they didn’t use any of my questions.
Anyway, Claiborne was talking about the Bible story about John the Baptist’s disciples coming to Jesus to ask, “Are you the Messiah, or should we wait for someone else?” Jesus, as he often did, didn’t answer with a “Yes I am” or anything clear like that. He looked back at them and said, “Look at what you are seeing happen; the blind, deaf, and lame are being healed. Bring your answer back based on these things.”
As Christians, Shane went on, if someone came up to one of us and said, “Are you a Christian?” could we answer back, “Look at what you see?”
I’m having a number of incomplete thoughts about this.
I also had dinner with Marty at Uppercrust Pizza, which is just across the street from the convention center. And while it looks like we’ve all discovered it already from the number of convention nametags I saw while we were eating, I’ll take a moment to recommend it. They have an all-you-can-eat buffet (for we hurried and underfunded youth ministers) and they make excellent pizza. They are at 1200 K St.; here’s the Google Maps link
