At Exponential 2009 New Church Planting Conference this afternoon I got to hear Erwin McManus speak and then attended two seminars. Both seminars were not what I had planned to attend, but I believe they were what God wanted me to hear.

The first one was about raising money for doing ministry. Sharing vision and inviting people to participate in the vision through prayer and financial support. It was a very good presentation.

The second one was Top 10 Mistakes made by Church Starts. As someone who planted a church a dozen years or so ago that ended about a year and a half later this was an interesting talk for me. At first I felt bad that I had made most of those same mistakes but then I felt better because others had done the same (misery loves company) and the fact that the guy shared ways to fix the problems. Good stuff. The notes are here so if you want them you can look for them here. Good luck downloading them :)

At the end of the afternoon our group went out to eat--we are eating well--and it was great to talk with the other people with us and hear their ministry stories and get to know them. Then we had a question and answer time with Glenn Smith . I enjoyed the answers he gave to so many questions. A big thing he said is that because there are so many models for church planting there need to be different ways of assessing planters. Also, he told us that our systems are the perfect ones for the church we have. But if we want a different outcome we need to tweak the system.

We need to make sure that the vision we state is the one we actually have.