I'm very excited about the STORY conference this year. I met Ben Arment a few years ago and loved his passion for the creative class. Last year my brother Elic and I had an opportunity to be a part of many brainstorming sessions leading up to the event, and participated onstage through some comedic bits that helped pay tribute to the sponsors who made the thing happen. In addition, our church's theatre company (Epic Theatre) provided actors who strolled the downtown Aurora area as conference-goers were entering and getting registered. (in fact, a great photo was taken of our boys last year, and it was used in this year's promotional packet - I'll post it here at the end of my post)
This year, the conference moves from Aurora to Chicago - at Park Community Church's fantastic (and relatively new) space. It's going to be great! The speakers are incredible, and very inspiring to the creatives out there trying to tell the one great story in imaginative ways. Here's the list of Speakers:

Dan Allender - best-selling author, professor at Mars Hill Graduate School
Charlie Todd - creator of Improv Everywhere in New York City
Princess Zulu - AIDS victim from infancy, advocate for the oppressed
Jason Fried - founder of 37Signals, creator of Basecamp, author of Rework
John Sowers - president of Donald Miller's The Mentoring Project
Shauna Niequist - former creative director at Mars Hill, author of Bittersweet
David Hodges - formerly of the band Evanescence, award-winning songwriter
Leonard Sweet - futurist, author of 40 books, professor at Drew University
David McFadzean - creator of Home Improvement, producer of Roseanne
Richard Walter - accomplished screenwriter and professor of film at UCLA
Sean Gladding - member of Communality, a new monastic community
Andrew Klavan - author of True Crime (Clint Eastwood) and numerous novels
Gary Dorsey - founder of Pixel Peach Studio in Austin, TX
Chuck Swindoll - best-selling author, pastor (appearing via hologram)
Music by Vicky Beeching, Kari Jobe and Carlos Whittaker

And... I just finished a phone call with Ben, and Elic and I are in the process of figuring out a really cool way to contribute to the theme through a performance piece. I'm hoping it will all come together - would hate to not do something creative at a creatives conference!

Sign up today, while there's still early bird pricing! You can do that by clicking here.

Hey friends. If you watched the Willow webcast today, I may have referenced some of the materials that you can download here for free. And if you'didn't watch and you want to, you can do so on "tape" here.

Below you can download documents about the big idea process, a campus constants doc (showing what things our church expects ALL of our campuses to have), the new campus start up guide, and the document we created to determine expectations for reproducing campuses (the permission-giving one).

We also have a zip file that shows one week's worth of big idea material for adults/students/kids you can get a sense of how that works.

Enjoy, hope it helps you be innovative, which is much better than being outtovative!

Hey there everybody in Court Jester-land. Just wanted to let you know that I'll be playing it "all serious" tomorrow morning, as the Willow Creek Association has asked me to be a guest on their "Becoming an Innovative Organization" webcast. It's live, and I'm being interviewed by Jim Mellado and Craig Terrill, who pretty much run the show over there (no matter what Hybels says)...

I'll be talking about a bunch of ways that our church has done its best to be a permission giving organization that allows for creativity and innovation. Hopefully it will help release some creative monkeys in other church environments - that'd be pretty cool, right?!

It all starts at 11:30am, CST. (Mom, I think that's 9:30am your time) Go to this webpage, and you can sign up to get an email reminder that includes a link to the webcast. And that webpage is also the same url where the webcast will be playing live. Sounds complicated, but it's probably not.

Okay y'all - there's been a bit of fluttering on the internets about the video I referenced in an earlier post, and how similar it is to another video. If you're interested in that conversation, check it out at Jesus Needs New PR. Seems like a good time to reveal last week's parody video we showed at Community: a parody of an Old Spice commercial. We worked really hard on this one - it was a total team effort from the entire crew here. And we got it in one take, on the 31st take. Bloopers to come. Enjoy! Here is the video:

And here is the commercial that it is parodying.

What do you think?

If you've ever wondered what I did for a living, it's something like this. Thanks to Sean Bublitz for pointing it out, and thanks to North Point for making it. Enjoy the comedy!