Back from Chicago: Moody’s Founder’s Week

Last night I got back late, very late, from the Moody Founder’s Week Conference in Chicago.  The annual conference is free to attend and, even for a cynic like me, worth going to.  I thought I’d write some things about it while the impressions were fresh.  The theme of the conference was “Running the Race” from Hebrews 12.

I missed Paul Nyquist’s opening sermon on Monday.  Evidently he did some of the main expository groundwork on the text which some of the other speakers built upon.  The next day opened with fine sermons by Bryan Clark and Ron Hutchcraft.  Hutchcraft was naturally funny, but built into his sermon solid lessons from the text.  I skipped the afternoon sessions all week (there were none on Tues) because either I wasn’t too interested in the speaker or I wasn’t interested in listening to another speaker, or, I had other things i wanted to do.  I was told the two student speakers on Wednesday and Thursday were both very good.  Tuesday night’s sermon at Moody Church by Mike Fabarez was well put together but too long.  Fabarez did very well building up to what I thought was a conclusion, but then proceeded to keep talking and dulled the edge of his presentation.

On Wednesday Phil Vischer gave a stirring testimony of burnout recovered by the fresh understanding that God loved him more than Big Idea!  Vischer was at once amusing and poignant.  He took us to several Pauline passages to bring out how important it is to do things through Christ’s strength and not our own.  I benefited from both his candor and his wisdom. Nancy Leigh DeMoss used her time to recite from memory the career of Jesus using passages from both Testaments.  It was impressive without being very helpful.  While I am sure she was genuine, doing such feats of memory inevitably become performances.  “So what?” was my thought initially, and I haven’t altered my opinion.

That night Josh MacDowall warned about the ubiquitous menace of pornography, especially as it relates to children watching it.  He did some scaremongering but perhaps that was necessary.  He showed the congregation some gadget called “Oculus” which will be released soon and which you place over your eyes in order to enter another realm – an artificial one.  MacDowall said that four companies with a vested interest in this device are porn providers.  His warnings were sobering, even if he failed to bring in the blood of Christ and Christian consecration as the antidotes.

Thursday brought us Erwin Lutzer and a message about preparedness.  It was a good sermon but nothing to rave about.  At the end Lutzer had everyone stand up and repeat a prayer against fearfulness.  I really do not like this sort of manipulative practice, however genuinely it is done.  Daniel Carroll of Denver Seminary came next and was really outstanding.  Carroll spoke from the heart from Psalm 42 and hit a note which is never heard in today’s churches: the need for expressions of doubt and lament.  He said that real life is tough and unfair and God seems sometimes seems not to be there.  The Psalms have more laments than any other genre, and for good reason.  But we have cut it out of our prescriptions for life and are the poorer for it.  Carroll’s fine mixture of exegesis and humble yet passionate entreaty were the highlight of the week.  Billy Kim preached about the need for prayer and holiness and love for the lost: again, very good.

Finally, on Friday morning I heard Voddie Baucham and Ramesh Richard.  These two together made this the best session overall.  Baucham spoke soberly about how young people particularly are more concerned with niceness than about Truth.  His subject was the Gay agenda and how to argue biblically and intelligently against it; or perhaps as important, how to reason it out in ones own head.  Top marks for a sermon of sustained intellectual engagement.

Ramesh Richard was also very good.  He chose words to think about the Christian race with.  I had to get ready to go and so my attention was not as fixed as it should have been, but I do remember his terrific emphasis on glory as “giving Jesus weight in the areas of your personal, family, and work life.

All in all this was an edifying time.  May God help me to apply what I learned to my own life and ministry!

Oh, and I also picked up the second volume of Pannenberg’s Systematic Theology and Hurtado’s God in New Testament Theology for a steal!  Score.

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