Reflections on Elephant Room
Friday, April 1, 2011 at 5:00AM 
I attended Elephant Room yesterday.
The purpose of the Elephant Room is to model loving confrontation and gracious disagreement that honors relationship and allows diversity of opinion but stands without compromise on the revealed word of God. As Proverbs 27:17 instructs us that iron sharpens iron, so we want to sharpen each other for effective ministry. You’ll be stretched and challenged in your convictions while gaining practical insights from a variety of pastoral perspectives.
Great idea. Here are some reflections.
- We need more of this type of discussion. Getting people together from different camps, and honestly and respectfully discussing our differences, is exactly what's needed. It's far too easy to get stuck in our own camps and to stop hearing from those from other camps.
- Discussions like these need to take place between ordinary pastors (and others). I'm glad that pastors of huge churches can get together and discuss issues, but I would love to see the same thing happen with pastors and scholars who aren't as famous. It's why things like Theology Pub are important.
- We need to listen. I really enjoyed the banter at the start of the day. By midday I longed for more listening and less talking. This was especially pronounced in one session. Testosterone can get in the way of really listening, but it doesn't have to. Having a moderator who is not also a participant may help.
I walked away from the day thinking more deeply about a couple of important issues. I grew in my respect for people who belong to very different camps within evangelicalism. If Elephant Room leads us to listen and learn from other evangelicals who differ from us, it will have been worth it.
Trevin Wax has some links to notes and a summary of his favorite tweets from the day. Chris from Canada was taking notes most of the day. You can also check out the tweets marked with the #ElephantRoom hashtag.
Reader Comments (10)
How diverse was the group, Darryl? Do you think there has to be a limit on that in order for people to participate? This really intrigues me, so thanks for sharing!
Hi Jamie,The main differences seemed to be over philosophy of ministry more than theology, at least in the discussions. Yes, there would probably have to be either some agreement on core issues, or else strong friendships between the participants for this type of discussion to happen.
My quick thoughts -Too many questions - the multi-site conversation really didn't go anywhere because there was nobody really OPPOSED to the idea of multi-site. Mark Devers' name came up as someone they could have brought in but then you're lining up a bunch of single-issue guys. They could have cut the number of questions from 6 down to 4.Pace - the day moved very quick. Lots of content to get through and lots of guys who like to talk. Again, taking the number of questions down from 6 to 4 would give a bit more time to chew on some of the responses.Moderator - agreed. A non-participating moderator would have helped.All in all, I think we are seeing the future of conferences - essentially a multi-site church model replicated for these kinds of events. Great teaching gathered at a central location with video stream events happening all over the world.I hope this one happens again! Good stuff.
I hope they release the audio/video of this at some point; the interaction between Furtick and Chandler in particular sounded fascinating based on Chris's notes.
James put on his blog today that they will make video available.
Excellent.
"Ordinary Pastors" wow that is what the rest of us are ? And they actually charged you to watch them?
I really hope to catch this on video. Chris, who is James? And where do you think they'll put up the videos? At the Elephant Room site?
Israel - James is James MacDonald.Link - http://jamesmacdonald.com/blog/?p=6004"FINALLY: Yes, YES! All the video from the event will be available on this blog. A piece at a time over the next few weeks we will post and discuss it. I look forward to sharing all of it with all of you."Pre-order the DVDs - http://store.walkintheword.com/p-2540-elephant-room-dvd-boxed-set.aspx
Thanks a lot Chris! I really appreciate it!