There were quite a few highlights from the CCDA conference last week.  Like I mentioned before, this was my first CCDA conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  I bumped into a few friends from around the country, got to room with my dad who was there with a couple of folks from his church in New Jersey, and ate delicious arepas – the Venezuelan food of my childhood – from a food truck.

The session on urban church planting I helped with seemed to go well; it was a smaller group which allowed for a lot of conversation and brainstorming around questions raised by the participants.  My favorite plenary session featured Rev. Dr. Ray Rivera preaching about captivity theology including four biblical responses to ministry in the context of captivity.  Rev. Rivera is from NYC and is a mentor to a couple of church planter friends from that city.  I’m looking forward to getting into his new book, Liberty to the Captives.

I arrived in Minneapolis on Wednesday morning in time for my session and left Friday afternoon for my flight home so I missed the final 24 hours of the conference.  All in all it was a great introduction to CCDA and I’m grateful for the many, many folks who worked to put on this excellent event.  Interestingly, the session that has provoked the most follow-up thought, in addition to Rev. Rivera’s sermon, was one I found myself disagreeing with.  I’ll come back to that in a subsequent post.