Here’s the thing … Catalyst is the best. They have great speakers, great musicians, great artists, great media, great causes, great workshops, great exhibitors, great partners, great staff members, great programming, great photographers, great Backstage hosts, great crowds, and a great director. I hated to miss last week’s conference, but by all accounts, it was … great.
If you, like me, weren’t able to make it to Catalyst ‘09, let me encourage you to check out the Catalyst Experience Kit. It includes a ton of great stuff that you can’t get anywhere else. If you’re a bit more budget conscious, check out the DVD set of all the main stage talks. Enough wisdom, insight, and innovation is cast from the Catalyst stage each year to keep your brain occupied for the next 364 days.
But here’s the thing about why I think Catalyst is so great — the Catalyst team facilitates (catalyzes?) something that doesn’t fully translate to a DVD. There is no digital medium that can adequately capture and retransmit what happens two days a year just outside Atlanta, Georgia. Catalyst is an experience unto itself because of the way God uses the prayer, dedication, creativity, hard work, and excellence of an extraordinary team.
Perhaps that’s a good model for local churches. Not the budget or the programming or the crowd size (13,000 this year), but the experience effect. I love that Catalyst makes DVDs available and I’m hoping my boss will order a copy for me (we do it for Echo, too), but like I said, that doesn’t fully capture the event. In the same way, I think it’s great that churches provide sermon podcasts (audio or video), but hopefully, that media file won’t fully capture what someone missed if they weren’t able to make it to your church on Sunday.
A media file can’t fully capture an event — an experience — regardless of the compression rate. If someone misses church, it’s great that they can hear the sermon on Monday morning. But hopefully — hopefully — there’s a twinge of regret as they listen. Hopefully, they regret missing the fellowship, the warmth, the connect, the energy, the inspiration, the encouragement that happens when we worship God in community. Hopefully, they regret missing communion and passing the peace and hugging good friends and praying with people who are having a hard time. Hopefully, like Catalyst, there are many elements of your weekend gatherings that can’t be downloaded or burned to a disc. Hopefully.
I mean, just look at this picture (via CatalystSpace):
Don’t you wish you were there? Yeah, me too.
