Noble describes his vision

Perry Noble delivered his much anticipated presentation at Catalyst this morning and taught about vision. In case you weren’t able to attend, here’s some of what you missed.

When we make any agenda of the church anything other than Jesus, we make the church a prostitute….

You need a Holy Ghost enema….

God will always test a church planter in the first year to find out if he is a prophet or a prostitute.

What has he been watching lately?

Some more:

If Andy Stanley walked into your church, what change would he make?

First, Stanley would rewrite your Bibles. I wonder if it might be better to wonder what Jesus and Paul would do if they visited your church.

Don’t lead from inspiration, lead from revelation.

Many religious leaders have found that telling your followers to do something because God told you is very effective.

You should be able to see your vision and feel it.

If you can feel your vision, you probably need to see a doctor.

God is waiting for us to step up and take action.

God needs a hand. Hurry up!

A Catalyst conference question

For those of you attending Catalyst in Atlanta this week, if you come back home motivated to do great feats of evangelism, does that make you a catalytic converter?

Fill in the bio

Catalyst Conference’s bio for Perry Noble describes him this way:

Perry is a gifted communicator and teacher, and his biblical wisdom and leadership insights exceed his years.

I’ve seen a lot of Noble’s leadership insights on his blog, so that part of the bio isn’t terribly remarkable, even though IMHO they’re generally recycled authoritarian corporate bromides (the sort that Keep-Pushing Furtick is also quite fond of).

My impression is that Noble’s skill is in preaching simple messages in personal and controversial ways. There’s obviously great value to repeating old and obvious truths, but I don’t know that you’d claim it as special wisdom.

I suspect that the Catalyst bio is boilerplate PR hype, and I’d be surprised if there are many NewSpringers whose primary reason for attending was to hear Noble’s advanced Biblical wisdom. Given Noble’s tendency to denigrate advanced Biblical knowledge, to give him credit for so much unique wisdom seems creative.

That said, however, I don’t listen to many of Noble’s sermons, and I don’t know the details of Noble’s theological insights as well as a regular NewSpringer might. I would like to know what you’ve heard from Noble, after you strip away the personal anecdotes, insults and jokes, that would constitute surprisingly deep biblical wisdom.

I’ve told you why I discount the Catalyst description (and for all we know, Noble probably does as well), but I’m genuinely interested in what the Catalyst leaders and Noble fans are hearing from his preaching that sounds so biblically wise.

The comments will stay open for a week. Please jump in, make your pastor look good, and educate us.

(Note, the comments for this post are intended as an opportunity for Noble supporters. Posts that just jump all over him will probably be deleted.)

Who’s playing?

Perry Noble talked up October’s Catalyst conference on his Twitter today, describing it as the Super Bowl of fall conferences.

I noticed that the list of speakers includes Rob Bell (and PN).

If it’s a Super Bowl, would I be safe to assume that Bell was only invited there to play the part of the losing team?