Imparted Wisdom from Impart

Pastor Steven Furtick » Blog Archive » Married Guys Listen Up.

In this video from IMPART, Steven Furtick is joined on stage by special guest Perry Noble. The first thing that hit me after watching this video is that someone paid $700 to watch these guys sit around and talk. Apparently, being able to draw a large crowd to a church service makes you an expert on all things. For instance, from the video, here’s Noble on marriage:

The problem with some pastors marriages is you want your wife to understand you and she don’t. She loves you. She married you. She will never understand you.

Maybe this is true in some cases, but Perry doesn’t strike me as a particularly complex guy. I mean, here’s what he says just a couple seconds later:

We’re men. If it doesn’t have anything to do with sex we forget it.

Luckily for us, Perry doesn’t stop there. He continues to impart his valued wisdom. On women:

Two guys can get in a fight and five minutes later we can go to lunch and be best friends again. Two women get in a fight, they’re not even gonna talk in Heaven.

Man. I wish I had known that women were incapable of forgiveness and grace before I got married. Oddly though, In the past twelve years, I’ve found my wife to be the most forgiving person I’ve ever met. I guess if Pastor P is right, she’ll show her true womanly vengeful side soon enough.

Now, that wisdom alone would have been worth at least $700 to me, but believe or not, Perry shares more. On parenting:

(To an older pastor) How did you raise a little girl that doesn’t hate church? He said this, I wrote this down. He said, “I never talked negatively about the church in front of my little girl.”

That’s good. I do wonder if the opposite is true. Should Perry talk negative about his little girl in front of the Church? I mean, it does seem that every time she has a bathroom accident, he tweets it.

Now, I know that more was discussed at Impart, and I hope that there are subjects where Steven and Perry are more adept, but with Unleash coming up soon, Impart just finished, and who know what else after that, I just don’t understand the draw. What do you think these guys will say that is worth paying to hear? I think it all comes down to the large crowds and hoping some of that success will rub off.  The critics are always accused of jealousy, but I think you have to be pretty envious of someone to pay $700 just to hear their secrets.

It’s kind of like dieting, I suppose. We all know how to lose weight: Eat less, exercise more. Yet millions of books and videos are sold each year that in some form or another tell people just that. We keep buying these products hoping that there will be some magic combination that will allow us to wake up and be the person we want to be… with little or no effort. My guess is that is the motivation for a large group of people that keep going to these conferences. Ok, I’ve read my Bible. I know what the Church is, and what it should be…but maybe, if I go to this one more conference, I’ll hear the secret that will bring me 10,000 members overnight.

Let me save you some money: It’s not gonna happen. Even if you follow Furtick’s advice point by point and do everything exactly the way he did it, your odds of getting similar results are almost non-existent. I think even he would tell you that, though if you really believed it, he would lose money.

Read the Bible.

Do what it says.

Be faithful.

Don’t measure success on a worldy scale.

Make all checks payable to James Downing.

What I learned at Thr3e

After the huge success of their Thr3e conference, Elevation decided to do it again this year and call it Impart. They also more than doubled the registration price for the one day event from $300 to $700. It seems that registration hasn’t been going as quickly as they may have hoped (some might be inclined to say SCOREBOARD), because they have started offering discounts, specials, and even giving away a Kindle per day to registrants. Also, to hype the event, Pastor Steven has had staff members blog about the lessons they took away from Thr3e.

For those of you still weighing your options about going to IMPART, here’s what one Elevation staffer had to say:

John Bishop, Ministries Pastor
The biggest thing I took away from THR3E was the way we took care of everyone who came.  And, when I say, “took care,” I’m saying we did everything we could possibly imagine to make their day with us as smooth and memorable as possible.

So, the great lesson he took away from Thr3e is that Elevation is awesome. If that’s worth $700 to you, knock yourself out.