I spent most of the day following an internet event called The Nines. Held on the ninth day of the ninth  month of the year 2009, it was a conference presented by Leadership Network and Catalyst, a group I had never heard about until I saw this internet conference advertised on a blog called “Church Crunch”. The video clip advertising this free conference was so upbeat and intriguing that I had to investigate further. I learned I had to register to participate in the conference, which I did. I also happened to be off work  the day of the conference (today) so tuning in was going to be a reality for me.

Why watch? The conference was built around this idea – what would happen if leading Christian pastors, speakers and thinkers were asked to give one piece of advice, or talk about one important thing to other pastors around the world, all within a nine minute video? Invitations were sent out to dozens of preachers and pastors, and dozens responded that they would love to participate – excellent! I recognized some of the names of those invited; figured it would be fun to hear them,  The Nines ran from 9:09am CDT to 9:09pm CDT, each  segment running pretty true to the nine minute limit. Fascinating! I don’t know how  many speakers actually participated, but it was a bunch – and most of them were very interesting. There are a lot a very committed Christian leaders out there – I rejoice for the church to have this many passionate  lovers of Jesus Christ reaching out with the gospel!

The Nines was meant to be an encouragement to pastors and church folks in leadership. I have a hard time thinking of myself in leadership at church, but I guess I am. One person commented on Twitter that since she was not a pastor, she wondered if she should be participating ; in fact, she  felt like she was was eaves-dropping. I have to admit I felt like that a bit, too, but soon got over it. I was just so caught up in all the thoughts that were being shared that I couldn’t stop watching. I tweeted some of the statements that really made me think, but I didn’t tweet nearly as many as I should have, and I didn’t get the names of some of the speakers. Apparently all this info is going to be made available to anyone who registered for the conference AFTER we fill out a survey from the Leadership Network, which they will send via email. I am very interested to see the survey, and will gladly fill it out to get the info about the speakers.

All in all, it was a great experience, with some glitches aloong the way, the most troublesome for me being the low volume. The video transmision had some bugs, also, but most of the time everything went amazingly well. I would participate in another conference of this type, especially if it were free!