Greetings from warm and sunny Pasadena, California!

I am here for a conference called Mighty Waters: Preaching and Living God’s Passion for Justice.

If you know me at all, you can probably already tell why I was drawn to this gathering. I’m all about striving to understand ourselves as called to live in – to breathe in – God’s desire for justice for the world and then to act – to embody – that justice in all we do. You might say we are called to exhale that breath of God’s justice into the world!

Here’s a piece of how the conference coordinators, Mark Labberton (Director of Fuller Seminary’s Ogilvie Institute of Preaching) and Bethany Hoang (Director of International Justice Mission Institute), describe what we’re hoping for this weekend:

Our bold prayer is that God will use these days together in ground-breaking ways for both our ministries and our own lives as we seek to more fully live God’s character of justice in our world.

We believe God’s heart is fully and wholly committed to the shalom of each and of all. That is amazingly good news in a glorious but broken world.

We believe God uniquely and personally enacts this commitment through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is the hope of the world.

We believe bearing witness to and being evidence of that divine reality in our living, speaking, and acting is the ministry of God’s people today. This is our daily vocation as disciples. A renewed commitment to preaching and living God’s passion for justice is essential for lives of faithful worship and effective witness. This is why it matters that we are joining together these couple of days.

We are asking God to do a great work among us. Our prayer is that this time together will deepen our lives in Christ, so that in lives of worship, our passion for justice and that of our congregations, will more nearly resemble God’s. In so doing, we may live out the call to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God (Micah 6:8).

Bold words! Bold hopes. But good words and needed hopes, it seems to me. How can you experience more of this gathering? Glad you asked!

I’m live-tweeting the event (that means I’m sending tweets about the conference as it is happening). You can check that out on my Twitter feed.  Or check out the Mighty Waters Facebook  and “like” it to see more.

Two examples of what I’ve heard already that moved me (both from the first night’s speaker, Mark Labberton):

God’s justice is human flourishing. We are meant for flourishing…and so is our neighbor.

A college student once asked me, ‘If I come to your church, will I meet people who are like Jesus?’

I hope you’ll join the conversation!