Late Night Rant: Why I didn’t go to "the Piper conference"

I’m probably going to upset someone with this. That’s not the goal. I only want to explain why I don’t regret one bit that I voluntarily skipped John Piper’s Desiring God conference this last weekend.

Does “You shall have no other gods before me” ring a bell?

I love a lot of musicians. They are very important to me, and I hold many of them in very high esteem. But when I see them live, I do my very best to not treat them as anything more than the human they are. He or she may have created something greater than I can or said something that inspired me more than I can describe, but the minute I say “[insert musician] is amazing” instead of “[insert musician] creates amazing music,” I know I’m in trouble.

I feel the same should hold true of those that put so much value into prominent Christians, maybe even more so. Certainly it’s nice to see that people have so much respect for a man that clearly has devoted his life to understanding the Gospel. My concern is more with the fact that the “Don’t Waste Your Life” conference was dubbed “the Piper conference” within days of its announcement. (I had to go to his site to look up the official name.)

A rule of thumb I’d like to propose: if the person teaching the conference/writing the book/speaking the sermon/leading the worship is being held in higher regard than the content he or she is presenting, it’s time to question priorities. For as much buzz as I heard about the event, before and after, I still don’t know what it was about beyond what its official name tells me. That to me is a bad sign.

The irony is painful

I heard a lot of talk about how this “could be a once in a lifetime chance” coming from everyone from friends to respected pastors. A once in a lifetime chance for what? To spend your hard-earned money and two days of your time watching a guy speak out of the Bible you read every day, only to find that he puts the recordings on his website less than 48 hours later for free? It hurts me to wonder at the man hours that were spent to put this all together. There is pain in seeing the irony that so many “wasted” their time and money to see someone in person who could have saved thousands of hours and dollars by speaking his message into a microphone and putting it online.

I apologize for being so brash. Being so entrenched in Christian culture has only made me jaded and I don’t think that’s the way it was meant to be. I just can’t help it when the contradictions are so glaring.

I’m not going to hold firmly to my statements, though: show cases of truly changed lives of those that attended the conference or tell me where my thinking has gone wrong. Please. It hurts to tear down my own people so I don’t want to be doing so unnecessarily.