Church Visits and Conference With The Penners

It's been a busy week, so here's the update.

1. Mars Hill Seattle (Oct 14th).
We were in Seattle for the weekend last week and visited Mars Hill. This was our second time visiting at Mars Hill and our first at the new West Seattle campus. The West Seattle campus was the long-time Presbyterian Church in that neighborhood and the facility was acquired largely through a gift from the original congregation. The worship was live and the sermon was piped in from the main campus (live?). The newly remodeled facilities were very nice and the children's programs were great for our kids and VERY well organized!

2. Westport (Oct 21st).
Today we visited Westport Church (Tanasborne area near Beaverton and Hillsboro) which is a church plant of less than 2 years. We were super-welcomed at WP. As soon as we walked in, we were welcomed and helped with getting our kids into their classes -- which they all enjoyed and learned in. After getting our kids into their room (BTW: the layout of the kids area immediately upon entering the building is GREAT). WP has been in this new facility for about a year and it is a very nice tech building that has been finished for use by the church. The worship and the service were modern and inclusive with great participation from the people (much more participatory than some of the other missional churches we've visited).

3. Marriage Conference with Cliff and Joyce Penner.
We attended Imago Dei's marriage conference that featured Cliff and Joyce Penner, who have authored a number of books including The Gift of Sex and How to get Your Sex Life off to a Great Start. While we thought that it was going to be a marriage conference with some sex stuff, it ended up being essentially a 12 hour conference on sex in marriage. The conference was great and I would recommend it for all couples who want God's perspective on sex and want to have better sex (who doesn't want that!). It might seem like this conference is good for people who "like sex too much" or who need some serious help in that area, but I think that it's good for newlyweds and oldlyweds (perhaps oddlyweds as well) alike because their program is GREAT on communication. They would teach for about 15-20 minutes at a time, then provide 5-10 minutes for individually completing a questionaire on the topic then 10-15 minutes for the couple to discuss alone (not group discussions here!). We benefitted from all these communication times as well as the topics presented by the Penners. They Rock!

-Derek