mgpcpastor's blog

Thanks to a heads up from Isaac I tuned into the live stream of last night’s session at the Oxygen Conference.
The streaming was buggy in the extreme, so the talks by John Lennox and John Piper were disjointed, to say the least.
I don’t know if it was imagination, but the streaming seemed to be getting better by the end.
According to the little ticker thing at the bottom of the screen there seemed to be upwards toward 300 of us trying to watch.
I was late into the talk by John Lennox, but he seemed a good foil for Piper.
It was interesting, in view of what I’d read online, to contrast the earnestness of Piper with the laughter response from the audience.
Now there are times when the speaker does attempt to consciously change the tone by a lighter comment.
Sometimes the audience laughs out of a self-recognition of something that has convicted them.
But last night there were times when Piper was being deadly earnest and the audience response of laughter seemed out of place.
They were finding humour where Piper was trying to be anything but funny.
Maybe people are being conditioned to come and hear a Bible talk with a view that it’s something like a training session and not an encounter about the state of their souls.