How to love and serve millennials and vice versa

I’m en route to Tampa for the Exponential East church planting conference exponential.org this week and have a few thoughts to share. This annual event, now bi-coastal and twice a year, has unarguably been instrumental in equipping and inspiring and mobilizing people and churches for the imminent future of churches in America and around the world.

For those privileged to be there in person, I’d love to connect with you in person: I have a workshop on Wed 4/29 morning, and a free lunch on Tues 4/28 hosted by ReGenerant Network + Ambassador Network + EFCA __ rsvp at http://expoeastaacp.splashthat.com

At Exponential, the Social Media team will be live-blogging and posting to exponential.org/sharedexperience with Great Congerencing Tips and the official hashtag is #exponential on Twitter and instagram.

Plus, Exponential will have a free livestream video of all main sessions live.exponential.org – and also a digital pass for archive access. Or, host a watch party for free http://www.exponential.org/proven-tips-for-hosting-the-exponential-east-15-webcast/ to expoentially multiply the value of the experience for your whole leadership team!

From recent conversations I’ve been a part of, there’s of chatter in the marketing world, business world, and church world about demographic shifts and what organizations must do to adjust for this new reality, specifically the different values of the next generation known as the millennials. Links: my list of churches reaching millennials, #20schurch book about the millennial church tour. And got to hear Dave Ferguson tell the back story of his new book, HPFTWBTG.

I found it quite amazing how these two books echoed parallel themes for engaging millennials with an authentic Christian faith. HPFTWBTG describes the 5 longings in people’s lives & hearts, particular millennials, and the 5 awakenings that are essential to loving & serving them and also for millennials to experience true love that’s more than enough, and connect them to the way that makes life fully authentic, meaningful, purposeful, valuable, and satisfying.

2 MVPs (most valuable publications) for real practical ways for spiritually engaging millennials. Hoping to meet & greet all the authors at Exponential for their good work.

A photo posted by Tommy "Urban D." Kyllonen (@urband813) on Apr 26, 2015 at 4:56am PDT

#aside

Yes, it’s 2015, blogging this via my mobile tablet, and finding it very hard to add links easily for references above. kinda bummed that in this increasing mobile world, that long-form written thoughts on blogs is so difficult to do, compared to photos on Instagram or tweets on Twitter… yes, short-form content has its place, but I sure want long-form content to have a place on mobile too.. trying to use this WordPress app on Android for months on my djchuang.com self-hosted blog, and it hasn’t worked for a long time.. at least it connects now.. so i’m doing what I can here on my alternate blog on wordpress.com to at least get my thoughts out to the world asap.. give Google and Bing a head start to crawl and index this.. then later will have to mirror it over to djchuang.com when I have time for a laptop connection to make the links pretty and so on..

lack of diversity in main stage conference speakers

“Ok so this is getting almost… too much. Every person of color has been black, and has come to the stage in the context of either “special music” or being a recipient (and in some instances a giver) of some sort of help. This conference is in California, is touted as a national conference, and there has been no Asian or Latino leader given platform.” #catalyst

found this comment via https://www.facebook.com/yucan.chiu/posts/10151687817088488

Number of Asian Americans at Urbana 2009 Missions Conference

According to one report I’ve seen, here are some statistics about the Asian (and, by inference, Asian American and Asian North American) demographic in attendance at Urbana 2009 Student Missions Conference hosted by InterVarsity every 3 years:

… Of the 15,800 who attended Urbana 2009, 3,849 (24.4%) delegates were of Asian or South Asian descent.

… .Of the top 10 campus ministries represented, the majority of students came from InterVarsity, InterVarsity Canada, or didn’t represent a campus ministry. But the Asian ministries also were well represented:
#6. Chinese Christian Fellowship
#7. Asian American Christian Fellowship
#14. Korean Christian Fellowship

… of the top 10 countries represented at Urbana, five were from Asia:
#3. Japan
#4. South Korea
#5. China
#6. Hong Kong
#10. India

Sometimes statistics can be helpful, giving data for potentially meaningful conversations as a point of reference. Let’s see what’ll happen at Urbana 12 next week in St. Louis!! I’ll be live-blogging and connecting with as many people as I possibly can.

[update 28 Dec 2012] @UrbanaMissions Tweet:

#u12 ethnic demographics: 56% Caucasian, 30% East Asian, 7.7% African Am, 6.3% Hispanic/Latino, 6.1% Southeast Asian, 2.9% South Asian

[update April 2016] via Urbana 15 staffworker:

Urbana 15 attendance was ~16,000 and its multiethnic demographics was about 53% non-White and 47% White; ~40% Asian/Pacific Islander — inclusive of South Asian, ~7% SE Asian, 29% East Asian

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