I attended the Orange Conference before Drive, but blogged about them in reverse order for no good reason. Here are my thoughts and takeaways from Orange:

• The Gwinnett Center is a pretty amazing place.
• It was cool to hang out with Mike Kelly and his crew for much of the conference.
• There was obvious intentionality in having less of a “star worship leader” feel, and more of a focus on having a community of worship leaders lead the times of singing together.
• A lot of the guest speakers did not share a message or “talk”, and instead were interviewed by Reggie.
• The “tweet up” (coffee house meet up of folks on Twitter) was fun. Free smoothie’s were a plus, too.
• The Orange staff team works their butts off, and I’m amazed they can pull off a conference like that with a staff their size.
• Rev Run was a guest, and that was pretty cool.
• Perry Noble’s talk was tied for my favorite part of the conference. He talked about his 7 core convictions about Family Ministry. He killed it, and I laughed so hard I was in pain.
• My other favorite part of the conference was connecting with other ministry leaders and Orange staff.
• The new Orange website launched, http://www.whatisorange.org/
• The new Orange Parents website/blog launched: http://www.orangeparents.org/

I’m looking forward to the Orange Tour coming to Washington D.C. in the fall, and I hope a ton of our children’s ministry volunteers will be able to attend.