MONTREAT, N.C.—After months of planning meetings, Facebook campaigns, video blog posts and eager anticipation, the 2009 College Conference at Montreat Conference Center kicked off Friday in a very animated, and nearly full, Anderson Auditorium. Conferees greeted friends new and old as they swarmed into the first keynote session of the four-day conference on “Outrageous Generosity.” Students swayed and clapped to the soulful strains of “Wade in the Water,” played by a talented and as-yet-unnamed band from Nashville. And then they shouted “Keep preaching” and “Amen” to a 73-year-old Italian minister from West Philadelphia.
Dr. Tony Campolo, professor emeritus at Eastern University and author of Red Letter Christians, began his provocative, and often humorous, presentation by illustrating the difference between power and authority. He listens to the police officer, he said, because the police officer has power. But as a young man, Campolo obeyed his mother because she spoke with authority, which she earned from the loving things she did for her family, time and time again.
In Jesus Christ, he said, God gave up all his power to come to the world as a baby in a manger, earning his great authority through his loving sacrifice.
As Campolo’s energetic storytelling branched out into politics and current events, the first rounds of “Preach it!” began to ring out. “If you think we can win through power, then you don’t understand Jesus…Herod had power; Caesar had power, but Jesus had authority.”
He discussed Revelation, comparing today’s faltering economic regime to the Babylon that John described and challenging the students to invest their lives in the kingdom of God, rather than in the seductive system of the material. When those other kingdoms pass away, Campolo asked, “will you be with the merchants who weep, or with the other people who can sing ‘Hallelujah’ because you have invested your time, your money, your energy and that which the world cannot take away?”
Campolo closed his keynote address by talking about his home church in Philadelphia, about the affirming shouts of his congregation (“I would have done much better tonight if I had my deacons instead of you people,” he said.) and about the church’s annual preach-off.
“It’s Friday!” he yelled, quoting one of his colleagues, who during the preach-off had referred to the despair of the present time and of Good Friday. But the Philadelphia preacher didn’t bear a message of doom and gloom, and neither did Campolo. “It’s Friday,” he said. “But Sunday’s coming!”
