The Furious Love Event is over, and by all accounts it was a smashing success. My crew and I are used to working long hours when we go places to shoot, but this was other level. When we got back home to Chicago, we took 3 days off and all felt like we had just come back from Africa–it was jet lag without the jet!
Many people have asked me to write an update explaining what the week was like, and I think I speak for most people who attended that writing, or even talking about what happened at that thing is hard to do because what happened was on such a deep level that words simply won’t suffice. If you were to look at the surface, you could say that many people were healed, encouraged, challenged, and set free. You could say we had a packed house every night, and the speakers brought their A-game every session. You could say 9 different speakers with various viewpoints and beliefs all came together in one heart to call the worldwide church to action. You could point out that many are telling us this was the single best, most impactful event they have ever been to in their lives. You could say a lot of things about it, and they would all most likely be true. But to try to explain to you what happened Saturday night, for instance, when Philip Mantofa brought a word of such simplicity to a crowd of die-hard believers, and then to try to explain how the Holy Spirit fell with such ferocity afterwards is to do the whole thing a terrible injustice.
When it was all over, I ran into my dad and Linda Piippo, the wife of the head pastor at Redeemer Fellowship, standing in the back of the church. She was crying, as almost everyone was at that point, and trying to compose herself. “I feel shell shocked,” were her words, and I thought those four words pretty well summed up how I felt when it was all over. The Event was a trauma to the system of comfortable Christianity and a world of excuses. It was incredibly fun and terribly stretching at the same time. I have never experienced anything quite like it.
I hate to say “you had to be there”, but this is one of those times when that’s pretty much all that can be said. My crew and I now have the long, hard task of taking 2 TB of footage and creating a mammoth 11 DVD series from everything we filmed. I can only hope that we were able to catch even a sliver of the power and majesty that emanated from the King all week. It was a holy time, and in some ways, it felt a little historic, especially on Saturday night. What Philip unleashed on that place, and indeed on America, was something to behold. My prayer now is that it will not stop within the four walls of that church in Michigan, or even the DVD players of the many thousands who will see it when we’ve finished putting it together.
For those of you who are wondering, the DVD series will include every session, plus the Q&A session (which turned out to be incredible), and an entire DVD from behind-the-scenes that I’m calling Viewpoints, where I ask each speaker many of the same questions in an effort to give as many sides to the hot button topics of the films as possible. It’s going to be great for small groups especially. We’re hoping to have that released by late May/early June, so bear with us in patience as we strive to create the gold standard of conference/teaching DVDs.
