I got an invitation to attend an honest to goodness Hollywood premier.

It was a once in a lifetime experience that I would have passed on as the trek from Hawaii to Los Angles to go to a movie is a bit much and frankly, I am not that impressed by celebrities to get all that fired up about it.

But since I have a daughter who is a freshman majoring in film and had some extra miles, I thought I would suit up and mingle with the elite so that she would be encouraged to purse her craft.

Maybe suit up is not the right word.

I don’t own a suit or a tie. I did have some new black jeans and a nice Aloha shirt, which I thought would be appropriate attire since it was the premier of a surf movie,  Soul Surfer, which was based on the book that I helped write for my long time friends, the Hamilton family. (And no, I am not getting anything for this effort other than bragging rights.)

If you have been to any conference, you know that the best connections happen outside of the formal  conference  activities.  The spontaneous meals, prayers in the hallways, and late night talks with old friends and new are the richness of the Christian Community Development Association.  Yesterday morning Mark Charles pointed out that “the American Church has bought into the false notion that relationships can be between organizations.  Organizations do not develop relationships, people do.”

There were several opportunities this week to remember that and perhaps my favorite moment was a “dinner party” that started with my friend Kevin from New Orleans saying, “let’s get together!” and me replying, “I’ll bring my team.”  Next thing I knew we each had invited about five people who then invited a couple more.  When we finally got everyone in the same place at the same time we noticed a few individuals standing around seemingly with no dinner plans so we roped them in too. 

Many of the problems in Christianity are rooted in assumptions.

We assume that the Bible is inerrant and infallible. (Have you looked for yourself?) We assume God is good. (Have you read Joshua?) We assume that anyone who even questions those beliefs is a heretic. (Are you thinking that about me?) Some of our assumptions are correct, but the fact that we make assumptions is not.

I used to fail in my attempts to tell people about Jesus for one simple reason: I worked from my assumptions about the Bible. It wasn’t until I really examined where the Bible came from that I was able to effectively communicate what I believed about Jesus with other people.

An entrepreneur’s book recently reminded me of this lesson. Seth Godin, in Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, says:

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