I had been pondering this exact topic when I flipped to Mark’s blog this morning and watched this clip. He says it well.

Over the last 10 years I have read and learnt a lot about how the church can express itself as a missional community and how we can creatively engage with the world around us. Mark describes this as the ‘panorama’, but then there is the question of how does this translate to real life in the context in which I live and work – the ‘practical’.

Some great ideas just aren’t worth a pinch of poop in ‘real life’ and they only reflect how detached the conference speaker has become. The other tension is that of getting so bogged down in the nitty gritty of our everyday work that we lose a sense of hope and vision for what may be possible.