The Reformed & Relevant Conference is designed to have all the vision and passion of a TED conference but with the purpose of a church conference. Following the highly successful TED model, each speaker will have 18 minutes to speak but, to keep presentations focused on spiritual ideals, an extra 2 minutes will be added for the Bible reading and/or prayer preceding each 18 minute presentation. The total duration of each of the 40 presentations will be 20 minutes. All speakers will emphasize foundational truths behind the most successful Reformed church communities since Luther launched the Reformation in 1517. Therefore, speakers will cover 500 years of doctrine and history in 800 minutes.

The conference must encourage mature faith and discipleship. Discipleship is often most effective when we connect with people at their points of pain. God knows that there is huge pain in the schools, businesses, courts, and other places that churches often fail to reach. Discipleship (guided by Biblical theology, the gospel, preaching, conversion, membership, leadership, and other marks from www.9Marks.org) must be taken to the right places at times when people are ready to acknowledge God's plan to replace suffering with hope. See e.g., Romans 5:3-5. The conference speakers will address the 40 pain points at www.Covenant.net/Problems with solutions summarized at www.Covenant.net/Solutions.

The goal of the conference is inspire America's 400,000 churches to reaffirm more of the Reformed teachings and partner with other churches around the world to show how Christ has solutions to all of the greatest problems plaguing people globally. As we pray about needs in the neighborhoods around each church, we see that all spiritual problems begin with an improper view of Christ, a false understanding of Christ's bride (the church), and/or incorrect knowledge of the relationship between Christ and His Church with the believer. For 500 years, the Reformers have taught that solutions to these problems start with confessing Christ as Lord and building the confessional church.

Throughout the conference, pastors from confessional churches will explain how time-tested statements of faith, such as the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, help believers reflect Christ's character into all areas of culture. To cover hundreds of pages of confessional teachings, summarizing thousands of Bible passages, the conference speakers will focus on helping attendees develop a mature understand of Christ's church (9 Marks); Christ's teachings (6 Solas); our relationship with Christ (3 Means of Grace); and the Christian's role in the major educational, familial, economic, judicial, and ecclesiastical institutions (5 Rooms). Presentations will show how the 6 main elements of Christ's character are evident in the covenants God made with man, in the teachings about reflecting Christ's character to the world, and in the structure of covenant community relationships.

Conference speakers will emphasize the development of covenant community churches. Such covenant communities give us proven solutions for problems afflicting individuals, families, churches and governments. Attendees will see how to work with organizations built upon God's 3 primary covenantal institutions to address the problems that most concern Christ and His followers. The conference sermons will show how educational, familial, economic, judicial, and ecclesiastical problems are addressed when churches work with families and governments to bring discipleship to the classroom, family room, boardroom, courtroom, and upper room (where elders often need to spend more time with Jesus).

By emphasizing the role of qualified church elders, this conference can achieve what Focus on the Family failed to achieve with the Truth Project. The conference can succeed where Bill Bright failed to succeed with his "7 Mountains" effort to address the 7 big cultural battles. The conference can make a difference in areas where megachurches are having little measurable impact in equipping members to build educational, judicial and economic institutions that transform culture.

What can sustain this renewed focus on the teachings of the Reformers? We need to reaffirm what Calvin, Luther and the Puritans taught about covenantal relationships with God and with one another. We need to build upon the covenant theology of the Puritans and the "Sphere Sovereignty" ideas form Abraham Kuyper. In particular, we need to work through the local confessional churches in each community to restore a covenantal understanding of the church, the family, and the government. This covenantal leadership model was never applied by Focus on the Family, Bill Bright, and others who tried to bring about change without emphasizing the role of the confessional church.

What can we learn from the unfinished efforts of Bill Bright, Jim Dobson and other parachurch leaders? Instead of using a big mainframe computer at a big national ministry headquarters, we need to use the distributive processing of the type that made Google successful. While respecting what Scripture says about church networks, we must unite local churches like Google united computers. Empowering local confessional churches to build a decentralized and scalable network, one covenant community at a time, will be more successful than top-down leadership that is long on rhetoric at the national level and short on results in local church communities.

The Reformed & Relevant conference may end up having the most influence as a virtual conference with a webpage linked to sermons excerpted from SermonAudio.com. Thankfully, there are enough excellent Reformed sermons online to support all of the topics on the agenda at www.covenant.net/500thAgenda. The conference creators plan to identify the best 40 sermons to cover the conference topics in 800 minutes (with 20 minutes per sermon). Existing online sermons will be cropped to 20 minutes and enhanced with graphics. Audio and graphical elements will be merged as at www.Covenant.net/GraceVideo. Attendees will receive workbooks with outlines of the 40 sessions, graphics, and links to additional content on the web. Anyone frustrated by the short 20-minute duration of each session can easily access additional content using links embedded in the conference workbook.

The conference will involve real pastors speaking live whenever we can find men who have the passion and training to address some or all of the 40 conference topics from a confessional perspective. We welcome help in finding local pastors who want to support the conference by preaching the Reformed & Relevant messages like the pastors at SermonAudio.com. As we receive feedback from local pastors, we can make the brochure more engaging to the various constituencies that need Christ's hope. The actual event should involve an MC playing sermon recordings and/or encouraging live presentations by local pastors.

Content from the 500^th anniversary conference will be put online at covenant.net with plans to maintain the content for centuries into the future. Then generations of believers can be ready for the 600th, 700th, and 1000th anniversaries of the Reformation. Given all the hits generated by www.covenant.net, it is possible to get tens of millions of sermon views over the next few centuries even if only 10 people attend the live 500^th anniversary celebration. Therefore, the size of the attendance at the October 2017 event does not matter as much as the content being developed and recorded before and during the event.

In just 800 minutes, the Reformed & Relevant conference will cover thirty topics that underscore the importance of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Conference organizers refuse to dumb down the message of the Reformers. At the 500th anniversary, we must show people the deep and broad wisdom of the Reformed writers and preachers. There is a need to breathe new life into what has worked in Luther's Augustinian monasteries, Calvin's Geneva, Puritan New England, and many successful Reformed churches around the world that reach into the areas of greatest need. Conference presentations will show how Reformed teachings are now embodied successfully in the educational, familial, economic, judicial, and ecclesiastical ministries of solid Reformed churches around the world. Following proven models, we must show that it is possible to be solidly Reformed while also being extremely relevant to the biggest issues on peoples' hearts. Discipleship is essential, but those of us doing discipleship in the trenches need air support from the pulpit. Sermons at covenant.net can provide the air support to inspire new passion, vision and purpose among believers in Southern California and globally.

Note: The October 2017 conference will be a "virtual conference" with sermons available at the above links but future conferences may be live events