so, what's this Omega thing?

As I blogged yesterday, we started filming for Omega. It's not a movie. It's not a frat. It's an eight week dvd study on what the Bible says about the end times.

For the first ten years or so of our ministry, I didn't bother thinking about the end times. I was more concerned with what I felt were the immediatly relevant needs of the people I worked with. In my opinion, most end times students fell into one of two schools of thought: Pie-in-the-Sky or Hide Guns & Butter...so I just avoided it.

In the last few years, I've taken a slow turn in my thought process - but a true turn, to be sure. The most ignored area of study - particularly among young leaders - is generally that of Revelation and Daniel. We've read the first half of Daniel (the killer VBS stories) and pretty much ignored the back half. We've relegated Revelation to being used as inspiration for murals on the side of custom vans. We've joked about it. And we've let a fiction series reinforce (or in some cases, form) our theology. I came to the realization that by the time eschatology is immediately relevant, it will be to late to do the homework.

In the Omega course, Mike is laying out eight sessions as an overview of what the Bible says. Kelsey and I are writing study guides, etc....sort of an End Times Alpha course (hence, Omega - giving credit to Jackson Bohlender, who beat Mike Bickle to the name on that one).

The 8 dvd's, 8 accompanying audio teachings to go deeper, study guides and leader toolkit are expected to be available for the OneThing conference at the end of the month. I am not expecting to sleep much between now and then.