This week Dr. Tim Keller will join Alan Hirsch, Darrin Patrick, Eric Mason, J.D. Greear, Tyler Jones, and Danny Akin as the main speakers at the Advance11 Conference we’re helping host in Raleigh-Durham.

Here’s a sneak preview, part 1 of a 4-part interview with Dr. Keller done for Advance the Church. In it, Dr. Keller answers two questions: Why is the Gospel so revolutionary? And, how do we train people to take the revolutionary Gospel into their context?

It’s not too late to join us. Registration will be open up until the conference. We’ll even be taking walk-ups. To sign up, go here.

Congratulations to Andy, Shannon, and Corey for your winning submissions in the Advance11 ticket giveaway yesterday. We had some great submissions, which made choosing the winners really difficult. Charlie Sheen even made an appearance. One of my favorites was this one from Zach:

Nice, work Zach. Sorry we didn’t have more tickets to give out, but we applaud your effort.

Congrats as well to @mattbarefoot and @jamesmarshallg for being randomly selected as our Twitter winners. Our ticket winners include a broke college student, a church planter, a pastor, and an advocate for special needs kids. Now that’s diversity.

If you won tickets, you will receive an email by tomorrow with instructions for how to register for the conference. If you’re on Twitter, we’ll DM you (make sure you’re following us). If for some reason you can’t make it, let us know, so we can give your ticket to someone else. To the rest of you, we really hope you can still make it.

An Evening with Tim Keller

We also want to make sure you know about another event in Durham. On Wed, May 4th, Tim Keller will be speaking at the Durham Performing Arts Center. Keller will be speaking on the biblical concept of justice and what it means to love your neighbor. If you haven’t been to DPAC, it’s an amazing venue. And all profits from the event go to bless Durham through the work of DurhamCares’ partners. You can get more information and purchase tickets at www.durhamcares.org.

Still don’t have tickets to Advance11? We don’t want you to miss it, so we’re giving away a handful of tickets. There are two ways you can win:

• Retweet our tweet from this morning. Find it here. We’ll randomly draw two winners from everyone who retweets us today.
• Comment below and tell us why you want to come to Advance11. Your answer can be funny or serious – it doesn’t matter – we just want to know why you want to come, and we’ll pick our favorites.

Both contents will close at midnight today EST. We’ll announce winners tomorrow.

Don’t want to take the chance on whether you’ll win? Get tickets and info at www.advance2011.com.

The blog is back after a long hiatus getting reading for the Advance11 Conference. By the way, ticket prices go up on Friday, so if you haven’t registered yet, don’t wait any longer. Head over to advance11.com. You won’t regret it. Hype aside, this is going to be one of the most theologically deep and missiologically practical conferences in the country, which is a rare combination. And it’s only $60 (until Friday). Oh, and Tim Keller will be there…enough said.

Keller is also speaking on Wed night (during the conference) at DPAC. A Night with Tim Keller is being sponsored by DurhamCares and all profits go to bless Durham. Get details and tickets here.

One of the highlights of my job is getting to witness what God does in the lives of people through the churches we plant. It’s a constant reminder of why we do what we do. Here’s a Twitter glimpse into what God was doing in some of our plants just last week:

Tennessee (launching Fall 2011)
TMatwood: Welcome to Twitter @JoelPolk. Member of the @BoroCityChurch team. You should follow this guy. 11:54 AM Apr 5th (that makes 22 people committed to join the City Church team)

Boston
@JanVezikov is bringing the Word tonight from Proverbs at City on a Hill Church Allston. http://t.co/Ky5Tmwo 7:34 PM Apr 3rd

Richmond
Read this wonderful story of God’s grace on the University of Richmond campus: http://rhc.to/hMPm6W 8:12 AM Apr 6th

Denver
Tonight @SummitDenver we celebrated a friend coming to know Jesus yesterday! We’ll be baptizing him when we can find h2o above freezing 10:11 PM Apr 3rd

The picture above comes from the last tweet. Many times when you plant a new church in a city, especially an unreached and unchurched city like Denver, it takes a while to see fruit. But God isn’t limited by our expectations. Two Sundays ago, Summit Denver got to see their first person choose to follow Christ.

Ryan began checking out Summit Denver about a month ago. After several weeks of attending their gatherings and sharing meals with their people, he and lead pastor Bryan Barley grabbed lunch to talk about what it means to give your life to following Jesus. As they talked, and Bryan shared the gospel, Ryan decided that he needed to repent and trust in Jesus. In the picture above, they are not only celebrating Ryan’s conversion, they are commissioning him as a missionary to the city of Denver.

Please pray for Summit Denver that God will continue to move and make disciples of himself.

If you want to know how to stay up to date with and pray for our church plants, we’ve created a list where you can follow all of them on Twitter. Check it out: http://twitter.com/SendRDU/church-plants.

Today and tomorrow we will be at Advance the Church – The Supremacy of Christ at Temple Baptist Church in Hattiesburg, MS. Temple has graciously provided live-streaming of the conference for those who couldn’t make it, which you can watch here or at www.advancethechurch.com.

Schedule (Central Time)

Monday, February 28

1:00 pm – Jim Shaddix – Colossians 1:1-8
2:00 pm – Russell Moore – Colossians 1:9-14
3:00 pm – J.D. Greear – Colossians 1:15-23
4:00 pm – Tony Merida – Colossians 1:24-2:5
5:00 pm – Baptist21 Panel w/ Merida, Greear, Jones, Moore, Shaddix

Tuesday, March 1

9:00 am – Jim Shaddix – Colossians 2:6-15
10:00 am – Russell Moore – Colossians 2:16-23
11:00 am – Tyler Jones – Colossians 3:1-11
12:00 pm – Lunch
1:15 pm – Eric Mason – Colossians 3:12-17
2:15 pm – Chuck Quarles – Colossians 3:18-4:1
3:15 pm – Fred Luter – Colossians 4:2-6
4:15 pm – David Platt
5:15 pm – All – Colossians 4:7-18