Well, seven of the men from our church arrived safe and sound via auto, checked into our hotel in North Hollywood, and ate a decent dinner at a nearby Italian cafe. We’re pretty psyched about the conference.

Tomorrow we’ll head over to Grace Church at 8am and register, have a quick breakfast, and shuffle in for the first general session where John MacArthur will be the keynote speaker.

And the hotel internet is down, so I’m blogging from my Blackberry! Though there will be wifi available at the conference tomorrow so I’ll be back online properly then.

(Welcome to those of you visiting from Tim Challies’ site… I hope to be posting photos in addition to the standard fare of text to give you a sense of the conference as a whole)

Well, it appears that proliferous Christian conference blogger Tim Challies won’t be attending this week’s Shepherd’s Conference held at Grace Community Church in Southern California. This annual conference aims to equip and encourage pastors and church leaders. From what I hear, there are up to 4000 attendees registered for this year’s conference!

The conference is comprised primarily of general sessions (a.k.a. “keynotes”) and numerous conference seminars, though there will also be a number of other resources, including a well-reputed bookstore and opportunities to simply network and enjoy fellowship with other like-minded church leaders. More details on the conference can be found at their website overview here.

In Tim’s absence, I’m going to try my hand at “liveblogging” the conference. It happens to be my first time attending as well. So after each general session, and throughout the conference (held from Wed-Fri this week), I plan to post summaries & reflections on our blog as soon as I can after each one. You can expect to find them all under the general category link:

http://dinghome.net/category/shepherds-conference-2008/

For those of our readers not so confident in my blogging abilities, or looking for an even richer experience, the folks at Shepherd’s Conference have generously offered a free live video stream of all general sessions for those who are unable to attend the conference in person. Speakers at the general sessions will include John MacArthur, Al Mohler, Steve Lawson, Rick Holland, Phil Johnson, and Tom Pennington.

We shall see how it goes. I leave tomorrow afternoon for the 6 hour drive from the San Francisco Bay Area in the early afternoon with two other men from our church from which 7 men in total will be in attendance. For those of you blog readers also attending, leave a comment, perhaps we can meet each other at the conference!