Speakers
Jonathan Acuff
Author
For the last 10 years Jonathan Acuff has helped a variety of organizations tell their story including the Home Depot, Bose, Staples, Chick-fil-A, and North Point Community Church. In addition to his many day jobs, he also writes a blog called www.stuffchristianslike.net, which is one of the most widely read Christian blogs with readership in more than 98% of the countries in the world. His first book, which is an exploration of satire and faith, is due out from Zondervan in April 2010. He and his wife live with their two daughters outside of Atlanta, Georgia.
Leroy Barber
President, Mission Year
Leroy Barber has dedicated more than 20 years to eradicating poverty, confronting homelessness, restoring local neighborhoods, healing racism, and living what Dr. King called “the beloved community.”
Leroy starts projects that shape society; In 1990, burdened by the plight of the Philadelphia’s homeless, he founded Restoration Ministries, to serve homeless families and children living on the streets. In 1997, he joined FCS Urban Ministries, to serve as the founding Director of Atlanta Youth Academies, a private elementary school, to provide quality Christian education for low-income families in the inner city.
He is currently the President of Mission Year, a national urban initiative introducing 18-29 year olds to missional and communal living in city centers for one year of their lives. Rev. Barber is the Pastor of a church plant, Community Fellowships Church; and on the boards of Atlanta Youth Academy and DOOR. Leroy was also chosen as a contributor to the ground-breaking book, UnChristian: What a New Generation Thinks About Christianity and Why It Matters.
Leroy is married to Donna and together they have three children, Jessica, Joshua and Joel.
www.missionyear.org
www.newneighbor.org
Bob Lupton
Founder of FCS Urban Ministries, Author
Bob Lupton has invested the last 34 years of his life in inner-city Atlanta. In response to a call that he first felt while serving in Vietnam, he left a budding business career to work with delinquent urban youth. Bob and his wife Peggy and their two sons sold their suburban home and moved into the inner-city where they have lived and served as neighbors among those in need. Their life’s work has been the rebuilding of urban neighborhoods where families can flourish and children can grow into healthy adults.
Bob is a Christian community developer, an entrepreneur who brings together communities of resource with communities of need. Through FCS Urban Ministries – a non-profit organization which he founded – he has developed two mixed income subdivisions, organized a multi-racial congregation, started a number of businesses, created housing for hundreds of families and initiated a wide range of human services in his community. He is the author of the books Theirs in the Kingdom, Return Flight, Renewing the City, Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life and the widely circulated “Urban Perspectives”, monthly reflections on the Gospel and the poor. Bob has a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Georgia. He serves as speaker, strategist, and inspirer with those throughout the nation who seek to establish God’s Shalom in the city.
Chris Heuertz
International Executive Director, Word Made Flesh
Too often, we get bogged down in the trappings of spirituality so that we can’t see the world that needs our involvement or the God who calls us to serve his people with him. As the international executive director of Word Made Flesh (WMF), a ministry that exists to serve Jesus among the poorest of poor people worldwide, Chris Heuertz is not immune to such blindness, but he is able to share how God continues to restore his spiritual vision through his intense experiences in global mission and his personal life. In his new book, Simple Spirituality, Heuertz highlights five disciplines that can help us break through the barriers that keep us from seeing God and others clearly: humility, community, simplicity, submission and brokenness.
Since 1992, Chris and his wife, Phileena, have traveled through nearly seventy countries working with very impoverished people, including gypsies, children with AIDS, prostituted women and girls, recovering drug addicts, street children, and refugees. While he was still in college, Heuertz spent a formative summer working with Mother Teresa in her House for the Dying. Heuertz has also studied archaeology and Hebrew in Jerusalem and spent six months in Peru with Phileena working with WMF.
In September of 1996, Heuertz was appointed international executive director of Word Made Flesh. Within six years, this struggling mission organization with a U.S. staff of three grew to a vibrant, spontaneously expanding community of more than one hundred staff members and a board of directors. Today WMF is comprised of nearly two hundred staff worldwide in countries such as India, Romania, Nepal, Bolivia, Argentina, Sierra Leone, Brazil and Peru. WMF staff live in “incarnational communities” among those whom they desire to serve, which often means urban slums, red-light districts and refugee camps.
Jeff Shinabarger
Social Innovator, GiftCardGiver.com
Jeff is a social entrepreneur, experience designer and avid creator of new cause marketing ideas. He is the co-founder of Original Event, Fermi Project, and the Q event. He is gifted at creatively communicating the needs of the poor to the greater culture and is actively launching macro and grassroots campaigns for International Justice Mission, Hope International, Rwanda Clean Water, Suffered Enough, Gift Card Giver, Prison Fellowship and Mission Year.
Jeff spent three years as Brand Director & Product Development for Catalyst, the Next Generation Leadership Conference. He is actively restoring his neighborhood, East Atlanta Village with his wife, Andre, and boxer, Max.
www.jeffshinabarger.com
www.giftcardgiver.com
Artists and Activists
Zach Williams
Musician
Zach currently resides with his wife Stacy in Brooklyn and would tell you that his music represents the communities he has had the privilege to pass through, experience, and the ones he is still holding on to. His voice carries layers of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and Adam Duritz. The blend is refreshing and above all honest. Zach has formed a new band since arriving in New York. The band’s Americana folk sound drifts towards all out rock n roll at moments and Zach performs as if he is strapped to the front of a freight train. Zach and the band’s crowning achievement thus far is crafting a live show that is both approachable and yet coursing with adrenaline. You can dance to it too. It leaves you feeling like you have spent the evening hearing the stories of your close friends.
Zach brings and open and collaborative spirit to the music he makes. He invites listeners to come in and live for a while in his songs, to take what you can and leave what you will. His music is not complete without the people who shape it, the people who are shaped by it, and God who holds it all together.