Wednesday, May 02, 2007

conference report (take 2)

One of the problems keeping the momentum going following our church conference is that we have so few opportunities for extended conversations in the normal run of church life. That, of course, is the reason we had the conference!

But we've identified a clutch of issues to raise at the next church meeting which will hopefully set the agenda for the two or three church meetings after that. I guess my hope is that by the end of the year - sooner preferably - we will have made refinements to the the way we do belonging, discipleship and leadership that will enable us to be more effective in our mission.

I'm off to Brighton at the weekend for the Baptist assembly - an important gathering of our clan which I'm looking forward to. I'm co-hosting Prism, the alternative strand, for the second and final time and am expecting it to be even better than last year.

I'm reading C J Sansom's third Matthew Shardlake novel - Sovereign - which is a wonderfully intricate tale of plots against the king at the fag end of Henry VIII's reign. I've also been reading some papers on meals in the ancient world from an SBL seminar hosted by Philip Harland. In particular two papers by Dennis E Smith have reminded how central the meal table was to the formation of Christian identity - and raised a stack more questions about the size and organisation of early Christian communities. Great stuff which you'll find on Philip Harland's website if you're interested: www.philipharland.com/meals/GrecoRomanMealsSeminar.htm.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Had a thought - why wait for a "church meeting?" You have one on a Sunday morning with many more people present! I spoke to Fred, he is doing more of the questioning on what could be termed serious issues, on a Sunday morning. He's also thinking about stopping church meetings altogether and having them as part of the Sunday morning scenario.