Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Chilling and working in the sunshine

Having a good time in sunny Leicestershire at the Newly Accredited Ministers' conference. Pat Took has been doing the Bible readings (scintillating) and I spoke yesterday on leadership (what Occupy and chaos theory contribute to our reading of Paul) which was well received and led to a pretty lively discussion.

This seems to be a good and relatively content group of NAMs with some really heartening stories of what's happening in their churches - which is a huge encouragement. My small group is full of stories and is a wonderfully diverse bunch, indicating that baptist ministry is in rude health.

Planning continues apace for the street party on Sunday. I have an excellent team of people in my church!

3 comments:

Andy Goodliff said...

Simon, the diversity of ministers (and their churches) doing creative and interesting things was what I felt about last year as well - this is my basis for saying baptist churches have a future and it might not necessarily all be about a pioneer ministry one ...

Hazel said...

Sounds an exciting conference.

Looking forward to the street party on Sunday. Wish we could be actively involved in helping, but we know that these days we'd be more of a hindrance then a help, but we certainly are supporting from the wings. x

simon said...

Lots of the good thinking and ideas on view at the NAMs conference were in inherited churches prepared to take risks and do things differently. There weren't a lot of pioneers there - as there aren't that many who are NAMs.

I think we need pioneers doing new things; some of them will be working in inherited church situations and some will be starting exciting new things who knows where.

Wherever they are, we need them because we need new thinking and missional activity