it’s snowed and rained and been cold every day so far in winnipeg, but we have had a great time. i was very worried that anything we might have to offer from london might not resonate or connect with somewhere so far away (i think bill was slightly nervous as well as he had persuaded the planning group to invite us). friday night was the big night. we had been flown from london to do a two hour presentation. and (phew) it went wonderfully well.

we led a worship experience (if anyone is visiting from the conference hi! a list of where most of the items – music, images, liturgy etc is here – the parable of the sower is by jonbirch). and then i spoke on alternative worship, mission shaped church and some of what is happening in the uk. the thing that seemed to really connect was the notion that insights from cross cultural mission have a lot to offer in our own contexts. i think the reason this thought hit home in the united church is that there is a perception that mission is a bad word because of the imperialistic history of mission (the imposing of our culture on foreign cultures). so when i suggested that maybe there is a good and contextual history of mission to learn from and that the imperialism we rightly have turned away from is still playing out but in our own culture (i.e. we expect people to come to us and buy into our culture to get God) it really sparked peoples thinking. i can’t post any notes because i didn’t have any – i just had a lot of slides in the presentation that reminded me what i was talking about… people have asked for slides or the quotes or whatever so i have uploaded some of them along with some i never got round to talking about. if you want to see the images of grace have a look at the grace pages on small fire. flea circus was a playstation 2 ad from a few years back – not sure where you can get that now. and the morphing jesus video is a worship trick that you can download.

it was also great to meet eric elnes who is leading a very creative church, scottsdale united using the arts and jazz in worship in phoenix. his stuff was very complementary to what we were doing. hopefully both together sparked people enough to do the imaginative work of how to grow church and express worship in the soil of their own cultures/contexts. he is part of what is being termed progressive christianity which seems to bit a bit of a new movement stirring. i need to find out a bit more about it.  it felt like a really small world when i discovered that bonnie greene, the other keynote speaker, used to publish materials for the institute of christian studies in toronto – their books really helped shape my thinking about 20 years ago…

dave is preaching this morning at bill’s church – knox. (btw bill’s nick name has become ‘the old bill’). bill is an amazing person – it has been brilliant to get to know him. he has amazing insights and wisdom and creativity. he is also very chaotic so you are never quite sure until the last minute what he is going to do or produce but everything he led or did at the conference was artistic genius – the crafting of words, turns of phrase etc… i have discussed blogging with bill as he clearly hangs out in that world but he says he could never keep a blog together. but he has so many nuggets to share with the world that i am trying to persuade him to e-mail me whenever he finds something or creates something new and i will start a category on the blog called the old bill to post these nuggets to…

the morph planning team have created an online community web site to share resources which is a great idea.