Greenbelt 2005

Back from Greenbelt, back to school. I was writing RE schemes of work this morning. But this is a post about Greenbelt.

I had a fantastic time - great music, great talks, great worship and great company. I came away thinking why have I not been more over the years.

Friday

Maggi Dawn - 'My name is Maggi, and I'm relevaholic...' - Maggi asked why are we so eager to be relevant all the time? Is this about church being relevant to wider culture or relevant to our own lives? Left me thinking is our concern for relevance, which usuallys works out in bigger, louder, more technology, just a reflection that we theologically-impoverished - our understanding of God is too small, so we feel we need to jazz him up?

Iain Archer - was brilliant live, some great new stuff.

Saturday

David Ford and Michael O'Siadhail - 'The Poet and Theologian 1' - poetry and theology are concerned with wisdom. A wise faith has a richness which is aware of and resists the dangers of neat-packaged faith. So in the book of Job, we find Job cries out, and his friends try and bring him neat packages.

Roy Searle - 'Streams of Living Water' - we need a breadth to our spiritual life, to learn from and live with different traditions - evangelical, contemplative, incarnational, charismatic, social justice - to be without one or several, is to have an unbalanced life.

The Post Evangelical: 10 years on - panel (Dave Tomlinson, Robert Beckford, Maggi Dawn, Elaine Storkey) - a mixed discussion, where good stuff as said, but highlighted the problem of labels, especially the 'evangelical' one

Richard Giles - 'Tent People' - this was thinking about how we use the space in our church building to reflect the kind of community we are

Sunday

Communion - Revive: a great whole church attempt to do communion with 20,000 people. good liturgy, music and mix

Karen Armstrong - 'The Battle for God' - excellent hour on what fundamentalism is and how we deal with it. I must get hold of some of her books.

Corinne Bailey Rae - beautiful voice, fantastic songs

David Ford & Michael O'Siadhail - 'The Poet and the Theologian 2' - theology should contain affirmation, judgement and transformation - what can we affirm, what needs to be judged and what can we transform. Theology should be an intensive conversation. Re-reading the scriptures in different contexts. Theology for God's sake. Theology is a broker between every sphere of life.

Monday

Naim Ateek - 'Whose Jerusalem?' - a good exploration of the Middle East politics

Dave Tomlinson - 'Running into God' - God is active in the whole world, we run into God all the time

Andrew Jones - 'The Spirituality of Blogging' - only caught the first bit of this, but out of a number of seminars on blogging, this was the best because it gave a good answer to why as Christians we blog. See here for Andrew Jones' notes

Maggi Dawn - 'Reinventing the wheel?' - how can we subvert the tradition, what can we learn from the tradition and alt.worship can be simple

Betty Spackman - 'Fantasy and other real things' - looking at Christian kitsch and how we live in fantasy worlds and the recognition that Christian art does not need to make an obvious message

Comments

[Laurence]

It was a pleasure to meet you in real life, at last, there.

[si]

sounds like you chose some nice sessions to attend. I didn't think I was sorry to miss it, until after I read this post Andy!