Sunday, June 06, 2010
Annual Conference - part 3
I went out last night so I missed posting but will make up for it later. Right now I'm headed to what sounds like it will be a very cool youth event. more later!
Friday, June 04, 2010
Annual Conference - part 2
I've had more fun so far than I expected. I think that's because I'm a social person by nature and the fact that I went to seminary in Kansas City means I know quite a few folks around the conference - professors, pastors, and leaders. It's been like a reunion of sorts, and I think that's part of the point. When John Wesley started this who idea of conferencing, part of it was for the pastors to get together and lift each other up. He understood the power of being with your peers and talking with them about what's going well and what's a struggle. You build relationships and learn best practices and perhaps also get some insight into yourself.
Aside from the socializing, I'm enjoying the theme of this year's MO Annual Conference - Growing Deeper. We have a tree symbol hanging up in front of the assembly, not quite a tree of life since the roots aren't as substantial as the branches, but close. Opening worship was done in a contemporary style with words on the screen but no music to look at or liturgy to follow. The sermon was good, with a lot of stories and references to John Wesley, but it ended with talk about numbers - and this is a big struggle for me.
Aside from the socializing, I'm enjoying the theme of this year's MO Annual Conference - Growing Deeper. We have a tree symbol hanging up in front of the assembly, not quite a tree of life since the roots aren't as substantial as the branches, but close. Opening worship was done in a contemporary style with words on the screen but no music to look at or liturgy to follow. The sermon was good, with a lot of stories and references to John Wesley, but it ended with talk about numbers - and this is a big struggle for me.
How do we measure success in the church? Is it in the number of people listed as "members" of our churches? Is it in the number of people who show up for worship on Sunday? Does it have to about numbers at all? I prefer to think of quality rather than quantity but how do you attempt to measure quality of churches? or the Christians who attend them? I guess you'd have to start by determining the goal, the point of the church in the first place. Talking with an old friend tonight, he stated that the ministry of the church is to change lives. I can go with that. But how you measure your success at changing lives? What kind of change are we talking about? If a church has only 20 people in worship every Sunday but is feeding the homeless in their neighborhood, are they not changing lives? Perhaps more than the megachurch of 5000 that has people showing up for small group activities? I just don't know that we can boil it down to numbers and i get frustrated when we insist that we have to have a way to know if all of these program we try to do are working. I'm not convinced that the changes that have the most impact are going to manifest in the numbers that can be tracked at the conference office. What do you think? How does it work in your church or conference?
Thursday, June 03, 2010
Missouri Annual Conference - Part 1
I'm a slacker and I know it. I haven't been blogging regularly for a while now, and as I'm gathering with United Methodist friends from all over Missouri this weekend, I'm trying to understand why. Many of them check my blog to see if I've posted and all I can come up with is that I've been busy doing other things. Yes, sadly, Facebook is one of those things that takes up more of my time now. I feel like I need to really evaluate the value of my time and how it's best spent. There are great things about Facebook but there are also great things about blogging that I miss, so I'm going to try to be intentional about posting some thoughts up here for the weekend I'm at Annual Conference at least. We'll see what happens after that. :)
As I was talking with one of my seminary friends about this earlier tonight I realized that what I miss most about my blog is pondering some of the bigger questions. I mean, look at my blog title - I used to live for this stuff! I would talk about theology and political ideas and now I feel like my brain gets consumed with making lists of things that I need to do or bring with me to whatever event is next on my agenda for work. I get so bogged down with the daily grind that I don't have the luxury of time to ponder the big questions. Of course, that's not entirely true since I make the the time to play Treasure Madness on Facebook each day - it seems that my priorities have shifted. I go from thinking about lots of daily things to wanting to do something mindless rather than intentionally intellectual. Where I used to have nothing but time to devote to that pursuit, I now see it as a luxury and not necessarily one that I care about having all the time. My priorities, it seems, have shifted. Or have they? I miss seminary and I miss the conversations I used to have about these things. I'm just going to have to decide how often I need them to satisfy that piece of me without draining what little brain function I feel like I have left after work. Do you ever feel like this? Am I making any sense at all?
Okay, so I'm trying to focus on Missouri Annual Conference. This is my first annual conference as a commissioned Deaconess, which means I have voice and vote. I'm also here partly for work, representing Habitat for Humanity Kansas City with a booth in the exhibitors' section - it is where I serve as a Deaconess after all. I've never worked a booth at conference before and I've only been to the MO annual conference one other time. That was in 2007 as we were voting on delegates for the 2008 General Conference so there was a lot of church business to deal with, some of which got pretty ugly, so I'm curious to see what a "regular" year looks like.
As I was talking with one of my seminary friends about this earlier tonight I realized that what I miss most about my blog is pondering some of the bigger questions. I mean, look at my blog title - I used to live for this stuff! I would talk about theology and political ideas and now I feel like my brain gets consumed with making lists of things that I need to do or bring with me to whatever event is next on my agenda for work. I get so bogged down with the daily grind that I don't have the luxury of time to ponder the big questions. Of course, that's not entirely true since I make the the time to play Treasure Madness on Facebook each day - it seems that my priorities have shifted. I go from thinking about lots of daily things to wanting to do something mindless rather than intentionally intellectual. Where I used to have nothing but time to devote to that pursuit, I now see it as a luxury and not necessarily one that I care about having all the time. My priorities, it seems, have shifted. Or have they? I miss seminary and I miss the conversations I used to have about these things. I'm just going to have to decide how often I need them to satisfy that piece of me without draining what little brain function I feel like I have left after work. Do you ever feel like this? Am I making any sense at all?
Okay, so I'm trying to focus on Missouri Annual Conference. This is my first annual conference as a commissioned Deaconess, which means I have voice and vote. I'm also here partly for work, representing Habitat for Humanity Kansas City with a booth in the exhibitors' section - it is where I serve as a Deaconess after all. I've never worked a booth at conference before and I've only been to the MO annual conference one other time. That was in 2007 as we were voting on delegates for the 2008 General Conference so there was a lot of church business to deal with, some of which got pretty ugly, so I'm curious to see what a "regular" year looks like.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Lost Time
Greetings blog readers, and my apologies for letting it be this long between posts. I can't believe I haven't been on here since AUGUST! But then again, thinking back to what was going on in my life around then, I get it. Things were crazy around my job at Habitat for Humanity Kansas City. Our 30th Anniversary (we are the 7th oldest Habitat affiliate in the world!) was in October, so we were planning this big birthday block party event. We also had some staff changes, I had two new AmeriCorps members to train, Trouble was back in the Air Force Reserves (this time doing her drills out of Colorado Springs), on top of all the usual things that make people busy and lose track of time. I don't want to even attempt to catch anyone up on what's been going on since then - it would take a long time, be fairly boring, and I'm not sure there would be a point anyway. :)
I'm thinking about time this weekend anyway, as we "Spring Ahead" for daylight savings time. I'm sitting here at what feels like 6:45 am to my body but my clock tells me it's almost 8 am. We go through this ritual every year, moving ahead an hour each spring and back an hour each fall, all in the name of conserving energy and spending more time in the sunlight. Does it really make that much of a difference? There have been debates about the energy conservation part - W. changed the dates we move clocks in an effort to show some effort on his part to conserve energy but we still like to keep our homes at fairly consistent temperatures and use electricity for a lot more things than just lighting. I did a little online research to learn more about DST, why we started it and how it's evolved. It's kind of interesting and the information varies from source to source (of course), but if you're interested, I liked the article on Wikipedia for its information not just on the history in the US but around the world. What's most intriguing to me is that there wasn't a "standard time" (let alone "daylight saving time") until the late 1800's, and that was basically adopted because railroads were running all over the place and need some kind of organized scheduling - it didn't become a US law until 1918! And as most of us know, there has been debate over if we should practice DST, when we should change the clocks, how much, etc ever since. DST is praticed in some form in many countries around the globe, but many countries have never done such a thing.
I wonder what it would have been like to live in a time and place where there was no standard of time? It's such a basic part of my daily life, I go nuts when I forget to strap on my wrist sized clock. We have clocks on our phones, appliances, in almost every room of our homes - it's everywhere! How did people before 1918 schedule meetings? Did church just start when everyone got there? Or was it all just based on whatever local standard was set, so that it wasn't really a problem unless you were traveling (which is kind of the same now - I appreciate that my cell phone can read what time zone I'm in an automatically adjust)? Perhaps what intrigues me mst about the concept of time is that it's something the whole world has more or less decided to agree upon. We can look at world maps and see what time it is in each place, we know how long a second, minute and hour are, we've even established a line on the globe where the date and time are based. If only we could find that kind of consensus on other things....
I'm thinking about time this weekend anyway, as we "Spring Ahead" for daylight savings time. I'm sitting here at what feels like 6:45 am to my body but my clock tells me it's almost 8 am. We go through this ritual every year, moving ahead an hour each spring and back an hour each fall, all in the name of conserving energy and spending more time in the sunlight. Does it really make that much of a difference? There have been debates about the energy conservation part - W. changed the dates we move clocks in an effort to show some effort on his part to conserve energy but we still like to keep our homes at fairly consistent temperatures and use electricity for a lot more things than just lighting. I did a little online research to learn more about DST, why we started it and how it's evolved. It's kind of interesting and the information varies from source to source (of course), but if you're interested, I liked the article on Wikipedia for its information not just on the history in the US but around the world. What's most intriguing to me is that there wasn't a "standard time" (let alone "daylight saving time") until the late 1800's, and that was basically adopted because railroads were running all over the place and need some kind of organized scheduling - it didn't become a US law until 1918! And as most of us know, there has been debate over if we should practice DST, when we should change the clocks, how much, etc ever since. DST is praticed in some form in many countries around the globe, but many countries have never done such a thing.
I wonder what it would have been like to live in a time and place where there was no standard of time? It's such a basic part of my daily life, I go nuts when I forget to strap on my wrist sized clock. We have clocks on our phones, appliances, in almost every room of our homes - it's everywhere! How did people before 1918 schedule meetings? Did church just start when everyone got there? Or was it all just based on whatever local standard was set, so that it wasn't really a problem unless you were traveling (which is kind of the same now - I appreciate that my cell phone can read what time zone I'm in an automatically adjust)? Perhaps what intrigues me mst about the concept of time is that it's something the whole world has more or less decided to agree upon. We can look at world maps and see what time it is in each place, we know how long a second, minute and hour are, we've even established a line on the globe where the date and time are based. If only we could find that kind of consensus on other things....
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