the only thing normal about today is that i drank about the same amount of coffee i do on a usual thursday. thursday is my clowns meeting. this normally starts a day where i relax and pray, listen, imagine, read, practice all those spiritual disciplines i encourage youth to be involved in.
today was way different
this morning for our clowns gathering, it was jason & jonathon having prayer time and a couple hours of conversation. good times, i don't remember exactly what we were talking about, but i know when i had to leave at 10:30am for a meeting jonathon and i actually tried to plan stuff in the last five minutes.. why do we do that?
ran from edgehill studios (coffee house) to bongo java east nashville (another coffee house) with an edgehill studios coffee in hand.. is that allowed? i met up with erin and the singer to our band for our wedding. had to talk about some of those special songs, plus the ones we don't want any part of in our wedding. yes, we nixed your "paradise by the dashboard light" request.
after that it was off to our monthly cohort meeting (i was supposed to have another lunch appointment, but due to the wedding meet up it got to make the cohort). ran into jc, we were the first there and started talking some. once everyone showed up and things got going, wow! not only did we have 25 people (that is a lot and reminds me that i'm glad we are not meeting at alektor anymore). we had some intense, but i don't know how productive, discussion on race, racism & all the systematic structure systems that keep people in places of power or without power... i think i'll try to ponder this a bit more, or just let one of the folks who actually recorded the cohort meet up replay what was said. i'm not even sure exactly what i said, so rather than sounding stupid and recanting my saying that i was brilliant and only to be show that was neither brilliant or on topic.. i'll just refrain and say, it was way cool, quite intense, and leaves me with no answers... wait, i never have answers at the end of these meetings.
motored over to our conference office to meet with our conference youth minister. she's one of my youth ministers so we were discussing our curriculum pieces for the next few months. that didn't take long so i just sat around and talked to the pastors that showed up at the office. my old pastor joe shelton showed up, he's retired now, but was asked to pastor the wesley foundation at tsu. we talked about those dynamics and i listened to some of his stories and he some of mine.
i stayed around the office for a junior high and senior high retreat design team meeting. this retreat has always been our weakest of events through the year. it lacked an identity and had little purpose to the overall ministry. our ccym has for the last two years discussed reimagining it. i was there to give a suggestion for a concept change to the whole event. instead of doing the main speaker and worship band, i proposed that we develop with the help of mentors a retreat model that gives the spiritual worship to the community. the leadership would open the weekend with worship, but then give it over to the community from there. through the weekend there would be workshop/training/teaching sessions times where small groups would work on various elements of worship; design, arts, singing, teaching, etc. their charge would then be to practice these while they lead the community in worship through the weekend.
there were some logistic issues and apprehensions. it's not done, probably because it has logistic issues, you can't just do this, it takes planning. it also take people who are willing to release power to the community so that God's movements do not rest on what we think people need to hear or learn but what the community actually feels a need to respond to.
the design team decided to take on my retreat concept, some logistic pieces change it to help make it successful for a weekend retreat. now, we'll see how it all comes together, i think it will be wonderful
