Some friends of mine have an awesome vision of incarnating Christ into the neighbourhoods of Toronto. They’ve been researching hard and have identified 25 of the poorest and most unreached patches in the city, and are asking for people to literally move-in, and be the church in these neighborhoods.
They are holding their first conference May 8th-9th to cast the vision and are praying for 2,000 people to participate.
Pray, join, invite others, and find out more more at http://movein.to/
First off, congrats to the epiphaneia folks for pulling off the conference again, trying new things, and getting a great turn out.
You can see my previous integrated live blog/tweet notes for
Walter Wink plenary and Dan Oudshoorn workshop
Stanley Hauerwas plenary and David Fitch workshop
and Marva Dawn’s closing plenary
Besides the content and ‘nuggets’ I jotted in the notes, my biggest highligh quite honestly, was simply being released for a full day from family obligations to just soak. I really believe in the business of providing space – there is just so much random clutter often in our lives, to be offered an intentional and formative space to simply be, just did it for me.
Of course, being in the presence of great thinkers and practitioners helped. I’m not sure if it was on purpose, but I felt the plenary folks were a bit too heady for the general audience. I’m coming from a seminary background and thought some of the insights were too dense to move on to the next point. Maybe academics/scholars aren’t suppose to compress their thoughts like this?
Having said that, I loved getting the random soundbites and interactions from the twitter channel as other folks were in different workshops. Everyone always bashes online connections, but I think just as with ‘real’ life physical relationships, it’s what you make of it.
The good thing about all the rich and compact thoughts was there was a lot of good conversation after where people asked – what did he/she mean by… ? Maybe the calling is for those of us who did catch it, to help translate those thoughts to others.
I love thought provoking insights and conversations but as with most conferences I’m always left with – now what?
For now I’m left keenly aware that I’m steeped in powers both good and evil, I contribute and enforce powers that I rail against, and somehow in it all, Jesus is with us making the world new again.
Maybe that’s enough, I just hope it lasts.
Session 3 with Marva Dawn – Hope in a Crisis Time against and with the Powers
Afternoon session with Stanley Hauerwas- The Power of War
Morning Session for the evolving church: amidst the powers – Walter Wink and Dan Oudshoorn
