An Interesting, Interesting Weekend

Well, the Zoe Conference was great. I got to see quite a few friends from days gone past, both at Otter Creek and from college at Lipscomb. I got to hear Lauren Winner twice, who was very good and gave some great things to think about.

The discerning communities in the Leadership Conference were also interesting, even though I don't feel like they really did as much community building as they could have.

I also got to meet many, many bloggers and people from WorshipForum.com

I spent much of the Leadership Conference working on the MediaShout presentations for the Friday night session, the late night Friday session (a Vespers type service), the Saturday morning session, and the Saturday night session.

I always get nervous in doing those, because the praise team really relies on the words on the screen to keep them flowing properly with the song, so I'm just praying the words are right and I'm getting them up there fast enough for them. Also, for the Saturday night session, I created my first background. I've always loved the Clarissa Cox/Michael Lusk song, "Let Us Be You." It really captures much of the missional thinking that's going around churches and church thought and is a really strong calling for us to "use our blessings to bring justice." I wanted a background that was resonant with the song and with the work that is going on around the world. I couldn't find anything that I really liked on the web or in our MediaShout library, so I decided to create it myself.

Using WindowsMovieMaker and pictures from the Web, I put them together and they rotate on 15 second intervals. I don't have the music with it, but if you know the song or have it on CD somewhere, you can listen as you watch it (imagining the words over the song). So, I offer it for those who weren't there.



The other incredibly interesting part of the weekend was a conversation that I had with Nancy French. I'll talk about this later, but Nancy French is a conservative... activist and author, I guess is the best way to describe her. It started out as a conversation about Battlestar Galactica and migrated to a deep discussion and sometimes disagreement about politics. I'll post more about this later this week, but it was really a very fascinating experience.