1 location
Good venue

The market place was in a good space and the big tables worked well for meals.

The Food was ok.
No coffee after meals seemed strange for a hotel.

Some of the workshop rooms were too small for workshops they hosted.

2 programme
Mixed
The physical programme looked good, perhaps it could be printed on glossy paper?

Ceildh/pub quiz - missed the pub quiz. Not sure it worked.

Optional worship times
Good/fine.
Seemed (understandably) constrained by venue restrictions,

Morning prayers sat am
Informal to the point of seeming unprepared. Took a slightly bizarre turn with invitation to confession of secret sins or headaches part.
In general fine

Rural youthwork workshop
Good/Fine
Some useful questions

Zoo
Best bit of the weekend.

Main sessions sat am,pm sun am
Key note Speaker spoke entertainingly and told nice stories. Not sure his message actually fitted into what the weekend needed to say to the audience.
The band musically were fine, although they only reflected one way of worship.

3 Scottishness
Good to see that workshops were mostly run by Scottish based youth workers but I think my main reflection was the conference didn't feel particularly Scottish. Deep Impact is marketed as Scotland's national youthwork conference, but I felt it lacked a distinct Scottish voice. If it was there which it may have been, I couldn't find it.
The worship sessions seemed to be based on a vineyard churches model of worship, (Californian 70's Jesus people).
The speaker was English and all his examples were English, entertaining and fun but English.
Is there a distinctively Scottish model of worship which could be used? What would that look like?

4 Development
I wonder how different the programme was in form and structure from the first deep impact? Not too much from my hazy recollection. I wonder if there is scope for a radical rethink and reorganising of the programme.
I may have missed it, but there seemed a lack of edge to the conference which is the raison d'être of youthwork?

the weekend conference seemed to go well, and people seemed to enjoy it. I enjoyed parts of it as well and hope this feedback can help the consideration and planning of the group who organise the next one.

not just to get 2 christmases, oh no. he is the religious leader who looks most like Sant, therefore if he gives up his christmas and gives presents to all the children of the world, then i can take a day and celebrate christmas with him.

Thanks Santa, i mean Cyril.

Giving up crisps.
Reading a book.
Giving up all music I had heard before.
Eating less.
Giving up caffeine.
Giving up alcohol.
Publishing a record of my spending on the Internet.

And this year I am struggling to work out something appropriate.

Lent is the period of 40 days which build up to Easter Sunday. The key is that you give something up in order to prepare yourself for Easter.

Lent has never been a festival which I had marked but recently it has been something I have been thinking about.

This year I want to do something which marks that preparing and respect for Easter but also something which embodies the “slow” translation of lent as well.

Dunno what I will do but I look forward to trying.

This week’s new group is Beer’n'Bible

Yeah it is a mixture of Beer and Bible.

The first one is tonight at The Clydesdale Inn, Lanark, and hopefully we will have a few people who want to come along, have some bible things and some beer things. My aim is to have some space to question, discuss and work out things, if you believe nothing, everything or something.

Don’t know quite what to expect, just trying to work out a couple of format ideas depending on who turns up. What ever the outcome, it should be fun.

oft of an evening, I read the Harvard Buisness Review, this one is from september 2008. Contained within it is a great article from Ed Catmull, Pixar Studio President, called, “How Pixar fosters Creative community.” As part of the article, he outlines some of the Pixar communities shared beliefs;
- Talent is Rare
- Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capacity to to recover when failures occur.
- It must be safe to tell the truth.

it sounds pretty awesome but i wonder how well each of these would change into some of the communities i live and work in.

but it was the statement directly after these beliefs which caught me.
- We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.

how, what, hi. [puzzled but curious face]

Love it, but could this apply to the communities i am a part of.
i wonder how this could work within a church community?
(sounds as unlike general assembly as anything could be.)
my wanderings are under formed but are wondering.

more later

solas2010 was class
you should have been there.

great music, speakers, weather, activities, and fun for all the family.
it was great to be a part of something like this.
where sourcing affordable, local produce, sold at affordable prices, (£2 for an organic venison burger. nice!) was as important as getting the right band. Where giving the festival the right feel & vibe was more important than having a pub.

It was a delight and joy. I still can’t quite believe how well everything went. Someone gave me feedback based on turning Solas from a 4star festival into a 5star. Trust me, a 4star rating is deserved and accurate. It really was good. You should have been there.

thanks to lots of people I worked directly with including,
Dominic,
Hoggy & Gordon @GBR,
Ben & E&MS crew,
Bill,
Sam,
Martin & Dave,
Jonny @Wiston
and the solas directors.

Here’s to many more.

PS Becoming a Solas Saint would be very helpful. please consider helping Solas to grow and develop the conversation between Arts, Justice & Faith, http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/give.php

Loved the full extract from “Marilynne Robinson: Can science solve life’s mysteries?” in saturdays Guardian. I love stuff like this.

(small quote)
It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labour. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us. There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms.

::[[read the rest of it here]]::

the fact they are from Yale University’s Terry Lectures is even more exciting.
The Terry lectures are given by a world leading thinker into the topics of science and theology. You can find 2008′s terry lectures in itunesU from Terry Eagleton. and they are well worth finding and downloading as he speaks immense sense theologically.

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Terry Lectures) by M Robinson, 176pp, Yale,

Changes.
They come in some unexpected places.

You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
You had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)

I doubt any of them make sense, in a joined up sense but in my brain somehow they make sense….
– Steve Jobs thoughts on using flash in iPhone, iPod and iPad.
– A small section in the Andrew Marr show (BBC Sunday mornings) on the relationship between MP’s and the electorate.
– The current tranche of press releases from The Church of Scotland on the future of the CofS
– and an ecumenical meeting of clergy with the local Community Planning Partnership.

Something has to change.
I was thinking this as I sat in a two hour meeting between staff and clergy, and local political instruments. In the meeting the head of the local Non-Government Independent Charities which are core funded by the Local Government, (do you see what they did there?), saw an impotent, poor excuse for a meeting. I found the whole thing disappointing.

on reflection a couple of things hit me.
- we had chosen to engage, but the relationship was not an even one. we were being regarded as useful information and propaganda sources, but not ‘partners’. The power relationship was skewed so far out of kilter
- secondly our engagement had been needy. As minorities within the relationship, we had gratefully taken everything we had been given with a respectful and humble attitude. (Just like Jesus?) My friend came up with the paraphrase of Jesus ‘Innocent as lambs, slippery as fuck.” In our meeting we had got the innocent bit right, but the slippery, well we were probably grippy rather than slippery.
- thirdly our engagement was uncreative,without focus or agenda, and chaired in a bizarrely partisan basis by the chair who was part of our group.

something needed to be changed. Yet I am unsure how to articulate the change which is necessary.

I dont think my experience of this is unique, but when i then read the mass of press releases coming out of the Church of Scotland in the run up to the general assembly I began to wonder about how universal these thoughts are.(CofS have been talking about money, how they do church, part time ministry, Gay clergy. Just about anything they can.)
As I have read things from press releases, quote for ministers, and leaks from reports, I got that feeling again. As a pew dweller I have no real power within the church. Everything is decided by committee, (the essence of Presbyterianism) at local, and national level. this give democratic authenticity to decisions but there seems to be a general unwillingness to change. My problem here is my understanding of any church as the only institution which exists primarily for the benefit of those outside it.
Engagement is on the established terms.
creativity is not a noted by product of any committee meeting of any sort.

something needed to be changed. Yet I am unsure how to articulate the change which is necessary. (I am unsure I have articulated the problem well!)

Some light as shed on this by the small section in the Andrew Marr programme, where they did a bit on the relationship between the MP’s and the electorate. its basic theory was that the electorate think of it as an upper class lower class relationship. (MPs upper class, electorate Lower class) yet politician after politician, in their memoirs and comment thought of it more as the relationship between the masters and servants, with Mp’s being as the servants.

I am unhappy leaving that expressed view unchallenged, but when you apply that thinking or position to the CCP or the CofS, the power dynamic changes, and the opportunity for change becomes something which can be worked towards. the problem then is how to make change happen and something creative for those involved.

Hence the inclusion of Steve Jobs open statement on the relationship between Apple and Adobe. It does several things very well. It outlines the problems, and outlines the future course of action which seems sensible given the argument simply put forward.
(You can read it here. Thoughts on Flash @ Apple.com
His comments are accurate, seem reasonably considered, yet clear and decisive action is called for. Change is advocated for.

My dominating thought though reading this was who is doing this for that meeting we had, who is doing this for the CofS assembly stuff i have been reading, (even who is doing this for the MP’s). something needed to be changed. It was articulated well the change which is necessary.

I wonder where else that is done?
I wonder where else that is done creatively?

My boss is moving to a new church. I will have a new boss.
His name is Roger.