I feel like nothing noteworthy has happened over the last two weeks though I know that is completely untrue. In reality, I’ve been working my butt off organizing things for church this fall, keeping up with school work (and trying to learn things at the same time), going to concerts, and working 20+hours a week.

It is the first thing, fall programing at church, that seems to suck up all available time. I have a few theories about why that is. First of all, we’ve decided to undertake a fairly ambitious project this fall and I have ended up unofficially spear-heading it. We will be hosting an interdenominational moderated panel discussion of Brian McLaren’s book, A New Kind of Christianity. I’ve been working with a bunch of others, with varying levels of motivation and productivity, to draw together a group of people from within Victoria to speak to one or more of the questions Brian raises in his book. Each evening will also have some small group discussion time and a space for questions and answers. It has the potential to generate a lot of good conversations, continuing on some of the ones began back in May with the conference we hosted.

The time consuming part has been the liaising with various people to get them to be involved and the endless number of committee meetings that seems to entail. As much as I try to empower people to take initiative and make decisions for themselves, there seems to be an ingrained culture at church (my current one anyway, I have not seen it at every church I have been a part of, thankfully) where we cannot breathe without having someone hold our hands. In the process of planning large events, that usually means fortnightly committee meetings so we can go around and around in circles discussing the same issue repeatedly because we are not sure we are allowed to act independently. It drives me mad.

But, the sessions are going to be really good. I am excited about some of the panelists we have lined up and the conversations that will ensue. There is more information on the Facebook page if you are in Victoria and want to check it out.