At Martha’s prompting I’ve been reading Tools for Transformation by Peter Craig-Wild. It has some OK bits, but I’ve now found some stand-out sections. As a service and/or worship leader (your language for this my vary; I’m not saying I like these terms), I care a lot about designing services that work well. The first paragraph that really brought me up short was:

“My task as a worship leader, is to allow the inherent power of the liturgy to emerge and do its own work. I was not to be an architect or engineer of worship, but a midwife that allowed liturgy to live.” (p.51)

At Greenbelt back in 2004, Mark Pierson spoke on his experiences of pastoring a church in NZ that deliberately was targeted at creative types. There was less structure, more space and silence, and much greater use of art and expression of all levels of quality. They didn’t have worship leaders: they had worship curators. (The title of the talk? Freedom from the Tyranny of Worship Leaders!)

From before then I’d seen the need to let there be space for God to do what He wishes to with His people, and woe betide me if I make the service too full and ordered to make that easy. However, I felt I couldn’t usefully use the ‘curating’ term. But this idea of midwife is one I could use.

More thought-provoking material in chapter 4:

“Every aspect of the service [can] have a revelatory possibility - ‘Wow, God is really here!’ ‘Wow, my sins really are forgiven’ …”

“Before the Service: How can we encourage people to gather, so that their gathering enhances their sense of being the people of God and heightens their expectation of God’s presence?”

“The Entrance: How can the entrance of the ministers give the sense of God coming among his pilgrim people?”

This needs some thought! And I have the opportunity to try and act on these, as I’m now being service midwife once a month or so. More thoughts soon, I hope …

So, I’ve now left Boston. Dave and I took the water taxi from near the (other) World Trade Center to the airport.

These aren’t my pictures, but they’re similar to what I saw when flying out.

Arrived in Boston, having that feeling as the plane grew ever closer to the bay that I hope there’s land around here somewhere. Thankfully there was a runway just a few yards from the water’s edge, but of course I couldn’t see that look sideways out of the plane, until we were right over it. It made me wonder why the seat back displays couldn’t show the picture from a video camera mounted by the pilot? It later turns out that this is done on at least some airlines. With so much else of the AV entertainment systems on planes having a complete overhaul in the last few years, why is the map tracker display still the same as about 6 years ago? Talking of AV I was pleased to see Tord Gustavsen Trio on the list of CDs you could play. I listened to that in between seeing House of the Flying Daggers and Ocean’s Thirteen.

Ate with the rest of my colleagues at a seafood restaurant overlooking the harbour. Not actually much to look at, apart from the wonderful warm tone from the setting sun. Almost more noteworthy was that we managed to walk there from the hotel, given how rare it is to find a ’sidewalk’ that goes anywhere useful. Shows that it’s a compact city.

2 frustrations at the hotel: first that the internet connectivity costs $10 for 24 hours, despite this being a fairly expensive hotel designed to host conferences. Marriott now don’t charge for WiFi, and many smaller places now don’t charge, so why here? Second disappointment was that I couldn’t skype to Martha for some reason, despite the phone handset showing it was logged on at home. I wondered if the hotel was blocking VoIP, as it must hurt their income from phone calls, but I could make a call out OK to skype’s test number. So I don’t understand what’s happening, which is never fun for a techie.

Time to try some blogging.

From a quick look at the always beta blog, it looks like WordPress has lots of opportunity to get creative, and with lots of useful tools. I’ve gone for self-hosting, as my hosting plan allows the necessary PHP and MySQL database.

Worked at the conference from 0700 to 1900 with only short breaks to write emails to the church leadership team.  Lots of good opportunities to talk to the people who know the product inside out, including an impromptu hour with the Product Manager discussing future direction.  They’re giving away 5 small beta systems to customers that can think of interesting new analytics to run on the platform - I put forward one idea which I hope will make the cut.

Sat through two ‘keynotes’. Not sure why they called this, and why you can more than one. Surely keynote will just come to mean ‘presentation’ if more and more get called this?  Anyway, the in-phrase from the President appears to be a variation on “thought leadership”. Several times he said he would help us by “leading our thoughts” on such-and-such.  My first reaction to this was negative — I don’t want to be told what to think — but then I realised that he was effectively in marketing mode, and “leading our thoughts” is a pretty accurate description of what marketing tries to do.

he evening event was held in the old round brick Cyclorama still showing its brick walls and floor.  They did manage a party feel pretty well, with food, rock music, and lit mainly by the glowstick bands that we were wearing round our wrists.  The point of the evening, however, was the Wii and PS2 consoles to play on.  I guess there were a dozen of them to go round, but most people weren’t too bothered whether they played a lot.

Yet another keynote!  This one from Susan Arendt on modern gaming.  Thankfully she was short as the acoustics for the PA were horrible in the round room with almost no absorptive materials.  She basically extolled the Wii concept, rightly pointing out that most people don’t like video games, as they take a long time to learn, and make you feel dumb in the process.  Nintendo went for this huge market, but didn’t realise what a massive hit they were going to have.  With most people and their mother able to pick it up *and have fun* within 5 minutes of picking up a Wiimote, no wonder the average length of time that a Wii console has sat on a store shelf is *4 hours*!

As well as the Wii Sports, I landed up playing Guitar Hero as well, which is like Donkey Bonga but for rock guitar wannabees.  Took me a song or two to get my coordination, but it then got quite fun, particularly when you could whammy on for extra points.  Playing with Susan I was a long way from a good score, unlike Susan who then racked up a perfect one. Sigh.  However, I have the consolation of knowing she earns a living from playing these things, and has 30 different types of console lying around her house.

Excellent lunch with Dom + Nathalie, which the men did to help the very-pregnant and not-at-all-preganant-but-still-feeling-woozy wives.
Whislt there we played around with TVs, leads and their Toppy, to confirm the diagnosis that our Toppy is working OK, it’s just that the TV signal strength we get at home is very poor, and so we can’t reliably get some channels. Looking at ukfree.tv shows that some of the multiplexes on the Ridge Hill transmitter are weak anyway in Cheltenham, and it’s those that carry the More4, Five, and Five US channels which have the shows we most like to watch.

We got excited for a minute when we saw that the transmitter was getting upgraded from 2,000W to 15,000W on October 31st — until we realised this wasn’t 2007, but 2011, which is when the digital switchover happens round here. At that point all the analogue frequencies become clear and the digital multiplexes can move into them, which are currently broadcast at much higher power. We must be about the last in the country to get this switchover.

So either we hike our aerial up another 30ft, like some big houses around us, or we have to get cable (not available down our street) or a satellite-based system from Sky. But then we’d need to change the Toppy, as you need a different one to ‘understand’ the Sky signals. Or just go for a Sky+ box I suppose. More investigation needed.

Planning ahead for my US trip, I thought it was time to give skype a go to get free calls home. So I installed skype on my laptop, and got a headset for it. And then installed a Netgear SPH200D phone onto the home network which can be used as either a skype handset or a regular handset for the normal cordless phones. (And can do it just by plugging into the LAN, without to be connected to any PCs; it’s this additional functionality I’ve been waiting for.)