What Would Jesus Blog?

Youth Conference 2008 was awesome! The venue, despite looking like some kind of weird military installation from the outside was actually just right inside – plenty of space without us feeling lost, good areas to hang out in and spend time in, and a fantastic gaming area (then again I might be biased!). It was a completely different feel from last year – less utter craziness, less strange occurences but I think people actually bonded more and felt taken seriously by the church. We had some good resolutions, although less in total than in years gone by – doesn’t matter though, I think the wheat was separated from the chaff so the impact of MYC ’08 will be felt as much, if not more than previous youth conferences. The ones I can remember covered things like training local preachers to be more confident and inclusive when there are young people there, membership in more than one place for people who genuinely live in more than one place (eg students), calling on the Methodist Church to liberalise and clarify its position on homosexuality, helping young people to explore their call to ministry (whether ordained or lay) and challenging the Connexion to help open EDEV to young people.

I, however, had a stinking cold when I went to MYC. The usual treatment for a cold is plenty of rest, plenty of water, and eating well…..none of these things happen at a youth conference! I don’t like using drugs all the time but for MYC I made an exception – half a pack of Pro Plus, a pack of Tyroset, a pack and a half of ibuprofen, four rolls of Halls Soothers, a pack of Lemsip Max and half a bottle of Benelyn later I survived but my liver hates me! And, of course, sleep doesn’t enter into the equation – this weekend I clocked 33 working hours and only 8 hours in bed….

There’s something nice about getting paid – bills get paid off, sometimes nice things get bought……but it’s also rather worrying when you look back and realise that most of your paycheque’s disappeared in next to no time. Ah well – got some good books in this month’s session….David Bosch’s Transforming Mission (well I couldn’t exactly do a missiology degree without it), Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody and Brian McLaren’s More Ready Than You Realize. Fun times!

Stayed with Cat this weekend – damn I love that girl! She looks after me And her living five minutes away from JRUL comes in very handy. I think I’ve actually got more books out now than I took out throughout the entirety of my first degree. This is what I imagined uni to be like – getting lost in a world of literature and it just never happened with my BSc, but it’s great fun now!

Youth Conference is coming up, it’ll be weird to be working on it rather than being a delegate – great to be going though. I can’t believe that I actually needed convincing to go!

Will I keep up this whole blogging lark? Only time will tell! Right now I’m two months into my MA in Mission (Emerging Church) at Cliff College, been going out with Cat for getting on for 2 years now, and am enoying having no official role in the Methodist Church (at least until we start planning Breakout 2010 next year…)

What will I be blogging about here? Meh, who knows! Ramblings about life, love, politics, religion and obscure missiological themes I expect….or whatever spews forth from my mind at strange times in the morning when I decide to do silly things like stay up to watch elections. Enjoy!