Unco Day 2 Morning Prayer, picture by author
Confession: I might have gotten caught up in a conversation today about a comic book store ministry and missed most of morning prayer.
Unco Day 2 is the day of breakout sessions. Lots of breakout sessions. The day started with organizing all the breakout sessions. (Well, actually with morning prayer but see confession above.) In the auditorium there is a large sheet with the polar bear mascot on it, and people wrote all kinds of ideas for discussions on it. Many overlapped. A giant grid was filled in with times and room numbers. Four or five breakout sessions were offered for each time slot; so, as the elders foretold, no one could do everything.
Some of the topics: subversive ministry in suburbia, experiential worship, interfaith ministries and interfaith families, leading as an introvert, gender and the church, bi-vocational churches/ministry, urban ministry and new church development, and the church’s role in economic issues.
The whole schedule is available here.
I wanted to talk about experiential/holistic worship. (Worship is one of my big things.) The breakout met during the first time slot, and it was a great discussion. We were trading resources, telling stories about things that didn’t work, and throwing out ideas to begin bringing experiential things into worship. Best quote of the session goes to Travis Jeffords:
“What we do in worship is a beautiful experiment” -Travis Jeffords
Something that came up several times was the idea of having a language to talk about faith. It came up in three of the four sessions I went to. How do we enter into relationships with people who speak different cultural dialects (not just different languages but different frames of reference)? I admitted at one of the sessions that I’m fluent in Geek, but I can’t speak Business. How do we equip people from all sorts of different cultural frame of references to talk about faith stuff? (Hint: there’s no one answer.)
I’m really happy to know I’m not the only person out there thinking about things like this. It’s going to take a while for all this stuff to settle down in my brain because right now my mind is running around like crazy. I’ll be lucky to sleep tonight.
Unco Day 2–The Day of Awesome Conversations. A day of connections, ideas, commiserating, and re-framing. I’ve actually told a group of people what my dream ministry job is (comic book store ministry), and (surprisingly) no one seemed surprised. I love being in a room where I can say something that in other places would be considered super crazy. In most places I feel like I’m pretty out there. At Unco, I think I’m normal. It’s a weird thing to feel normal.
More reflections to come as all these thoughts settle down!
Best quote of the day goes to Ryan Kemp-Pappan:
“We need to be able to fail for Jesus!” -Ryan Kemp-Pappan
Emily Hope Morgan is student at Princeton Seminary and a candidate for the ministry of teaching elder in the PC(USA). She writes the blog Fight the Bees which deals with pondering questions from a Millennial’s point of view. Find her on Twitter @PresbyEmily.