Methodist Conference – a view from the sofa

Wow! What a day! I was able to spend most of today listening to the live feed on one laptop whilst working on another (not to mention nearly an hour cutting out paper crosses from newspaper – more later!)

Two things:

Firstly, there seems to be a real sense of positive energy building up around conference over this last couple of days. I heard that the Youth President and youthy things went through yesterday and today the highlight (other than Revd Gamble) was the Big Society/poverty report. Many people were tweeting about how proud they were to be Methodists and I caught a glimpse of the intangible that draws me to the people called Methodists. Incidentally, there were a number of conversations about Methodist identity and who ‘is’ a Methodist and ‘how long’ you have been a Methodist. Strange, then, that the thing that made it Methodist was a sense of purpose and narrative rather than a verbal or affirmation of identity. Need to think about that a bit more …

Secondly, Social media is rocketing! Another great day on twitter with connexion 2.0. One of the most amazing things is that people are actually joining twitter to become part of the conversation (how cool is that!!), a parable of evangelism just do what you do and others will want to join. I think most of us have been amazed at the presence of social media this conference (even those who know it far more than I) but one of the challenges has been to get the visuals seen by real life delegates also seen by virtual observers. So, with this challenge in mind I, and my colleague Carla, are planning the opening devotions for tomorrow’s conference (I will be on the 6am train). They only last 15 mins but I have spent today wondering what worship will look like on this side of the screen. The real challenge was that I am using a video as part of the devotions. I have spoken to the Techy team and they can show it but needed to be assured that we had the right licenses to broadcast the video – we didn’t. So I have spent most of the day today conversing with people in America (when they got up!) to see if they will give us permission to play the video on the live stream – eventually they did! Now I just need the Methodist Church law and polity bods to sign it off and we are up and running.

Also – if you are going to be watching the opening devotions on twitter then you will need a cross cut out of old newspaper (I’ve cut 500 out this afternoon, I’m not doing anymore!!)

Let’s see if the worship works on both sides of the screen – let me know how my first tworship went.

Early night tonight