Faithworks 360 Conference

This weekend I attended the faithworks 360 conference.

The event included the UK launch of Brian McLaren's new book A New Kind of Christianity. So I heard Brian speak several times - a good experience.

I want to blog about several aspects of the event, but first some general impressions:

• Here is a group of people passionate about finding a "360 degree" theology, and applying it to all parts of life. This is a good thing.
  
• They're enthused about working in partnership with the community - and with government bodies - to deliver things which help the poor and needy in society. This is a good thing.
• Some manage to retain a fairly traditional understanding of Evangelical faith: others were probably more alarmed by Brian's ideas. This is interesting.
• I'm not used to hanging out with big groups of people so implicitly aligned with the left of politics. I'm not saying they were partisan (both Labour and Tory MPs spoke at the event), but you knew which kind of people were the fellow-travellers of most of the organisations represented with stands etc.
• For an event so well connected to such right-on action, it was surprisingly middle-class, white, and middle-aged. There were some younger people, there were a handful of black people; I don't think I saw anyone obviously from an Indian or Chinese ethnic background. The majority were well-distributed around my age - many older; some somewhat younger. This is surprising. [I was minded to wear a baseball cap for the whole weekend, as I often do. But I would have been in a minority of one, had I chosen to persist. I caved in.]
• Perhaps as befits that demographic, the engagement with new media was decidedly patchy. That was a big surprise. [I would have written a live blog, but there was no wireless on offer. I could probably have done so via my phone, but wasn't ready to jump through hoops to do it. Doesn't everyone have wireless these days?]
• I struggled for a while to work out quite why the whole thing seemed quite 'other' to me: in the end I worked it out. I had spent the whole of the preceding week at a very different conference - a business event, in Miami, populated by all the multinational names familiar to you from the world of IT. Moving from that very big business picture to the world of small-scale charities, volunteers, and government grants gave rise to more than a little ... cognitive dissonance! This was a surprise.

As I say, these are just first impressions of a process kind. More about the content, later.


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