Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

I spent a good portion of today in 2 meetings. They were productive and felt like a good use of time. I don't always come out of meetings with that feeling. I'm at the point in my life where, if I don't need to meet, I often would prefer not to. This doesn't rule out the importance of time with family and friends doing things that are fun, rather than "productive," although these 2 things don't have to be mutually exclusive. However, to do a meeting just for the sake of having a meeting is rather futile.

Anyway, this morning we had our weekly "church work team" meeting. Pastor Serge shared from his heart about feeling that our celebration of Easter was perhaps a compromise to the secularism of our culture. He was sad that we didn't have the time of Easter week set more apart. I think that he felt alone in this sentiment.

However, I think that a good number of us would like to see it set apart in a greater way. In my interest and study of the emergent church, it seems that many young people (at least in the West) are looking for a combination of old traditions with new traditions. Bob Webber (a former professor of Nicole's and mine at Wheaton) would call this a move toward an ancient-future faith (The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World by Robert Webber, p. 20).

Our discussion on this year's Easter celebration led to the idea of forming a "festival committee" of artists and others in the church who can help plan events like these. It also was a challenge of the need to plan ahead and plan early for events like Easter. This includes perhaps blocking out the church calendar for 2006 now and not scheduling other events during this time.

Sometimes our discussions get off track and seem pointless. However, this was one discussion that seemed very important.

This afternoon I met with Jim Beise about the May 20-23 Portes Ouvertes de Belleville event of our church. While there still are some details to work out, some of the major components appear to be falling into place nicely. Compared to last year, we are way ahead of the game. An important component right now is getting publicity ready now. We have around 6 weeks to publicize this in our community. An important part of this will be convincing people in our church to invite and come with friends of theirs to the events.

Bakoly, an intern at church, finished most of the rest of the Mission Radicale mailing to churches. There remain just a few envelopes to print up, stuff, stamp, and post.