Made it to the South-West CRE on Thursday, and came home with the usual bag full of leaflets, cut price books, and ideas about various things which will probably never happen. 'Highlights' included:
- the clergy catwalk show, mainly for one vestment which, from where we were sitting, looked like it was made out of rubber. Apparently they were all offered £50 to do it. I spent considerably more than that on a new set of shirts, which you'll see on the streets of Yeovil in a few weeks.
- Lucy Moore, speaking about Messy Church, really bubbly and enthusiastic, and great to see how many churches have used this model for reaching out to families and all ages. They have a website, there are now 2 books out, and it's been so popular that Lucy is now employed full time by Barnabas to help Messy Churches around the country.
- Christians Against Poverty have developed a 3-session course which any church can run on money managament and debt issues. Spot on for the current climate, they will train up your church members to run the course, provide the course materials, and then local churches can get on with it. Training day in Bristol on April 25th. More stuff on debt tomorrow.
- The Exeter diocesan beer, which is nearly as good as ours. However they have a really nice logo for their 2009 celebrations (its 1100 years since Exeter and Bath & Wells dioceses were created) which puts ours to shame. In fact, I'm not even sure we've got one! If their cricket team all turn up in June (Church Times cup, much more serious than the Ashes) wearing the black diocesan hoodies then we'll just point and laugh, then ask quietly whether we can have one.
- Street Pastors stall, they did a seminar on Thurs and lots of people who hadn't heard of it were really interested. Our Yeovil Street Pastors started training yesterday. I picked up the Torbay Street Pastors newsletter, which has a statistical summary of what they've done in 18 months or so on patrol, here's a few of them:
Nights 50
Man hours 2356
Flip Flops 191
Emergency Blankets 45
Contacts 3969
Incidents 190
Lives Saved 3
That last one really hit me between the eyes. Fantastic.
Now back to those leaflets....
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