Thursday we went to Exeter to the Christian Resources Exhibition so that we could go to a couple of the seminars there. Ali went to one called 'A gospel of words or signs?' which gave her a lot to think about how to include deaf people into the life of the church. Jon went to a one entitled 'Why don't real men go to church?' which he found to be interesting. It was a good opportunity to hear about some different issues and other people's points of view.
Jon went to Open church on Friday lunchtime and attended the service on Sunday morning. It was good to have the links between prayer for the OMF missionaries that the church supports and Kang-San Tan (a lecturer from Redcliffe who was preaching) who used to work for OMF.
On Friday Ali went off to Eastbourne to the Children's ministry conference for the weekend. Eastbourne was actually sunny(!) but unfortunately the conference was very intensive so she didn't get much opportunity to see the delights (!) of the town - although early Saturday morning she did get a chance to go to the beach and watch the sun rise.
The conference had some really good seminars on puppetry and she learnt some great action songs with Duggie-Dug-Dug (that's Doug Horley who wrote 'We want to see Jesus lifted high' for those who don't know) - it was wonderful to see a whole auditorium of adults all getting involved and doing all the funny actions - the chicken dance song was particularly memorable! There was also very funny magic trick involving a square of cloth and a banana!
During the main teaching sessions they did show a couple of videos that were shown during the Children's ministry course last year at Redcliffe (good to see Redcliffe leading the way...) The most challenging aspect, apart from cramp from writing copious notes, was feeling lonel,y as so many other delegates had come in groups from their churches.
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