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Greenbelt is upon us again. 20,000 people all dressed for summer, shivering under unexpected showers and looking for shelter in the tents and stalls scattered around the Cheltenham Racecourse. Thats how I usually remember it. Although last year was really scorching.

HELP? I have my sleeping bag but not a tent this year. Got room for me in your tent? Let me know. Glamping sounds fun but i can also rough it.

I leave Belgium on Friday and go straight to Greenbelt Festival Unfortunately I will miss the emerging church roundtable on Friday at 3pm but I know many of you are attending. Try to get there early because it might take longer than you think to get in, and then find the tent. I am speaking here from experience, having organized the emerging church roundtable in 2004 and then arriving embarrassingly LATE for it.

My two teaching sessions at both at the CMS Small Tent Venue otherwise known as the Blah Tent.
Saturday 4:30pm. The Emerging Church is like a Box of Chocolates, a historical sketch of the emerging church movement in the Western world from 1968 to 2008, a 40 year pilgrimage with some readings and references to books such as "The Emerging Church Vol I and II (1968) by Kalt and Wilkins, The Emerging Church (1970) by Bruce Larson and Ralph Osborne, The Emergent Church (1981) by Johann Baptist Metz, The Mowbray Emerging Church series including "The Scandal of Poverty: Priorities for the Emerging Church (1983) by John Atherton. Tracking the progress of the emerging church over the decades, we also look at some of the emerging models from the other continents and and books from 2008.

Monday 2:00pm Transcoding Mission for the 1024 window. We will look at what it takes to let Christ's face play on ten thousand computer screens and how you can be one of those people that put him there. We will also discuss the shape of mission and church in a Wiki world. Geeks and non-geeks welcome. Dont leave Greenbelt too early - come and hear me speak.

MY BEST BETS FOR GREENBELT: (not a pun, even though Greenbelt meets at the racecourse)

Best food: I have food to eat that you do not know, because i keep it a secret, but now the mystery will be revealed. Go to the Organic Pork trailer and order the pork and apple burger and then smother it with their red onion chutney. Really! Honestly! You will thank me!

Best Other Stuff: Here are the people to meet and things to do besides my two wonderful life-changing sessions:
- I will be helping Shannon Hopkins with a really exciting stream inside Greenbelt called NET (Network for Entrepreneurial Talent) and I am speaking on one of the panels. Look out for it!
- Ruth Valerio is worth hearing, as is Frank Schaeffer, Joel Edwards in a new role this year, Brian McLaren, fresh from addressing Lambeth, will be speaking 3 times but check out his "postmodern and postcolonial" talk on Sunday. Doug Gay had some coherent emerging church wisdom with a Scottish accent last year and is tackling political involvement this year. Barry Taylor and Fuzz Kitto are both living legends and larger than life and both will find a way to offend you in a new way. Gareth Higgins is a thoughtful fella also.
- Farewell to Larry Norman
- Aradhna are playing their blend of Indian worship music. Worth seeing. They rocked Greenbelt a few years ago. Read my thoughts on them here. Juliet Turner I met in Belfast and really liked. MxPx are well known in USA.
- Dave Walker has found himself in the middle of a huge lawsuit-blog controversy and has a hair-raising war story to tell. Find him at the Wibsite meeting at the beer tent, Saturday 4:30
- Having used Manga to teach missions in Japan, I am interested to hear from the guy who recently created a Manga Bible
- Greenbelt Art School is new this year.
- Hymn singing at the organic beer tent, despite noise complaints from neighbours, is a regular big event but i cant find it on the schedule for this year. Anyone know?

Beyond that, pretty much everything going on at the CMS venues, in particular the CMS small tent venue where I and my scruffy friends are presenting, is worth keeping an eye and returning to. What would you suggest?

Related: Me at Greenbelt 2007, the skinny on Greenbelt 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004 with our FreedUp worship, and our first visit to Greenbelt in 2003 with 45 of us tenting at the Boaz campsite.

Technorati Tags: greenbelt, greenbelt festival

The United Kingdom rates committed campaigners such as Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King far more highly than celebrities and more than one in ten would be prepared to break the law to campaign for a cause they believed in.

A service of dedication took place last night at a church in Scotland for its new eco building which aims to show the way ahead on renewable energy.

In thinking about what good teachers expect from students, we come back once again to the important issue of what learning and education is all about. This is the theme of the second half of the 4th chp of Ken Bain’s exceptional book: What the Best College Teachers Do.

Less successful teachers see students as tanks ready to be filled. Good teachers see students as model constructors who need help in reconstructing the model that is already at work in their head. Learners undergo deep-seated transformations and affect heart and mind and lead to continued growth. So, good teachers see the classroom as a place for intellectual develpment instead of just absorbing information from the teacher/master/scholar.

They, in other words, create situations to develop intellectual and moral skills. They get students to ask:

What do we know? How do we know it? What is the evidence for this or that?
About gaps and where folks are filling in gaps with faith or intuition?
About the difference between observation and inference?
About how important “words” are in the whole process?
About where assumptions come into play?
About how they are testing their own assumptions?
And, about becoming more self-consciously aware of their own knowledge?

Good teachers connect the discipline to the person.

So, good teachers expect “more” but not just in that they have “more assignments.” The word refers to getting students to reach for more and to strive for the highest level of intellectual achievement they can achieve. And they figure out how to help students get there.

One of the best teachers said it this way: “My strongest feeling about teaching is that you must begin with the student. As a teacher you do not begin to teach, thinking of your own ego and what you know … The moments of the class must belong to the student — not the students, but to the undivided student. You don’t teach a class. You teach a student.”

Big questional: Are churches educational? If so, are they teacher-shaped or student-oriented? What difference would this make to churches?

Now the chaser: What will this do to the concern with power, hierarchy, and authority in churches?

Conversion and conversions will be themes of this blog for the next couple of weeks. This series on Chrysalis is about Alan Jamieson’s book Chrysalis: The Hidden Transformation in the Journey of Faith. Today’s comes from Scott Gay.

Alan Jamieson’s “Chrysalis” is a gentle map of faith’s spiritual journey. It’s a book that can help Christians in the midst of transitions,and provide deeper, broader relationships within the church. The last chapter of the book encourages us to create inclusive Christian communities for people. People who have a tacit acceptance of answers with people full of questions and critiques. Do you know many of the latter are misunderstood or misconstrued and leave? Do you know “Ironically, the institutional church is often an obstacle to spiritual growth…”(pg 32)?

An underlying implication of the book is that those who go on to embracing the mysteries of the faith, of paradox, support each individuals exploring, and they support others in the will and leading of God. More importantly to me is the next to last chapter of the book. Here Jamieson postulates the need for faith waystations. Not a place where people stay, but one to share, be refreshed, and be beckoned on. It reminds me of the “Jesus Creed” blog.
Much of the home (house) church movement is also of this genre. Here the faithful meet not because of persecution as the outsiders suppose. Here the diversity and richness of the Christian faith is shared. Who can put into words the mystical experience many have
encountered in “waystations”?

My analogy of the waystation comes from the three festivals commanded to attend in the Old Testament. We have explored the spiritual meaning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread (Passover). Each Christian knows Jesus as Savior. We have explored the spiritual
meaning of the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost). Each Christian knows the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. There is also the Festival of Booths (Ingathering). It has not been spiritually explored like the other two. These are as booths in the desert. We are being encouraged to prepare these booths. These are the waystations of Jamieson’s “Chrysalis”. Especially needed in the radically different world we find ourselves becoming. To build a waystation is a glorious catholic preparation.

This CNN article reveals that many college and university presidents are in favor of lowering the drinking age to 18. Does the postponement of legal drinking make it more taboo? Why do so many young adults abuse alcohol?

The campaign for a Welsh team at future Olympic Games has been stepped up with the launch of a national petition on the Welsh Assembly's website.