This Saturday is the Cultivate Learning Gathering at the FRWY in Hamilton. I helped run it last year with Pernell as part of my time spent with him and we thought it was a great event overall and were excited to do it again this year. While I’m a lot more hands off this year, I think it’s is going to be equally as good. This year we are doing three topics instead of five and they are Culture and Creativity, Spiritual Formation and Urban Renewal. I am doing a small little bit on Culture and Creativity.
Normally you get asked to present on something you know lots about. Then you take what you know and your experiences and you put it into a nice little presentation and if you’re lucky you have a PowerPoint to go with it. This year I am going to try something different. I’m going to talk about something that I’m currently trying to understand and wrap my mind around. I don’t have a three point sermon prepared for my topic and I’ve never done it before. I haven’t really done this before, I have only ever presented something that I’ve felt I have understood. Part of me feels like I’m going to go up there and leave people out to dry when I’m done because I don’t know if I can offer any conclusions.
With that being said, I think I’m going to head in the direction as understanding the Kingdom of God as making a spectacle of the world around us. I want to look at Jesus a little bit and how his actions directly offended religious leaders of his time. I want to look at current examples of how I think people have made spectacle of certain theologies or understandings of God. Then I want to look into our calling as Jesus followers and how I don’t think that we can actually follow Jesus without making a spectacle of boxing up God. For now I’ll leave it at that. This post was more to get me thinking and try to put into words what the heck I’m trying to say. I’ll post my notes and everything after Saturday and we are recording it also so we will have them available as podcasts later on.