I'm going to miss the sound of the Pacific Ocean rolling up against Gallagher's Cove...

I'm back in Vegas after my second week-long excursion in about a month. This time, it was to Catalina Island and Campus by the Sea for the West Coast GFM Faculty Conference. This year's theme was power. I don't think the presentations resonated with me as much as they did with others at the conference. I never really did connect to the notion of hybrid identity in a way that really gave me a new perspective on the concept of power. The second speaker spoke of things that were much more familiar to me, focusing on how power is used in the setting of higher education, and how clear examples of harm are still being done at these levels. (Though I should say that I'm lucky to be in a place that isn't currently mired in those games.) I appreciated the social justice edge on that presentation, as it's something that is systemically wrong with the world right now and probably one of the clearest examples of how power is used for both good and bad ends.

Stepping away from the conference, I find that the things I'm taking away from it this year are mostly disconnected with the conference content itself. I was in one of the tents that was facing the ocean and fell asleep to the steady sound of waves against the beach, with the sound of rocks clacking against each other as the waves pulled back into the ocean. There's a certain level of peace that such sounds brought that's a bit hard to explain. I usually go into the week with a sense of needing some rest, but that's not really what I had going in this year. Yes, it was good to unplug (though I did spend a few hours doing work, so I wasn't completely unplugged). But I think this was more of a time of refocusing than rest.

So refocusing on what? One target that's in my sights are the missions outcomes at church that I'm hoping to advance. I don't think I've actually elaborated on these yet, so now seems like a good time.

• General Missions Theology: We don't really talk that much about missions, so that if you were a new Christian you would have virtually no opportunity to be exposed to it and understand how it connects to the larger faith. Something we asked for (and received) was that Pastor Roger would preach on missions at least a couple times a year to elaborate a bit on what it means and why it matters. The framework that we set up in the report that went to the elders was intentionally and explicitly holistic: "Missions at Life Springs Christian Church is much broader than overseas evangelism. Missions activities should be understood as partnerships with organizations or people in the pursuit of activities which bring the Good News of God’s redemptive work to a local community." This is why doing things like teaching science in Oaxaca is a good missions activity even though we didn't sit around and talk about Jesus all day when we did it.
• Quarterly Missions Newsletter: One thing about our church is that our communications infrastructure is not very good. We basically don't really have any good models for creating a conversation and engaging people in it, and so I want to take a stab at that area.
• The Basek Cafe: It's interesting to me that we have a coffee house called the Basek Cafe. The Basek are a people group in Equatorial Guinea that the church has partnered with. But the Basek Cafe (at this moment) really has nothing to do with missions other than its name. This is an area that we need to grow into an actual ministry that's more than just people getting coffee on Sunday morning. I've got the idea of trying to procure Oaxacan coffee and serving it as an option, so that it can be a starting point for "Why Oaxacan coffee?" and drive the missions conversation. I think we can even get Oaxacan coffee from specific farmers, whose pictures we can then post and use as a fair-trade-like edge for the Cafe.
• Interactive Missions Station: This is a bit more abstract right now, but the idea is to have an interactive station where people can connect to missions by flipping through pictures and videos, and reading prayer letters and such. I envision something like a computer kiosk at the Basek Cafe. The central theme here is discipleship, in that we need to give people a place to engage somehow. I think something like a simple webpage format would work. I don't want it to be tied to our current website because it's not a good website structure. (I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority view about our church website, but I think it needs to be stripped down and dramatically simplified because we've got too many links and too much stuff that nobody is really paying attention to. For example, our most recent announcement in the announcement section is 5 months old. Three announcements in, and you're looking at an announcement seeking interest in joining the Worship Arts team from April 2014. And then there's the mostly bare events calendar that makes it look like we pretty much only do services on Sunday morning.)

The other thing to focus on is school-related. All those projects I listed two weeks ago are still there. I also don't really know what state my office will be in when I get there on Monday. I haven't talked about it because I haven't had the chance. The move ended up being much more complex and bothersome than anticipated. Things didn't end up where they were supposed to, and it was just an all around mess. There are pictures of desks on their side and in extremely unstable configurations (think three-legged desk and you will be very close to imagining what was going on). Will they have replaced the desk in my office that was clearly too big? I hope so! But I'll just have to see what I see when I get there.

On the way out and back, I spent a night with Justin, Janet, Ezra, and my newest nephew Stephen. A little swimming, a little playing around the house, a little bit of watching a neighborhood cat stalk a bird... Just casual stuff like that.

I guess I don't have much to say beyond that. Life is about to start to fall back into the normal routine. And I'm looking forward to that. The last month has been very good, but I think I need the routine.