London Conference

May 26, 2008 Church, Life No Comments

This weekend, I once again trekked to the annual meeting of London Conference. This year, the event was in Aylmer, and I was attending as a YATS participant, but also had been asked to be part of the tech team, comprised of myself, Chris and Gord.

I’m simply going to make my comments as bullets, I don’t have a lot of insight into the theme and such.

  • Presentation software: One person did all the worship slides in Corel Presentations, an uncompatible piece of software. It was a pain, because her computer didn’t take to projectors as well as the other laptops we had on hand, and we didn’t have time to re-do all those slides.
  • Presentations in general: People need to stop using ridiculous text and transition effects in PowerPoint, or anything else. They detract from your message. Also, they often don’t port well to OpenOffice
  • Our unwillingness to use Office: Bad idea. Sometimes you can’t fight the system. Open source rocks, but most people have yet to join the revolution.
  • The theme: Enh. Good in theory, didn’t really translate into awesomeness unfortunately
  • The facility: Really nice but didn’t work. The lighting was too dark and put us to sleep, the arena was too large for the plenary. Food was awesome.
  • The music: I didn’t feel it. The songs were fine but weren’t delivered with enthusiasm. Music breaks were used by the delegates as coffee breaks and everyone just walked out in the middle of them
  • The overall mood: People are scared of the future. Churches closing and numbers shrinking. It’s sad.
  • YATS: We had new people this year which was cool. I’m not sure if we were welcoming or not, and I’m not sure if we’ve gotten too serious over the years.
  • YATS II: I’m not feeling the leadership the last couple of years. They’re sweet people but don’t really know what to do with the group. I’m not sure if WE know, either.
  • The Kairos Video: I’m so sick of seeing it that I walked out while it was playing. Was apparently well-received. I’m not sure we did a good enough job being enthusiastic about the event.

More to come possibly…