Aussie 15 August on with the show

The conference here in Parramatta starts and my contribution for the day is an evening’s Messy ‘Masterclass’. (Not my title. Sounds terribly impressive, though…). We welcomed about 75 people to the Centre for Ministry to hear the basics about Messy Church and think about the issues around starting one. Funny how the material expands to fill the time available and despite jumping quickly over the core values, so that we could look at them in detail later in the week, there was still so much to say. Again, I am humbled by the distances people are prepared to travel in this huge country to hear about ideas like Messy Church. One lady had been on a Greyhound for eight and a half hours… others had driven anything between half an hour and five hours. I’ll think twice before I whinge about travelling across the UK again.
Another interesting fact: Parramatta means ‘the place where the eels lie down’. Which raises all sorts of questions: do eels ever stand up? How do you know they lie down, as surely if you dived down into a river to see, they would all wriggle away?