Last day in Winona Lake for awhile—your Intrepid Blogger takes off in the morning for Brethren National Youth Conference in LaCrosse, Wisconsin. Posts from here on will contain photos and reports of what’s happening with 2,300 teenagers at BNYC.
In LaCrosse we’ll be teaching young journalists seminars on writing, photography, website content, and how to use writing/photography in advancing the work of the local church. We’ll be judging NAC competition in piano solo and creative writing, and will be shepherding teams of writer/photographer young people who will make internet posts each day to report on the conference. We’ve also helped them produce 15,000 copies of a tabloid newspaper that will be hand-delivered to homes in LaCrosse and Onalaska in their Blitz.
And from there direct next Friday to Kingsport, Tennesssee, for the Grace Brethren Celebration conference. At Kingsport we’ll be producing the daily conference newsletter, manning a BMH Books booktable, doing general writing and reporting, sharing updates with the Association of Grace Brethren Ministers, and conducting a Wednesday-evening BMH dinner and corporation meeting. Conference ends Thursday, and BMH board meets Friday and Saturday—we should be back in Winona Lake early in August.
MasterWorks concludes its festival this weekend with performaces of the Prokofiev Symphony No. 5 and both the Tchaikovsky Violin and Brahms Piano concerti. What a blessing these programs have been! Patrick Kavanaugh, founder the director of the MasterWorks Festival, will then depart for MasterWorks Europe and return in the fall to teach at Grace College. In 2006 he’s slated to become chair of the college’s music department.
Funerals and memorial services are always a good reminder of what’s important in life, and a proper biblical perspective on this life versus the next. Yesterday we had the memorial service for Gene Ridenour at Winona Lake Grace Brethren Church. Gene, who died Friday of cancer, was a much-loved usher, ABF leader and faithful prayer warrior. He married Bobette Osborn in the 1980s after his first wife died.
The July/August issue of FGBC World should by now have arrived in all subscriber homes and churches. If you don’t receive it, and would like to, log onto www.fgbcworld.com and click “subscribe” for directions.
Off to the Badger State!