Early February meetings

I helped set up in Louisville and at the Presbyterian Center (up in the beautiful 5th floor conference room where my Toastmasters club occasionally meets) a meeting of the Cooperative Congregational Studies Partnership Steering Committee (CCSP), to which I belong. I was sorry that very cold weather greeted the some dozen people at the meeting (5 degrees Wednesday night). The other sites we had considered were Orlando, New Orleans, and Hartford, Connecticut, where they met last year. But we figured that we were more likely to get snowed out of or snowed into Hartford than in Louisville (though I had let them know what the average January and February temperatures in Louisvile were (and they were not low)). A week earlier and we would have locked out of the building (becuase it was closed for the ice storm); a week later it would have been in the 70s. People seemed mostly happy with everything except for the weather. We wound up back at Saffron's, where Stephanie and I had eaten two nights before. Only one person (Alexei) was unhappy about that. I have attending CCSP events once or twice a year since my first summer with the Presbyterians, and I have gotten to know some of these religious researchers from various denominations and faith communities pretty well. Two who work with the Steering Committee, and four others drove to the meeting (which helped lower the overall cost - though someone paid $900 to fly from Atlanta!). Pictured above is the CCSP leader: David Roozen of Hartford Seminary. Below is David and the one person I know also with my first name, Perry. I have to get used to being in meetings where when people say Perry they usually are referring to someone else. This Perry heads the only denominational research office that is unambiguously larger than ours, the Latter-Day Saints office in Salt Lake City.

Pictured below are two of the drivers - Aaron, a researcher who happens to be Jewish with the Center for Congregational Change in Indianapolis and Ihsan, with the University of Kentucky and the Islamic Society of North America, and the $900 airline ticket passenger: Steve, who teaches at the Interdenominatinal Theological Center and thus helps represent historically African American denominations.

Below (from our left to right) is Kirk, who now heads the Episcopal Church research office, and Alexei (unhappy with Saffron's - and who wanted to go to New Orleans) who heads a similar office for the Eastern Orthodox denominations in the United States. (I got to talk with Alexei at dinner, and he's quite the world traveler, and belongs to an organization that facilitates him staying in homes with host families many places where he travels - including with a Northern KY family he has gotten to know, where he was headed next (in distillery country). Both Kirk and Alexei have been clients of ours). Dirk, a retired Reformed pastor, did more than I to organize the meeting, and moved to Louisville this summer (and has now twice lost electric power for a week).

Mike works with the Bahai faith community and teaches sociology at the University of Houston. The meeting as a whole went well. Even though things like bleak for landing a big foundation grant (which helped fuel this partnership for several years), we plowed ahead with plans for developing several more congregational resources, for organizing a big survey of congregational leaders in 2010, and for developing a public relations/marketing strategy. For more information on the partnership and its Faith Communities Today survey, see one of my half a dozen other blogs, "Flock Facts," at http://flockfacts.blogspot.com/ For pictures from our August meeting, see the "Catastrophe" blog entry.

As these folks left Thursday, it was already starting to warm up. You can see from this picture of a newly renovated building at Lousiville's Presbyterian seminary (a building that I considered moving to when it was a part-dorm at the seminary, when I first moved to Lousiville - they even said they'd take my dog!) that the sun was out and lots of snow and ice had thawed. I went to Leadership Development Day there Saturday morning, before helping people do their taxes.

A seminary professor who returned the next day to our church gave a presentation. And the six-month-old Stated Clerk, former client Gradye Parsons, led one of the four workshops, the elder training workshop, which I attended. Gradye had no PowerPoint presentation, but he did a great job. (I even asked him about quandaries in a work project.)

-- Perry