Jazz and liturgy conference in cleveland...

Well, we arrived in Cleveland after a GREAT eight hour road trip: four members of our church band and myself.  After checking in we shared some GOOD bar food and called it a night.  Today, before the conference began, I showed my new friends some of my old stomping grounds and that was sweet.  Cleveland is a tough, rough and tumble town and the legacy of racism still runs deep.

After showing my friends some of the local sights, we bumped into a man who asked me to take his photo.  It turned out he was a Christian pastor exiled in Jerusalem from Russia where he had been working with prisoners in Siberia!  Jon said, "You know, I NEVER meet people like this when I travel by myself:  only with YOU!"  We exchanged emails and then he prayed for us in Russian.

That said, I love this place and it was fun to take in a few of the sights before the conference started in earnest.  Three things about the opening of the Jazz Symposium:

1) The music was STELLAR:  the horn players, the vocalists, the bass player, pianist and drummer were at the top of their game.  We heard top rate versions of tunes from the oevere of McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis, Paul Winter, Freddie Hubbard and John Coltrane (can you guess what era the band leader learned his chops?)  The music was the highlight.

2) The liturgy left me COLD:  there is a theological bias at work here and my take on it goes like this:  if you're focus is on the horizontal bar of the Cross - God in community - and you forget the vertical bar of the Cross - God in the transcendent - worship will be busy, flat and without time or space for introspection.  Dianne booked after 35 minutes - she has a lower BS quota than I do - but we all agreed that without time for quiet and inward reflection, the worship felt rushed and geared more towards performance than reverence.

3) Lots of words cannot make up for depth:  too often at these things, the leadership celebrates that sound of their own voices rather than things of substance and depth.  OUCH - I know - but it is true. Both "key note" addresses could have been half as long and could have used more substance.

Tomorrow, we have already applied some strategic planning skills to our schedule, and will build in our own time for reflection and discernment.  All in all, it has still been a great time with good learning and I am grateful to be a part of the experience.