Houston Summit

Houston Summit
Originally uploaded by offyonder

The Houston Summit was a great success! Bill Warrick of TMC Youth started things off and set the tone of the meeting. He introduced the TMC Youth staff and explained how the sessions would work.

There were four lecturers:

Christine Driessen - Sharing Christian Science: Building Bridges
Ginny Luedeman - Plain Talk About Love and Relationships
Don Wallingford - A Spiritual GPS: The Presence of God's Goodness
Ron Ballard - Why Healing Spiritually is Crucial

The youth had the opportunity to hear any two of those.

Then there were workshop sessions: Talking about CS, CS Nursing and the Practice, CS Publications, Sunday School, The Christian Science Monitor, Class Instruction, Committee on Publication, Christian Science Organizations for college campuses and the new CS Chaplaincy program.

Again, there were only two sessions to attend any of these workshops but a neat addition to the schedule was the free talkback time given where the attendees could freely wander amongst the presenters and ask specific questions.

There was a full group session on Answering Tough Questions and how to address those. Some of the questions included: Does CS work? Do you ever go to the doctor? Why don't you believe, like most Christians, that Jesus is God?

To wrap things up, the Christian Science Board of Directors took the stage and fielded questions about the future of the movement and what they were thinking about things. They also made it clear that they cared about what the membership thought of it all and were receptive to ideas being thrown out. Explanations about going beyond the KJV of the bible, formality in church, music styles and Sunday School were openly discussed as well as how the attendants of the summit can help in the movement.

Afterwards, we were all bussed to the Cheney's house where a delcious fajitas cookout was served complete with a three guitar mariachi band and ice cream!