A job

Well, some of you might be wondering what exactly it is that I'm *doing* out here. The details will mostly confuse you all, but essentially I am working in the office that is organising the next General Assembly of the Conference of European Churches…now, don't get confused, it's the organisation that's called conference, whereas the conference is called an assembly? Got that?

Good. Now the organisation is ecumenical (economical? people say…no, ec-you-men-ical), which means that most of the time we are liaising with churches, churchy type organisations, and political organisations.

My particular job, in relation to the assembly (which, by the way, will be in Lyon, one of my favourite places…) is to organise things for the 'youth', in this case mostly under 30s. Which means both young delegates sent by their churches/organisations, and stewards who come along to help out (which is the kind of thing I was doing in Romania last summer).

So far, I've been working for three weeks. We have a database, and several initial planning documents for the main assembly, I've drafted some brochures and info about the youth programmes, and we're getting to the stage where we need to put in the details. So it can only get more exciting from here on (supposing people and computers do what we want them to…;-))

We also have a preparatory conference in a few weeks' time, called the "Future Conference" which is some kind of new interactive exercise. I'm intrigued!