Bus conversations

We have just arrived back from a fantastic few days away. In this last week the group has really gelled together well despite my uncertainty on day one as to whether this would happen. It has gelled so well that leaving the group last night was quite tough for us all, but we meet again tomorrow evening. We had two six hour bus journeys together and had some really good conversations. Two characteristics which I warm to from the mennonite church is their position as a peace church and their openness theologically. It was good to discuss some theological thoughts on the bus for instance: I discovered that some of my own thinking in certain areas was not actually just down to my own thinking but shared by highly respected theologians. Kinda good to have got to their academic thinking without knowing it! We visited Montreale and a church much more similar to LBC which was good to see a different type of Mennonite church. Montreale was a nice city, French speaking and not that disimmilar to Paris. It has been interesting understanding how these different European settlements happened and how now everyone starts conversations with their own mixed inherritance backgrounds - something that we have little of in the UK, although I suspect that is likely to change in our multicultuaral context.