As Fi Bows to Peer Pressure

I have to make this reasonably quick as I’m heading off to a public lecture at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). The Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the UN and a person from the UNDP Crisis Prevention Bureau are talking about the current state of knowledge, and policy options, for disasters and development. It’s the first one in a series on disasters and development (what a surprise!) and I’m going to go to all of them. Should be fascinating!

One of the things I’m loving about being in London is the number of public lectures/seminars that are available to attend. Heaps are on at the LSE each week, and then the ODI hosts quite a few as well. Last Thursday a group of us from Passfield and DESTIN went to hear Jeffrey Sachs and a Canon from Westminster Cathedral have a “conversation” about sustainability and development. It was vaguely one-sided, Jeffrey Sachs did most of the speaking, but really interesting. It seems quite surreal to have been to hear him speak in person, he’s not as charasmatic as I’d expected but still well worth going to hear if you ever get the opportunity.

For those who don’t know, Jeffrey Sachs is the Special Advisor on the Millennium Development Goals to the UN Secretary-General, as well as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He wrote “The End of Poverty - How we can make it happen in our lifetime”, which I’d thoroughly reccommend reading if you haven’t already. It’s both informative, interesting and a book that’s hard to put down.

I went to All Souls, Langham Place, last night. It was another interesting experience. The teaching was really solid and I felt I learned a lot from the Vicar, who took apart Roman 8: 12-17 (always good when you can remember what he spoke about). The worship wasn’t really my thing though, and it felt sightly more “high church” than any of the places I’ve been to so far. I like having organised church but I’ve decided I like being suprised by what we sing. We were given service sheets at the beginning, which have all the words on for the songs we were singing as well as the general outline for the service. In some ways, though, it was nice to know what was going on.

The church was reasonably full, although it feels bigger than HTB so it’s hard to know whether there were more people there or at HTB. The worship was mostly older songs and the band consisted of a flute, violin, guitar, keyboard, piano and four vocalists (and a conductor). I enjoyed it but again didn’t quite click. I spent a fair amount of time thinking I’d quite like to go back to HTB, so that’s my plan . . . next week I will go back to HTB and I’ll see what it’s like a second time. I’ll also write a quick review of my first time at HTB later once readings for tomorrow are done.

P.S Thanks for the comments guys!