CONNECT22 Wednesday 2

With what voice should we speak in today's culture?
What does it mean to say that you are in the business of Christian communication, content making, film, media, or the arts? And what impact do you hope it will have on the world?
At CONNECT22 you will join engaging and interactive conversation sessions in-person and online as we explore these questions and more through three particular lenses: truth, goodness and beauty.
We will explore the substance of truth and seek to determine what makes something 'good' or virtuous in light of the Christian story. We will also interrogate the various expressions of this through the lenses of beauty and hope.

Understanding your voice is a critical task for any person or organisation. It reveals your identity, your passions, the things you care about. In this first session we will be opening up a framework through which we can understand the voice of Christian media, arts and communication in Australia as we work together to bring a unified message saturated with the truth, goodness and beauty that is found in Jesus.

The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill is a podcast hosted by Mike Cosper, Director of Podcasting for Christianity Today. It takes you inside the story of Mars Hill Church in Seattle – from its humble beginnings to becoming part of one of the largest church planting movements in American history, to its very public dissolution under lead pastor Mark Driscoll — and the aftermath that followed.

We live in a world of contested truth, and as people of faith we can often find ourselves down in the mud, fighting about who is right and who is wrong. In this session we take a broader look at truth (the first element in our theological architecture) and realise that to follow Jesus means that truth is far more than a set of propositions. Truth is a person; and that changes everything.

Living as a follower of the truth changes the way we engage with the world. As image bearers of God, we are to pursue and reflect the goodness of God through our character and work, but this isn’t always an easy task. This session explores how goodness (the second element in our theological architecture) can reflect the moral fabric of the world, and how media and arts contribute to the shaping of this morality in all that we do.

Once every 5 years NCLS Research runs a survey enabling churches to ask their members questions about church life. The survey, begun in 1991, allows church members to express their voice on all aspects of church life. It’s been 5 years since the last survey, there’s been a pandemic, church online has become a thing, not to mention the changes in our political, economic and social spheres. In this live session Dr Powell will unpack the series of questions designed to understand Church attender views about media and local church media usage.

Alan & Debra Hirsch have been leading and influencing church communities in Australia, North and South America and Europe. They recently returned to Australia having lived in the USA for the past 13 years. During their time they were involved in ministering to the arts community in Los Angeles participating in the annual pilgrimage to Burning Man Festival in Nevada. The combination of their sensitivity of understanding and passion for the Scriptures has helped position them uniquely to develop a theological curriculum for living in missional communities while serving in the midst of creatives navigating self-expression, music, arts and sexuality. Alan and Deb will share openly about their experiences and how the church can reframe itself to be more winsome with the Good News.

As one writer said: “beauty can save the world” - but how? This session brings beauty (the third element in our theological architecture) to the forefront and examines how media and art is part of the great witness of Jesus in the world. Brian will be diving deep into the major theme of CONNECT22 exploring, Beauty. Immediately following his presentation the discussion will be opened up for those in the room and online to participate and engage more deeply with the thoughts and ideas.

An anamorphic image is an image or an object that is aligned in such a way that only by viewing them from a specific direction, or from a specific angle, will they become recognizable. Viewing them from any other angle will reveal a distorted picture. Mike uses this as an illustration, or a framework for exploring ways in which we can adjust our posture and position to help explore truth, worship, salvation, faith, holiness, missions, love, etc from a Christ-centred vantage point.