We put on .bE last night in a beautiful facility (see more photos below), the Eighth Street Center in Buhl, ID. It’s always interesting to see who comes to .bE….and who doesn’t. I really don’t know how to advertise .bE any more. For this time, I limited myself to 15 churches in Buhl and the next town, Filer. I sent out a mailing, called the next week, sent some more information, visited with some pastors, made some more phone calls. After all of that, there were 4 churches who expressed some real interest in this. They advertised it to their congregations, took posters, put it in their newsletters…not one person from those churches came.
At 8.30pm, when we were going to begin, there were maybe 8 people there [keep in mind, this is after all day preparation and 3.5 hours of set-up]. By 8.45pm there were close to 20 and we started then. I think a total of 30 people came. It’s hard to trust God that those that needed to be there were there, and it’s hard after putting so much work into something to only have 30 people come, and to have many, many more tell you they were extremely excited about it and then not show at all. But I had some great comments from people about the evening.
Some wonderful comments came from the owners of the Eighth Street Center. While the building used to be a Presbyterian church (in the early 1900’s) it is now very much a multi-use facility: after-school activities, art shows, plays, concerts, etc. It houses the office for the Universal Life Church and many people associated with the center are very into non-traditional forms of spirituality, healing and wholeness. One of the women read a couple of the .bE pamphlets I had and told me that seeing me do this “gave her hope” and she knew that it was “so right” that I was doing this. I’m guessing that our definitions of God, religion, spirituality probably vary quite a bit – but to know that something like alt.worship could be used as a way to get conversations going about spirituality and that something like .bE offers a place where people of all spiritual walks can worship and experience God together…there is something very cool about that.
So…it was good. I had some wonderful help (thanks Jacque, Jean, Andrew, Jeff, Melissa, Jessica, Brady, Hailey and anyone else I forgot). Here are a few photos from the evening…
- The Prayer Pool: As a kid splashing around in a kiddie pool, I never thought I’d have use for one again…
- People Praying
- Prayer Station
- People At Stations
- View from Upstairs
- The Eighth Street Center: Just a beautiful facility. They had the sets of pillars in the 4 corners of the room, facing N, E, S and W (Native American spirituality has special meanings for the directions)