ICETE Begins

Sigh. No more afternoon naps on the beach. I spent much of my time today punching out, alphabetizing, folding and setting up these place markers.

The main conference started this evening. When the board was introduced, guess who was the only one not wearing a suit coat. To be fair, he got pulled in from the registration table.

We are more than four hundred theological educators instead of the three hundred we (and the hotel) were planning for. We have taken up all the available rooms and spilled over to another hotel. I missed when Steffani Ferrenzi (old friend from Overseas Council days) read off the countries represented. Suffice it to say that it was embarrassing to have boring old United States on my nametag. Half the US people have interesting names that shout that they weren’t born there instead of good old Anglo-Saxon names. (Steve’s ancestors may not have been Anglo-Saxon, but their name got changed at Ellis Island so that’s what is on my nametag—even here in Turkey surrounded by—the WORLD.)

As our friends and colleagues arrive, dinner table conversations take on such topics as the learning curve of Ukrainian churches faced with opportunities like refugees and military camps on their doorsteps—things their theological education did not prepare them for. Or teaching Iranian Christians in the diaspora.

I am figuring out the food. A lot of it is vegetables. I mostly go for mine raw as there is wonderful salad material. Today I had a tomato stuffed with something. Not sure if it was meat or rice.  At lunch I had squash stuffed with something that reminded me of chutney. The grill is always going outside at lunch. I’ve taken to eating salad and a piece of meat. Today I was greedy and took two pieces of what looked like a Brazilian bife. It wasn’t. It was liver. But marinated, grilled and topped with barbecue sauce, it wasn’t half bad. I’m not sure I could get Steve to eat it though.

It's been a long day. Again in the interest of fairness, this was during the worship, not during Chris Wright's talk on mission, monotheism and maturity as the biblical outcomes of theological education. Worship was led by a team from the local church in Antalya. It has grown to more than a hundred people, struggling back from nothing thirty years ago, after being the dominant religion almost two thousand years ago.