This year's conference is straight outta Pwllheli. Word.

Several of my friends are shortly going to be attending the New Word Alive conference. For those of you who have no idea what this is, it's a week-long Christian event full of Bible teaching, worship and so on. Several fairly high-profile evangelicals are going to be speaking there (the "headliners" are Don Carson, John Piper and Terry Virgo), so as Christian conferences go it's a biggie.

Although I do respect the work that the conference is doing, there's a couple of things that make me laugh every time I hear it mentioned. The first is that it's called "New" Word Alive to distinguish it from plain old Word Alive, the conference that was a part of the much larger Spring Harvest conference up until last year. The split is mentioned on the Spring Harvest website, but you'll note that the site announcement makes no mention whatsoever of the reason for the split. That's because the organisers of Word Alive disagreed with Spring Harvest's practice of inviting speakers whose theological viewpoints differed from their own.

Actually, that's a rather simplified way of looking at it; it's probably fairer to say that the Word Alive people considered the theological difference so great that the Spring Harvest speakers were preaching things that were just plain wrong. Whatever the motivations, I can't help but feel that the new setup is pretty nearly the worst possible outcome. By sticking with almost exactly the same title, the New Word Alive organisers have ended up looking like kids who are taking their ball and going home because the other kids weren't playing nicely; equally, the Spring Harvest organisers look like heretics or like idiots who can't control their own conference, depending on which side of the theological argument you tend to come down.

Both impressions are wrong. The New Word Alive people made their split because they couldn't, in good conscience, be part of an organisation which disagreed with them on, as they saw it, an utterly fundamental point of belief. That's about as far from petty as you can get. Likewise, the Spring Harvest people seem to believe so strongly in allowing different shades of belief a voice that they're willing to sacrifice convenience for unity. Whichever side is "right" (and I think the situation's much more confusing than right-or-wrong), both have acted in the interests of the people they serve, and yet both have come out of it looking daft. It's the sheer absurdity of this situation that makes me laugh, although it's more from desperation than from any inherent humour in the situation.

On a lighter note, the other reason to find New Word Alive amusing is that they use the abbreviation NWA. I can only assume that most of the attendees have never heard of...errr...the other NWA...