Update and Invitation for UK Speaking Tour June 2015

Posted on 1.05.2015

An update regarding my speaking tour this summer in the UK and reminder for your church, university or organization if you'd like to host an event involving me during the month we'll be in the UK, June 2015.

Right now, on June 3-5 I'll be with Business Connect on Jersey Island.

After our time on Jersey we'll be spending the weekend of June 12-14 with the Citygate Church in Brighton, England.

After that we're waiting to finalize an engagement in Aberdeen, Scotland.

All that to say, dates for our time in the UK are starting to fill up. So if you'd like to explore booking me for a speaking event this coming June please contact me at beckr@acu.edu and I'll connect you with Hannah Bywaters from Citygate church who is helping me coordinate events.

Looking forward to seeing UK readers and friends this June!

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7 thoughts on “Update and Invitation for UK Speaking Tour June 2015”

  1. How exciting! Congratulations on avoiding the British/English pitfall. In order to progress to Level 2 on your cultural sensitivity training, you'll need to stop pronouncing the 'ham' at the end of place names and replace it with a mumbled 'mm' sound. It's not Bir-ming-ham, it's BIRming-mm. Level 3 involves losing the habit of qualifying the locations of towns and cities. This makes British people shake their heads indulgently at Americans. We all know where Brighton and Aberdeen are - and they're the only REAL places called that, so you don't need to differentiate them from Johnny-come-lately pretenders over the pond. The only exceptions are places that have more than one incarnation, such as Gillingham. In these cases, you have to both get the pronunciation correct (hard or soft 'G') and specify the county using the preposition 'in' e.g. "I went to Gillingham in Kent on Saturday". There are further exceptions that need to be learned individually. For example, there are two places called Woolfardisworthy in my own county of Devon. One of these is pronounced 'Woolsery' and one isn't, just as Poughill is pronounced 'Poil'. Don't even start me on Shrewsbury. It's really all very simple.

  3. Having lived in Devon, I can say it is a particular goldmine of those kinds of names. But a gentleman who comes from the nation where they pronounce the river Arkansas differently from the state Arkansas should have no difficulty with such trifles as Cholmondeleigh (Chumley), Featherstonehaugh (Faversham), Moushole (Mowz'l), Bozeat (Boe-zjut) oh who am I kidding we are ridiculous.

  4. While they are all great locations, I hope that you will be visiting some places a bit more accessible and central for most of us Brits than Brighton, Aberdeen, and Jersey! This is comparable to an American tour visiting Miami, Anchorage, and Puerto Rico. :-)

  5. I agree. We'd really like to find some engagements in London and Oxford. So if anyone has contacts in those cities please feel free to put this on their radar screen.

  6. Richard, I know it's across the country from Aberdeen, but if you have time you might consider a side trip to the islands of Iona and Mull, very well known as centers of Celtic Christianity. A dear young monk, Fr Serafim Aldea, is in the process of founding an Orthodox monastery on Mull. He came to our parish in the fall on the last leg of his fundraising trip to the US. If you go, be sure to email, as Fr Serafim is about to begin a gig at Oxford, his "day job" for the next couple of years, and he will be in and out as building goes on at the monastery site, in preparation for nuns who will be there.

    You can read about the monastery here: http://mullmonastery.com
    You can hear some of Fr Serafim's story and get an idea of what he is like here: http://mullmonastery.com/2014/11/29/talk-on-monasticism/

    On the way to Aberdeen, you might stop in at the Northumbria Community mother house, a few miles southwest of Lindisfarne. http://www.northumbriacommunity.org/ The Community was a tremendous help for me when I was in the wilderness.

    Happy New Year!

    Dana

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