1 – The UK will lose its triple A credit rating.
2 – The Scottish Episcopal Church will have poor statistical returns this year prompting very quiet wailing and gnashing of teeth except in Argyll.
3 – At least one Church of England bishop (and maybe a pair) will be outed. (Only time I’ve retained a prediction from one year to the next).
4 – The Scottish Parliament will vote for new legislation allowing gay couples to get married. (But no such weddings this year). The details of the new category of “belief marriages” will be substantially changed and much more heavily regulated than is suggested in the recent consultation response from government.
5 – Sadly, I expect renewed campaigning for straight people to be able to enter Civil Partnerships with preparations being made for a legal challenge for 2014.
6 – The Coalition will have lower public opinion ratings by end of year due to public concerns as austerity measures bite. It will record one of the lowest public opinion rating of any UK govenment in modern times.
7 – The Church of Scotland will have a difficult General Assembly, but one characterised by fine speeches. They will approve a report which suggests having a theological study into blessing civil partnerships but not actual marriages of gay people. (This will please no-one who has any opinions about the matter and will thus be regarded as a success by those who don’t).
8 – The Church of England will be unable to agree a way forward on opening the Episcopate to Women.
9 – Justin Welby won’t put a foot wrong.
10 – The new Bishop of Durham will come from a relatively small congregation in London.
18 responses to “General Assembly on sex and singleness”
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DCampbell writes:
Wow, Kennedy – I hadn’t realised there was so much or so many people to it, but surely it is not beyond us to have some kind of webcast of the more important sections of the proceedingsWebcasting from Palmerston Place presents a number of challenges:
resourcing the camera crew, vision mixer and director (kit and people) and integration with the projection system to carry any slides and visuals
looking at the lighting to allow good pictures but without interfering with the projection system (which suffers from light spill from the windows already)
Network and machine infrastructure in the building to capture and code the video.
Dedicated bandwidth (with Quality of Service) to transfer the video and audio stream out to a distribution server. (We currently piggyback on Palmerston Place’s own internet connection).An alternative would be an audio stream with a general shot webcam updating every 30 – 60 secs but again would probably need a dedicated connection to the net to ensure that there was no breakup.
This is not a litany of reasons for not doing things – it’s just a realistic assessment of the resource requirements.
Kennedy
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Or another thought-
We start having Synod on the Th/Fr/Sa after the Assembly on the Mound and share the costs of the setup.
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No, I suppose a general ‘piskie tag would work just as well, but I’m with Kimberly and would prefer #piskie
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My only problem with piskie is that in some parts of the UK a “piskie” is one of the little people, and not necessarily a nice one.
See for example:
http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/cornwall/folklore/the-piskies-of-cornwall.html“Some people saw them as the souls of pagans who could not transcend to heaven, and they were also seen as the remnants of pagan gods, banished with the coming of Christianity. In tradition they are doomed to shrink in size until they disappear. “
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Maybe it’s just me, but I have always found the potential confusion between pisky and piskie immensely pleasing (by ‘always’ I mean, since I discovered the term – not too many years ago!). It’s one of the (many) reasons I’m pleased to be on the pisky/ie side of the pond.
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Thanks Kelvin – all this stuff is quite amazing really – especially Kennedy’s informative and knowledgeable material about what is actually needed. I agree about the Primus’s charge being essential, but if live streaming (if that is what it is called) is too intensive an operation in all kinds of ways for an admittedly small audience, why not do a twice daily edited digest of each day’s business like the one the Revd Dougkas Aitken does for the CofS?
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Rob Warren already does do digests in audio format – video may well be the next step, though it is quite a big step to take.
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The video update that Douglas Aitken does is a copy of his audio update with appropriate video material behind it ie you don’t get any actuality from the chamber.
We would still need editing and coding time before the video could be uploaded to an external server.
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