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Warmth In Winter, Day 1

John I. Carney
2 min readFeb 1, 2020
Our speaker, Toi King

Well, we had a great first night for Warmth In Winter. We stopped at Blaze Pizza in Murfreesboro on our way to Nashville; I’d never been before, but it was as good as I’d been told. They make 11-inch personal pizzas; you tell them what toppings to use (kind of like going through the line at Subway) and then the pizza is cooked in just a few minutes in a really, really hot oven.

By the time we got checked in and unloaded into our rooms at Gaylord Opryland, it was time to go over to the first group session. I saw Brad Fiscus, who, as head of NextGen Ministries for the conference, runs Warmth In Winter, and we swapped “hello”s as he was on his way from point A to point B. I also saw our Stones River District Superintendent, Chip Hunter, and said hello, and I stopped by the Mountain T.O.P. booth.

The evening session was good. The past few years, Elias Dummer — who’s part of a United Methodist church plant here in Tennessee — led the praise team, but they went out-of-town for a speaker. This year, they flipped things, bringing in FRVR FREE — which is not so much a band as a production company that provides worship experiences — from Atlanta, while Rev. Toi King of Brentwood UMC is our keynote speaker.

FRVR FREE was good — but they were a lot louder than Elias Dummer ever was. One year, I brought a pair of earplugs from work to Warmth In Winter but never…

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John I. Carney
John I. Carney

Written by John I. Carney

Author of “Dislike: Faith and Dialogue in the Age of Social Media,” available at http://www.lakeneuron.com/dislike

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