As the first weekend of September approaches it is once again time for the National Youth Assembly of the Church of Scotland.  The event will be held 4-7 September at Stirling University.

To keep track of the Assembly the best method will probably be Twitter with the hashtag #nya2009.  If you remember from last year, the hashtag for that Assembly made the Twitter trending list at one time and the organizers asked people to temporarily stop tweeting and return to the real world from the virtual.

There is also an official blog for the Assembly at cosyblog.wordpress.com.  On there you can read that the theme of the Assembly this year is “Field of Dreams.”  To give you a flavour of the Assembly this year here is a shortened up version of the welcome on the official blog:

It’s not long now til we meet at Stirling University – hope you are beginning to get excited!

We have a great programme lined up: Digging deeper and unearthing the ground in our debate chats on Identity, Multi faith, Spirituality and Wealth.

Lots of different types of worship to stir you out of your beds in the morning and to get you jumping at night.

Long lunches where you can doing something Physical and Sporty and the Scottish National Sports Centre (very conveniently also on the same campus) Hmm not likely to find me there much I’m afraid!  You can catch a movie, have some quiet worship time or go to any of the workshops – of which there are masses to choose from!

The hootenanny is there for all you folks who have a talent to share – get in touch with Kim Wood if you haven’t already done so!

We have 35 folk coming from Sweden who perform in a fab choir – they will be doing a set for us one evening as well helping us to hum the odd tune here and there.

Don’t forget, that Saturday night is the Gala Dinner – Big surprise as to the theme (even for me!) so don’t forget your glad rags and some dosh for the charity we are supporting!

The moderator has gone on holiday!!! Hopefully he will be back in time!!

It’s going to be great!! Looking forward to seeing you there. We will be thinking about Field of Dreams – what are your dreams, visions, hopes for the church, the world, yourselves, your faith……..

In case you did not catch it, the official topics for discussion will be “Identity, Multi faith, Spirituality and Wealth.”  Should be interesting, especially since the decisions of this Assembly will provide recommendations and business items for the General Assembly next May.  I consider the NYA a great event because if you want insight into the thinking of the younger generation in the church this is the event to watch and because of how it interacts with the GA.

In addition to the official blog I was tempted to “round up the usual suspects” and make recommendations as to who to follow, but decided instead I would add updates to this post as they started to post.  The one “announced” blogger I can recommend is Chris Hoskins over at What is Freedom? who has put up his intro message for NYA2009.

So stay tuned and I look forward to the discussion next weekend.