The view from here

A bit more on BMR

2012-02-03T10:32:00.000Z

If you're interested in knowing how to calculate your BMR rather than let a web-based calculator do it for you, then this is a good place to start. If you read the article, you will see that BMR can be calculated in a number of ways. The most accurate, it says, is to use lean body mass. That's the weight of your body minus the fat! You need to know your body fat percentage to do this, which makes it a little less accessible for those without access to the technology to do this. However, it's not that difficult to get it measured. Be aware that when you measure it can affect the reading.

The basic calculation is this:

BMR= 370+(21.6 x LBM)

LBM is Lean Body Mass in Kg.

It's not gender specific, so the same equation works for male and female.

The BMR figure I played with yesterday for myself was based on what I think would be an ideal personal weight for me as an active individual. When I used this formula for me at my current weight and BF% the BMR came out very similar (1882 vs 1811). So it's not a big difference, although 70 calories a day over a year would add up!

On the other hand, there's no allowance for exercise or activity in these numbers, so as a general guide I'm not sure either would be a problem.

Calculating BMR

2012-02-02T08:36:00.000Z

My earlier post got me thinking about BMR a little more and I did a quick bit of maths! I know, 8:00am on a Thursday morning and I'm doing maths, it's not a good sign! Anyway, here's a graph of my BMR profile according to this BMR calculator.

Now I don't know how accurate this calculation is, but as you can see from the simple data set I used, BMR falls in a nice neat straight line with age. I've made no allowances for changes in fitness, I've just let the BMR calculator do the work, so whatever equations it uses, I've used!

I put in my height as it is when I stand up straight and again without allowing for shrinkage over time! I've also used a fixed weight which is probably a bit low for me, but one I'd like to be. No harm in having a dream. Given it's a straight line, changing the weight would simply shift the line up or down.

If you do a bit of simple maths, the calorie count drops by about 7 calories a day each year. Not much is it? It's 49 calories a week or 2555 calories a year. If I remember correctly, 1lb of body fat is something like 3500 calories. Now it starts to add up. If you are eating the same amount of calories now as you were 30 years ago, you're almost certainly taking in more than you're using up. Unless you are dramatically more active, you could easily be 200 calories a day over your BMR, which is 7300 calories a year. Equivalent to 2lbs of body fat!

Now I'm not talking as an expert and there might well be something intrinsically wrong about my maths here, and if not the maths then the science or the logic! For one, I'm not wholly convinced that BMR is a straight line. If it were, my BMR at 20 would have been 2049. Maybe it was and I was just very active. But at this simple level, knowing your BMR would seem like a very useful bit of information!

It's all a bit sobering isn't it.

Playing with My Fitness Pal

2012-02-02T07:47:00.000Z

So, I've been using the MyFitnessPal website for three weeks now and it's rather interesting. I'm not going to give away any results as yet, but I have lost some weight and it's been interesting trying to track my food intake, especially when it comes to eating out! I've created some recipes and I hope to do some more. what is helpful is seeing what a portion actually looks like. I've talked before about how easy it is to get portion sizes wrong simply because we don't know what apportion really looks like.

When you first sign up with the application you can let it do the maths and set your goals for you depending upon your aims (weight loss or weight gain). It works to a standard spread of calories from carbs, proteins and fats, but you can change this in the custom set up section from the website where you can also reset your daily calorie goal. So, if you find that the calorie goal isn't helping you to achieve the progress you're looking for then you can change it. In the end the goal is a guide and the scales are the evidence! Just because it says you will lose 0.5Kg a week by eating 1900 calories doesn't guarantee it!

For example, when I first signed up the system calculated my BMR at around 2400, but using another website calculator I got a figure of around 1900. Those 500 calories equate to about 1lb of weight loss a week. If I put in my goal weight, then my BMR drops to around 1800 calories a day. So, as my weight goes down (and as my age goes up!), so does my BMR and that would suggest to me that if I want to maintain weight loss then I'll need to adjust my calorie target appropriately. The basic rule is experiment. See what works and keep reviewing. The more you learn about what works for you, the more control you will have. and the more control you have, the more freedom I think you will have when it comes to those treats we all like and the less guilt you will feel.

I've changed my goal slightly on the basis of this theory and I'll review the most successful weeks to see what was different about those weeks compared to other weeks. That's a bit of a job, and a way of maybe getting some reports out based on a few user chosen parameters would be helpful. I haven't found anything that will let me do that yet, but then I haven't really explored the reports that much. Maybe the printable version would give me the data I want.

I think the other comment I would make is that you shouldn't assume that when you put in your exercise that the figure calculated for calories used will be wholly accurate. If it says you've burned 1,000 calories just don't assume you can eat those calories back and still reach your goal if it's weight loss. I think you'll be disappointed if you do that too often.

Overall I think this is a great tool for tracking how your diet is working both nutritionally and in terms of weight management. Used well, it can help you plan menus to balance your diet. Simply fill out the daily diary with your expected meals and snacks for the day and then see how that sits alongside your goals and make any necessary adjustments. Yes it would be time consuming to do it that way, but over time you might learn more about your own nutritional requirements than any quick fix diet will give you and it might just help you develop long-term healthier habits. That's my hope for myself anyway!

It will only ever be as accurate as the data you supply and the algorithms it uses. If you cheat it can't tell. So don't cheat! I'm off for some breakfast.

The BU money gap

2012-02-01T09:07:00.000Z

I need to start by offering a spoiler alert! At some point in this post it might sound like I'm actually advocating widespread redundancies as the way out of our financial crisis. I'm not, and please don't read it as such. On the other hand, if we are not prepared to think the apparently unthinkable, then the novel and creative might just be out of reach too. Let me explain by way of two stories.

The first comes from my time at British Gas. I was on some sort of course, can't remember what exactly, based at a hotel somewhere in West London. We were divided into groups and on one occasion given a research project to consider. In my group I was the only one currently working in a research environment. The project was the remote reading of gas meters. Each group had to do a presentation and a senior member of one of the research stations was brought in to reflect on our presentations. We were third up and I got the job of presenting our ideas.

The first two groups both included in their presentations thoughts about the impact of remote reading on the jobs of the meter readers. They both received the same criticism that that was not their concern, they were to focus on the remote reading question and possible solutions. So, although we'd talked about the same issue, I dropped it from our presentation because I thought by now we'd all have got the idea that this was not part of the project. Not so. One member of our group spoke up after my presentation to say that I hadn't mentioned the meter readers. My response was to point out to them that we already knew that this was not part of the brief.

The point is quite simple. No matter how much we cared about the meter readers and their jobs, that wasn't the project. Focussing on that one issue would not help us think creatively about solutions to the questions raised by the project brief.

The second story comes from a conference I attend some years ago. It reaffirmed something I learnt in my early days as a research scientist about the non-evaluation of initial ideas. The speaker at the conference talked about how they came to design a standard control circuit for many household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. They began by thinking about how a ladybug might control such an appliance. From that seemingly ridiculous starting point came the design of the circuit board.

Again the point is simple. Think the unusual, even the unthinkable and maybe you will find your way to the solution.

So what about the financial gap in the Baptist Union's funding. Well, we could take the kind of approach we've taken many times before and simply ask the churches to give more. The truth is I can't ever remember that working. We may have increased income, but never enough to cover the shortfall. And it all rather assumes that the churches, and the people in them, actually want to give towards the centre. From personal experience the evidence is very strong that fewer people in our baptist churches feel any sense of connection to the denomination for all sorts of reasons.

Perhaps we need to take the radical thinking approach, not as the end of the game, but the beginning. Maybe we start by asking what a movement would look like if we started it today, rather than how we can shore up our denominational structures that may have served us well in the past, but may not be the best way to do things now. I don't know.

At our recent ministers' gathering someone said something along the lines of, "Well, of course we can't make everyone at Didcot redundant can we?" I have to confess that I wanted to ask why not. I also wanted to ask why we couldn't do a few other things either, like stopping home mission grants. I know it sounds horrible, but unless we're willing to ask the question and answer it in a way that has less to do with jobs and careers and more to do with mission and kingdom, well how far will we actually get.

Thinking the so-called unthinkable does not mean doing the unthinkable. On the other hand it might just allow some hitherto unexplored creative ideas to emerge.

The Other 16

2012-01-31T08:02:00.002Z

My daughter Ally sent me a link to this article this morning:

Who are the other 16?

Apparently 1 in 17 Android and IOS 'phones have the YouVersion Bible App installed on them. I don't know how many that makes worldwide, but I'm guessing it's a pretty big number. The article is about how to reach the 16 who haven't and it asks some questions about what we can do to encourage people to engage with the Bible through the medium of smart 'phones and other mobile devices.

If you have such a device and haven't tried YouVersion, then do give it a try. It might just help you keep up to date with your reading plan, or not as the case might be!!

Retraining here I come!

2012-01-31T07:55:00.000Z

So, this Saturday, 4th February 2012, marks the real start of my retraining. It's the first day of the full diploma course in Sports Massage Therapy and I'm looking forward to it with that mixture of excitement and apprehension that goes with anything new. Will I be able to learn all the information at a rate that will get me through the course? Will I be able to develop the practical skills and that I will need? Will I be able to turn it all into a viable business at the end?

All questions that will undoubtedly get answered in the next twelve months or so.

Of course it's also important to remember that I'm not retraining because I've given up ministry or because ministry has given me up. I"m dong it precisely because I'm still passionate about people who are far from God and about the church that God has chosen to carry the news of the greatest hope we can ever have. When I first ventured towards ministry it was because of a sense of the need within the church in the UK to rediscover it's spiritual life in God's hands. As fellow members of an expedition to North Africa were talking about their sense of call to reach the Arab world with the Gospel, I was consumed by an equal passion to see the church in the UK fired up.

I remember a picture that came to mind of a mission worker edging out a long a branch to reach whatever was at the end. I remember the folk sitting by the trunk cheering them on as they went. And I remember too the sense of time passing and the person on the branch fading from both the view and the memory of the those around the trunk. Eventually a decision was made to cut off the branch because it weighed too much and the trunk would be damaged if something wasn't done. No one remembered that there was a person at the other end who needed help and support. So they took a saw and cut off the branch and the worker on the end found themselves falling helplessly to the ground. In that picture I saw the church at home, concerned about itself so much that it lost sight of the wider mission.

Years later, when I read about my Grandfather's time in Gambia, I wondered if he felt that sense of disconnection with home. I wondered if that contributed to his returning home from the mission-field and never being involved in church again. I don't know. I wondered too if he ever prayed for the church in the UK to get its head back in the game and to stop fretting about curtains and policies and just get on with the job of the kingdom.

I was going to tell a story about getting to put into practice a few of the things I've been learning about massage. About how funny it was to be standing around after tennis last night doing a little bit of massage for a friend with a tight muscle. I was very careful not to do what I'm not able to do, but I did what I could and I'll find out next week if it helped or hindered. Hopefully it helped.

But whether I'm a Sports Massage Therapist, a Nutritional Adviser or a Baptist Minister, I will never stop being a follower of Jesus. I may slip and slide, I may make mistakes and I may fail in some people's eyes, but I will commit myself to pursue a simple obedience to the call of God on my life.

It's going to take time!

2012-01-30T10:46:00.003Z

Finally I got to church yesterday. What with Christmas, family visits and weekend introductory courses, I haven't actually been to church for a month. Well not on a Sunday anyway, and not to a building that we mistakenly call the church and... Actually I have "been church" over the last month, just not in a standardised and sanitised appointed 1.5 hour worship experience.

Anyway, we toddled off somewhere yesterday and had a good time. Perhaps "good time" is not an appropriate description of what we did, but it will have to suffice. It certainly wasn't traditional, and it wasn't slick, but it was open and relaxed and engaging and okay. Is that the right way to describe a worship event-Okay? Who knows! It was interesting to be part of the congregation, mostly unknown in terms of my background. Only one or two possibly knew I'm a minister and I didn't tell anyone! Not that it's a secret, it just takes a bit of explaining! Rather like explaining that just because I used to work for British Gas didn't qualify me to fit a central heating system or that having studied chemistry that I would be able to fill my grandmother's prescriptions for her because the shop is called "Boots the Chemist" rather than "boots the Pharmacist"!

So what's going to take take time? Well, mostly it's about finding a place within a Christian community. One of the reasons for not disclosing readily my background as a minister is in order to not get pigeonholed into a role of any kind. If I'm a leader, then I want that to emerge through service rather than imposed by virtue of training. Eventually, if we settle in the community we visited, then it will become apparent, more widely known as we become more widely known within the community. The risk I run is being seen as the quiet one who doesn't say much. But then again, keeping quiet isn't a bad habit for someone who's been preaching for twenty years.

I don't know if it's going to be more difficult after two decades of ministry or if we will simply ease ourselves into ordinary church life. I don't know how it will be sitting in the congregation listening to otters do what I used to do. I don't know how I will respond if and when an opportunity to speak is offered. All these things lie ahead of us. I just hope that we don't lose sight of the simple church idea that is forming in our hearts and minds.

Driscoll and the British Church

2012-01-30T10:20:00.000Z

By now some of you may have read the interview in Christianity that seems to have stoked something of a debate whether Mark Driscoll has anything to say to the church in the UK or not. I ought to reread the article again sometime, but from my first reading I thought he had some courageous things to say that need to be said and need to be heard. We're very quick to defend ourselves when maybe we ought to be taking a long cold look at the reality of our situation.

To balance things up, if you've read the article or just the tweets and blogs, then you might like to read what the man himself had to say about it and a helpful piece by Don Carson too. I thought Don Carson's reflections were particularly helpful and balanced, and you can read them here. Mark Driscoll's comments are on his blog here.

Mark Driscoll calls for clarity of doctrine, courage in preaching, and some objective thinking about men and the church. We ought to listen to that challenge. Generally, as evangelicals, we've got our doctrine sorted out, although there is always room for differences. How big those differences are and how healthy they are is not at issue here. I think the issue issue is how far they distract us from the core call of the church to reach those far from God. To be honest, I think it's naive to think that one's position on say women in leadership, is wholly responsible for our ineffectiveness in reaching men. There's far more to it than that.

What Don Carson does in his reflections is to remind us that Yorkshire is different compared to London (well we all knew that anyway!), and in reminding us of that points us to a reality that success is not necessarily in the numbers. Good things are happening in our country and innovation is alive and well despite institutional barriers and cultural challenges. Mark Driscoll openly acknowledges these differences too.

Overall, we're in danger of yet more knee-jerk reactions to things said by people who are passionate about the kingdom and actually care about the future of the mission of God in the UK, just because we don't like Jonny Foreigner trying to tell us what we're doing wrong and how we could do better. Perhaps the voice from the outside is just what we need so that we can see more clearly from the inside. Thank you to both Mark Driscoll and Don Carson for caring enough to say what they see and for raising the standard of hope around which I hope we can all gather.

Experimenting with diet and nutrition

2012-01-25T08:48:00.000Z

As some of you know I'm currently studying a nutrition course. Partly for my own interest and partly as a personal retraining programme in order to be self-supporting in ministry. Anyway, my interest in nutrition foes back a long way and should have been better informed a long time ago. I was only four years old when I declared my dislike of most meat and announced I wasn't going to eat it anymore! My mum thought it was a phase, but in broad terms I've not eaten most red meat since then. I still eat chicken and turkey, and a few other things that I like, so getting all my essential amino acids has never been a problem.

A few years ago I decided to do two things. One, tackle my increasing weight and secondly, take a serious look at the potential risks of diabetes and possible solutions. BOth my mother and my grandfather had type II and my twin now also has been diagnosed type II. I started to look at GI and we adjusted our diet as a family to follow a lower GI/GL regimen.

In the run up to our daughter's wedding, both Anne and I lost a lot of weight following a ver popular eating plan that worked for us, and generally speaking we are being reasonably successful at maintaining our weight. Of course the root problem is that you put on weight because you metabolism doesn't match your calorie intake, and those habits are hard to change but need to change over the long haul if you're going to avoid the modern phenomenon of going form one diet to another.

My current experiment on myself is to use both a calorie counting tool (the My Fitness Pal website I blogged about recently) and an adjusted balance of protein and carbohydrates and fat in my diet. The FSA guideline is roughly 15% calories from protein, 30% from fat, and 55% from carbohydrates. To give you an idea of what that looks like, the average healthy adult male runs on about 2,400 calories a day (it just makes the maths a little easier). 15% of that is 360, 30% is 720, which leaves 1120 for the carbohydrate portion.

The simple calculation is that 1g of protein or carbohydrate is 4 calories and 1g fat is 9 calories. So that would suggest that you would need to eat 90g protein, 80g fat, and 280g carbohydrate. Apparently, most people usually don't eat enough protein, and often too much fat, but that's a discussion for another day.

To lose weight you need to eat a calorie deficit diet (fewer in than burnt). But protein uses more energy to digest and so if you get more of your calories from protein the logically your body will need to work harder to extract the nutrients. This is the basis for diets like the Dukan diet that is very high in protein and low in carbohydrate. So my experiment has been to eat a calorie deficit diet of about 500 calories a day below my needs, and to eat 30% protein rather than 15%. On top of that I am making sure that I drink a lot of water. at least 1.5 litres a day and probably nearer 2.5.

What I've noticed is this:

Firstly, it's quite hard to make sure you're eating that much protein. My daily target is 150g, which turns out to be quite a lot for a non-meat eater! Protein shakes can help, but that's not a cheap option by any means and you do need to be careful about what you're doing.

Secondly, drinking that much water takes discipline, but then so does everything else!

Thirdly, never forget the importance of exercise to maintain lean muscle mass and keep your metabolic engine running!

Fourthly, it seems to work! I've lost about 6lbs (2.2kg) in 3-4 weeks and I still treat myself to the occasional flapjack in the coffee shop once a week.

Farewell to the Baptist Times

2012-01-20T14:32:00.002Z

I scanned the final print version of The Baptist Times this morning. This caught my eye from 1977, the year of the "Protest Assembly". Reading the text it would seem that protest is code for someone actually asking a relevant question that sends the procedural process folk into a tailspin. Maybe I'm being unfair, but it would seem that when a denomination is more concerned about the correct procedure than the question, we're in a real fix!

Anyway, the question was raised by one Douglas McBain of Lewin Road (I had the privilege of meeting Douglas in the 1980's and was really helped and encouraged by him), who apparently woke the assembly up with his challenge from the floor over the interpretation of the data on decline in the denomination, which in his words, had nothing to say about the life, health and spiritual strength of our denomination.

In a later article for The Baptist Times he wrote about the "malaise" afflicting our churches where we'd lost the cutting edge of evangelism, how poorly paid most ministers were, churches that were afraid of change, too many colleges, and looking backwards rather than forwards. A week later he wrote about the need to have hope, be courageous, innovative and avoid any tendency towards centralisation.

I guess as the lights go out on our denominational paper and come on with the Beyond400 website and the Baptist Times website to be launched, we have to hope that we will not only listen to these voices from the past but also to the voices of the present who once again are calling for courage and innovation. Perhaps too its time to recognise that we are not like other denominations and we do not need to protect the centre in order to go forward at the margins. We don't need a centralised system that organises our life for we ought to be able to organise ourselves locally. Not in fierce independence but in cooperative interdependence.

Two years after the '77 Assembly a report was produced. It's take on the decline in membership? Apparently we were now "slimmer but stronger". If we compared the 2012 figures against the 1979 numbers I worry that we might find ourselves positively diaphanous!

Steve Turner once said: History repeats itself; has to, no one ever listens. Are we listening?

Reading Haggai

2012-01-18T10:59:00.001Z

I made the decision to read Haggai and Habakkuk because I thought they might be relevant to our new direction. I know too how easy it would be to pick out verses that saw what I want to hear and how dangerous that would be. But why would I read my Bible in a vacuum?

Haggai challenges and encourages us to prioritise the important. As we buy a house and talk about everything we want to do to it to make it our home, Haggai reminds us that we are not doing this for our benefit alone, but to honour God. If God cannot take pleasure in the house we are building then it's all a waste of time and effort. Remeber the psalmists injunction that "unless the Lord builds the house, those who labour, labour in vain".

So our prayer is that whatever gets built, God is honoured in it and by it, that he will be pleased with what he sees, his glory will be there and his peace too. Not a bad goal for where we are going.

Picking up the pace

2012-01-18T10:53:00.000Z

You'd think that someone who has spent most of their adult life reading books, studying ideas, reflecting on concepts and generally trying to stay involved in changing conversations about all sorts of things would find shifting their focus to a new area of study fairly straightforward. But the thing is I've never really done anything in a straightforward manner in my life!

So I find myself about to start this amazing Sports Massage Diploma while at the same time studying a Diploma in Nutrition and planning some CPD in Pilates, posture and a few other things. These, of course, will not happen until next year at the earliest, but I do seem to considering a lot of fresh studying for someone of my advancing years! I just hope my brain can take it!

I have a friend that I haven't seem for a long time. In fact I've lost contact with them and would like to track them down, but I can't seem to find them anywhere yet. I remember his plan was to retire at 55, the age I will be this year and the age I think he must have reached about five years ago. I wonder if he did? I wonder what else he is doing?

As for me, retirement doesn't look like a possibility for a long time yet, so I might as well keep learning and exploring. No way do I want my brain to slow down. Recent studies seem to suggest that decline sets in much earlier than previously thought, so I know I'm on borrowed time as far as learning and retying new information goes. Let's hope the brain lasts out the next couple of years!

Stepping out in a new direction

2012-01-16T07:43:00.001Z

Okay, so this past weekend I spent the two days taking my first steps into the world of Sports Massage. Stepping into the unknown is always somewhat daunting, but never more soy for me that this weekend's experience. The thing about massage is that it is literally "hands on". Who knows how one is going to react personally to applying massage to people one doesn't know. Will you be able to do it in a way that makes them feel comfortable, will you feel comfortable?

In the end, I really enjoyed my new learning experience and I've signed up for the full diploma course! So for the next 11 months or so I'll be a sports massage therapist in training! After that, who knows how things will take shape. We will have to wait and see.

I was really surprised at how much I learnt in just two days. Doing the final "full-body" massage on Sunday afternoon was a chance to put all the things we'd been learning together. Managing the time is quite difficult. How do you work out how long to spend on one leg before moving onto the other one? some of that clearly comes with experience and also with what you find. The tendency we all had was to want to look at what we were doing rather than letting our hands give us the feedback. We learnt that looking up was important for our posture.

I think the other thing we all discovered was how much effort it takes to do good massage. This isn't just lightly stroking someone's back, this is hard work! Learning to use your own body weight and to push through your legs and hips, not using your arms and shoulders takes a lot of concentration and effort at first. But it soon became more natural.

As I type this post, I'm listening to some worship from Hillsongs. It reminds me that what I'm doing is not replacing my ministry, it's reshaping it. I may never preach again, but this weekend I had more meaningful interactions with people who wouldn't consider church an option than I've had in too long. I've had my faith challenged as I was asked all sorts of interesting questions and sought to give open, honest answers.

It may be a new direction, but the good news remains the same, the passion for the lost remains intact, the desire to be shaped by the hands of God in accordance with his purposes is still at the heart of everything. I never want to lose sight of that.

More than a calorie counter

2012-01-13T07:12:00.001Z

I've started exploring myfitnesspal as part of my interest in nutrition. We all know, I assume, that if calories consumed exceed calories used, then weight gain is inevitable. But how many of us have an accurate idea of our calorie intake?

Myfitnesspal is both a web-based food diary and an app for both iPhone and iPad. It allows you quickly to enter data about the food you eat and the exercise you take on a day-by-day basis. There is even a barcode scanner option for gathering data about a food item. By setting manageable goals you can track your progress. At the end of the day you can review both the calories consumed and the balance of the day's diet. So, for example, if you are trying to derive say 30% of your calories from protein, you can see how you are doing.

I suspect that over time, if you use it honestly, you will get a pretty good idea of what a typical day looks lie and where to make changes. I think it might also help design different eating plans.

There is a good range of easily accessed food data available without having to enter carbohydrate, protein and fat breakdowns. This was today's breakfast:

You can save any given meal, or you can copy a meal from a previous day or date, so it's quite a flexible system. I don't know that I would use it over a really long time. I think it's more a case of getting to know what a typical day or a typical meal means to my overall diet.

Oh, and by the way, it's free!

What is giving?

2012-01-11T08:00:00.000Z

As you know, we're about to embark on a very different ministry track in the next few months. As things change one of the areas we've been talking about is how we give and what constitutes giving in these changing circumstances. It would be very easy for us to declare that we can no longer afford to give in the way we have done in the past, and so to reduce our giving to something we consider more manageable.

I hope you feel as uncomfortable about some of those words as we do. We've never wanted our giving to be a matter of affordability or manageability. I remember the quote at the start of RT Kendall's great book on giving that says something like, "When someone says it's not about the money–it's about the money!" We will always keep tat in mind when we work out what to give and how to do it.

The question we face is more mundane in many ways than the simple affordability question. In reality we can spiritualise it by saying things like, "We can't afford not to give," but who wouldn't like a bit extra in their pocket to spend, especially when the mortgage is due and the utility bills are rising? Equally we don't want to become fixated on tithing as the only true measure of our giving. We can so easily fall into the trap of doing the maths and deciding that God must be pleased with us because we hit 10% again this month.

No, our question really revolves around the costs of retraining and the investment in church planting. If I'm doing the training, does that count as part of our giving? There we go again. Another interesting word, "count". It's so forensic, so legal, so accountancy-like, as if everything is reduce able to a measurable amount, a metic of some kind. When did our faith-walk with God become about metrics?

Somewhere along the line we need to rediscover the joy of giving and the sacrifice, but also the joy of life with God. I can't remember how we worked this out last time when i went to college to study theology. I do remember well God's faithfulness to us through those years and how he blessed us in ways we never imagined. And I remember too our friends who struggled. We were no more deserving of God's blessing than they were, but together we shared the blessing.

This time around we have decided that my training is an investment in ministry. We will keep an account of the cost and we will still seek to be generous, but we won't beat ourselves up about numbers. As always we will watch carefully how things unfold and in faith we will look to respond to what we see before us.

What I'm about to read

2012-01-07T10:33:00.002Z

Alongside reading books on nutrition, i'm still reading as widely as I can about church, particularly missional church. I have a number of unstarted books that I ought to get stuck into in the next month or so. Two that I want to read are: The faith of leap by Hirsch and Frost and The missional church in perspective by Gelder and Zscheile. Alongside these two, I've jus bought Barefoot church by Hatmaker to read on my Kindle.

That should keep me pretty busy for the rest of January.

The nutrition thing is quite interesting. I'm now on module 5 of 18, trying to do one a week. I guess this will get a bit more demanding when I start my other course. Self-discipline will be of the utmost importance. It will almost be like college all over again! At least I'm free of major examinations this time around. I remember vowing that I'd never sit another exam after I finished my first degree and then I went and did two more! And then after that I still did two more exams for my accreditation as a batiste minister and a diploma in counselling. Must be a genetically disposed student.

Maybe it says something about being willing to embrace something new and different. At least that might be an argument I could use for it. If, at school. someone had said to me that I'd have a degree in chemistry, two in theology an two or three diplomas in unrelated subjects I think I'd have thought them quite mad. Back in the 70's it was still very much the case that you settled on a career and followed that through. Now it seems that there's almost a portfolio approach the career development. Maybe not for everyone, but for some.

Anyway, whatever it all means it certainly means this: life will be different. So I'd better get on with writing up my next assignment and ding some research for a friend who needs some nutritional advice. Does this count as my first real client I wonder? Hope I can help!

Me and my Kindle

2012-01-05T08:39:00.001Z

I was very lucky to get a Kindle for Christmas. As you know, I already own an iPad, so why you might wonder would I want a Kindle? Well, I have to say that I asked the same question for a long time. The iPad is great. It has a bright screen that is easy to read and a larger screen size than the Kindle. The Kindle is a dedicated reader, whereas the iPad can do so much more. So why carry two devices around with you when one would do the job, right?

Wrong!

The Kindle is brilliant. It is light, much lighter than the iPad. It renders the pages in a way that makes it feel book-like in a way that's just a little hard to explain. The text is clear, navigation is easy enough and the battery lasts a long time. Yes, it's a dedicated reader, but it's so good at being that, and that is exactly what I want from this kind of device.

I currently have a number of books on my Kindle. I'm half-way through The Long Walk, the story of a group of prisoners escaping from a Siberian work camp in the 1940's. I also have a book about nutrition on there and a couple of other fiction titles to dip into at some point. Yesterday I downloaded a sample chapter from a book I might get. Now that's a great way to explore new books and ideas without having to clog the bookshelves.

So I have to say that I'm impressed with my Kindle and I have a feeling we're going to have a long and enjoyable working relationship. Will I stop buying paper based books? Probably not. Actually I'd love to have the option of buying both paper and digital for some books, rather like triple-play Blue Ray, DVD and digital media.

Proteins, Carbs, fats and Vitamins

2012-01-05T08:27:00.000Z

To keep my brain from going to sleep now that I'm no longer a church leader, I've embarked on a course in nutrition. To be honest I'm not too sure where it fits in the grand scheme of qualifications. If anyone knows what it means I be pleased to find out what an "NCFE Level 4 diploma" equates to on the NQF. From what I've done so far I'd guess that it somewhere around or just above an A-level, but given that they are supposed to have got so much easier than when I did my A-levels, who am I to say!

Anyway, I'm working away it to the best of my ability and trying to remember what I've read so far about complete and incomplete proteins, what the essential amino acids are, how to work out how much carbohydrate there is some foods and what a portion size actually should be for the average person! Next up is a module on fats and then there's a long unit on vitamins. My ageing brain is struggling to retain all this new material and I think I'll have to produce some kind of review system to help me stay familiar with what I'm learning.

I'm using Anne and myself as guinea pigs to explore different diet elements. So last night I cooked a simple pasta meal, but rather than just sling some pasta in a pan, I weighed out the pasta according to the serving guidelines. I then did a bit of maths on the meal to see what the calorie count was. Very interesting. I'm pretty sure that one of the challenges the great British diet faces is that of portion size. Just for fun, try weighing your breakfast cereal out. Just put in the bowl what you'd usually have and then weigh it and compare it to the portion size on the packet. I was surprised how much I saw as a reasonable portion.

Anyway, it's quite interesting to explore all of this, at least it is to me.

In a couple of weeks I'm attending a weekend training course which is an introduction to sports massage. If that goes well, I'll be looking to start the full diploma course in February. All this should keep me occupied over the next year along with sorting out the house we are hoping to buy.

The 39 Steps

2012-01-03T11:22:00.000Z

Last night Anne and I went off to the Criterion Theatre to see a production of The 39 Steps. It was a great evening.

Adapted by Patrick Barlow, it is a comedy take on Buchan's original story. The story moves along at a great pace and we didn't even notice the time passing. No sooner had the opening monologue begun than we found ourselves 45 minutes later at the intermission without a dull moment.

The cast of four did a great job and I think we'd even go back and see it again, just to pick up on some of the things we might have missed the first time around. There was some really clever use of props and shadow puppets on a very simple set. I'm not sure how far through the action that I realised the number of references to Alfred Hitchcock, the director of the original film version with Ronald Coleman in 1935. On the train home we listed the ones we could remember: Psycho, The Birds, Rear Window, Vertigo, The man who knew too much, North by North West. I'm sure there were more.

According the the programme notes "Buchan's story is too cerebral to make a good movie," but this comedy adaptation works really well. If you get the chance to go and see it, I don't think you will be disappointed. A good night out.

Here comes 2012

2011-12-31T08:39:00.000Z

So it's New Year's Eve and 2012 is just a few hours away. Growing up I never thought I'd reach the millennium let alone this far into a new century. I think that was mostly due to that weird sense of what constitutes old when you're only eight years old. I remember reading an article in the Observer magazine (yes, I used to read bits of a Sunday broadsheet when I was eight) about people in their thirties who had "retired" from the rat-race to live idyllic lives running general stores in Cotswold villages or somewhere in North Devon. At eight, living to thirty-four seemed impossible.

Now, each year flies by with barely the time to take a breath. But 2012 is going to be different for sure. Making sense of the rejection of my ministry and the new direction we are taking precipitated by the events of the last two years is an enormous challenge. Are we stepping out into a new challenge, bravely doing what others are too afraid to do? Or are we just foolish? Are we choosing a selfish option because I have messed up our lives in a most spectacular way by not being what I ought to have been.

Whatever the reason, this is the story in which we find ourselves and only in eternity will we know the significance of the twists and turns. I find myself in the ebb and flow of thinking I've made a terrible mistake, and that God didn't bring us this far to abandon us to the hopelessness of rejection and failure.

So 2012 is going to be a very different and unpredictable year. It may the first year in maybe more that 25 years when I don't preach a sermon or lead an act of worship. I don't know how often we will find ourselves in church on a Sunday. Not because we think it is optional, but because of the growing desire simply to do things differently.

Apparently the Mayor of London's firework display to celebrate the New Year will last 11 minutes. Once the smoke clears and the eyes readjust after the bright lights, the year will start. it's more that an 11 minute firework display. It is another 366 days of faithful walking in the same direction. Like Abraham, we are trying to walk with God to a destination he has shown us, but for which we have no map by which to navigate our way.

Empty words?

2011-12-30T11:15:00.002Z

I've had a few funerals to do recently. Just search the blog to find out why I think about doing funerals. It was while I was doing one particular funeral that I realised how empty some of the words I use each time might actually sound to those listening. You hope that the words bring comfort and a sense of hope without ever appearing to pass judgment. You hope that somehow you will be able to sow a seed of the gospel in to the lives of those who listen as you pray and reflect. Sometimes I probably do so more that I imagine.

But there's one phrase that I use every time that has been bothering me for sometime. It occurs early on at the very beginning of the funeral service.

We are here to renew our trust in God who has said: I will not fail you or desert you.

Personally, I find those words very challenging. If I'm honest I feel failed and deserted a lot of the time. I feel a sense of being abandoned by God, let down and insecure about almost every aspect of my life. I'm not depressed, and I'm not prone to depression. I'm just being honest. There has been little in my life recently that has given me any glimpse of God's enduring faithfulness in a tangible way. Prayers go seemingly unanswered, and I for one cannot figure out why God appears to say no to most of my prayers when I'm not actually asking for very much at all.

Is it just me? I don't think so.

Sometimes the Christian community is guilty of using language that suggests that we all get up in the morning and God speaks loudly and clearly into our lives, directing our decisions and choices. Most of the time this is simply not true. Most of the time we struggle to make sense of what we believe.

Perhaps the reason I need to say these words is to remind me that I do have to renew my trust and that life is far from simple and far from easy. Maybe faith has more to do with what is unseen than what is seen and verifiable.

The words are not empty, but they are not easy.

Christmas

2011-12-24T16:47:00.002Z

The house is quiet, the cats are asleep somewhere, Anne has gone off to her parents for Christmas Eve, and I have the place to myself. I like it like this, so don't feel sorry for me being on my own on Christmas Eve. I will probably go out for a walk when I've done this post, unless laziness gets the better of me. I also have a sore foot, so there's my ready-made excuse!

Tomorrow for only the second time in 20 years I do not have to be in church. Normally Christmas Day is a juggling game of family and church. Last year I suggested we close on the Sunday, given that we'd been together on the Saturday anyway. I thought this was a great idea because it would give people a chance to spend the day with family instead of rushing about fitting family around church. I recently discovered that such a terrible suggestion was yet another indication of my lack of commitment to the church because I put my family before church. Clearly I'm not suited to ministry!

I'm not sure what it is about church that makes me feel frustrated at times, but such an attitude is high on the list. I'll be honest enough to say that I won't miss being in church tomorrow, even though it is a Sunday. So, I shall get up at a reasonable time. Maybe I'll go for a walk if the mood takes me (I doubt I'll get the chance later in the day). I'll go to Anne's parents and have lunch and I'll come home again. I'll wonder again at the amazing story of the incarnation, and I'll give thanks that God thought I was worth all that effort.

And when it's all over, I for one won't be putting God back in the box with all the decorations for another year because the gospel is more than the nativity and my commitment to him is about more that a single Sunday out of 52.

Psalm 137

2011-12-20T09:30:00.001Z

I read Psalm 137 and wondered what it has to say about our current, and future situation. Of course, just because you read the Bible it doesn't mean that you have to find some sort of point of equivalence in every word. That was one of the faults of some of the early interpreters who found meaning in almost every detail of the parables. But it's always important to ask questions of the text you are reading, even if in the end you conclude that it is silent on the prevailing issue.

So, as for Psalm 137, I'm not going to equate our new home with Babylon, although I did remember God's word to the exiles in Jeremiah to settle down, build houses and pray for the prosperity of the city. Equally I'm not going to treat either Upminster or even Bedford as our Jerusalem. But there was one lesson to learn.

Don't forget the heart, the focus of your worship.

With the potential to be out of connection with a church, it would be easy to drift into a worship-less pattern, to become the Christian equivalent of the solider stranded on the desert island who doesn't know the war is over. We want to continue to grow and worship and develop as followers of Jesus and we need to guard ourselves against losing our way in this.

So there was a lesson to learn from Psalm 137, it just needed the right question and the right eyes to see it.

That was the weekend that was!

2011-12-19T09:25:00.000Z

Well we had a very good weekend. I guess we would have to say that we missed not having to plan the All-Age and Carol Services for Christmas and we missed being part of those events, but we also rather enjoyed not having to do all that too.

Instead we travelled to Bedford to share in a wedding and we got to have brunch with some old friends and visit others. The wedding was the third of three sisters, and it was great to be part of that event. Brunch on Sunday was an exciting affair too!

During our eight years in Bedford we talked a lot about what it meant to be a church in the community, about how we could serve the community, about what it meant simply to be church. We were not afraid to ask the questions and think differently about the answers. Yesterday's brunch was some of the fruit of that thinking. About 30-40 people gathered in the loach village hall and talked and ate together. A whole cross-section of people. I met someone who had come for the very first time and I sat and simply asked him questions about is life and listened to his story. There were no songs, no prayers, no preaching.

Having the time to talk, which hopefully leads to building relationships, that in turn create opportunities to share faith, was at the heart of the purpose of the event. there was a bouncy castle for the children and some craft activities for them too. The adults sat and talked.

Okay, so it's easy for the Christians to drift into comfortable small groups around tables, but generally, with a bit of effort, that didn't happen. You have to be intentional about talking with others, but everyone can do it because everyone can listen to someone's story. All you have to do is ask questions and listen carefully enough so you can ask more questions.

So we had a good time. I got to share our vision for the future with some old friends over the course of the weekend and we got to spend time with our daughter. All in all it was good way to spend our first weekend away from full-time leadership.

Stretched and relaxed!

2011-12-15T08:03:00.003Z

Well, I have to say, holy yoga was an interesting experience. Firstly, I'm not as flexible as I might be! That was one thing learned as I tried to grab my foot and tuck it into my lap! Beyond the obvious creaking of knees and muscles as they complained bout being asked to do things they'd long forgotten how to do, I have to say that I did feel the benefit of having spent the time stretching and relaxing.

Of course doing Pilates would probably achieve similar goals and if I did the exercise I ought to do each day, my flexibility would increase vastly and with none of the theological issues usually raised around yoga.

So, what did I make of the theological issues then, I hear you ask.

Well, actually I don't think there were any. you see the thing is the whole routine was set in the context of worship. It was quite reflective and brought a fresh dimension to engaging spiritually and physically. Here's an example. When we were doing one particular exercise that involved a progressive stretch, we were encouraged to think about the principle of surrender. As you stretched and your body resisted you simply focussed on surrendering to the stretch. sounds odd doesn't it, but if you have ever done any form of serious stretching, you will know that you have to relax to stretch and relaxing is an act of surrender because your body naturally tenses up when it resists.

So there will still be issues that this is the thin end of the wedge and that Christians who engage with yoga, no matter how much Christian spirituality in incorporated, are opening themselves to negative spiritual influence. But I also suspect that the very people who reject holy yoga in this way will do so jet before they go of the play Modern Warfare 3, or watch some film or TV programme that lack a Christian ethical and theologically sound base.

Holy Yoga

2011-12-14T09:14:00.001Z

I know, I know, yoga and Christianity doesn't mix well, particularly for evangelicals, but as a form of exercise it remains fairly popular. So what are we to do?

One approach is to reject it as a distraction or deviation at best, fraught with pitfalls and dangerous mystical beliefs and practices. An alternative is to think redemption. That appears to be what one group is seeking to by developing a Christian based alternative.

I'm in London today to see for myself what holy yoga looks like and to meet a Christian practitioner. Should be an interesting morning!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

What might it look like?

2011-12-13T11:20:00.001Z

We were joking the other day with some friends about what we might be doing next now that formal ministry seems to be over for us. Amidst the swinging from crazy ideas and incredible vision to sheer panic and scary dreams about the future, we find ourselves reflecting on all sorts of things. The truth is that rather like one of the legendary large artworks of the inimitable Rolf Harris, it's difficult to, "see what is it yet."

In my dreams, it looks very different to the usual experience we have of church. It's rooted in relationships, built around common values and shared experiences. I know this is what all church experience ought to be, but it isn't. That's the truth. When faith becomes institutionalised it requires an organisational system to maintain itself. That system generates demands and expectations that are sometimes in danger of becoming the defining criteria above the core message. It's the nature of an imperfect expression of being the body of Christ with which we all have to do battle whether in or out of the local, traditional expression of church. Whatever we do in the coming years will not be perfect, it might not even be better.

Having a blank sheet of paper does give us the opportunity to begin from scratch and ask ourselves what are the key things, the non-negotiables that we would want to put in place. I don't have a definitive list, but one of the things I know will be important is a resolute determination not to criticise and moan about the established church. It doesn't help anyone. I also know that whatever happens, it will probably not happen spontaneously but will require a degree of intentionality about it. With that in mind, I think we will need to be able to describe the boundaries and the ethos of the thing really early. Like now would be a good time!

So here are a few thoughts about some key ideas:

Firstly, whatever group assembles, we will need a clear, shared vision that we all buy into. If some of us ultimately see the end game in terms of a gathered group of people in one place of Sunday mornings singing songs and listening to sermons, and others don't, then we would need to get that sorted pretty quickly.

Secondly, we would need to be fully committed to spending regular, quality time around a shared meal. Call it what you like, but relationships are built over time and not through worship services alone.

Thirdly, we would need to agree to live as an extended family. Put simply, we care for each other without abdicating that responsibility to one person alone.

Fourth, it's shared leadership. More like parenting maybe that CEO-leadership, but based on a plurality of leadership gifts distributed among a group of leaders.

Fifthly, and remember these are not in any specific order, a deep commitment to pray and to incarnational mission.

There's a lot missing I know, but it gives you a flavour of the things that are going through my mind at the moment. To those who have listened to me over the years, some of it will be instantly recognised from previous conversations.

More to come, I'm sure.

Kindle's and iPads

2011-12-13T09:05:00.000Z

Of the things that I find really useful about my iPad is the ability to stick pdf's on it and read them wherever I might be. It doesn't matter about the style of the pdf, it just works and I haven't had any problems at all as far as I can recall. My iPad has a number of articles and short papers that are colourful and easy to both read and navigate on the nice bright screen. But it's not the most efficient reader, and an iPad is a complete waste of money if all you want to do is read stuff.

The Kindle, of which Anne as the Wi-Fi version with the keypad and I'm getting the non-keypad version for Christmas (yes, I know how lucky I am!), is just one of the alternative e-book readers out there. One of the things I like about the Kindle is the ability to email pdf documents to it. The problem is that the Kindle renders the pdf by page, which can make the typeface very small indeed.

For documents that I write, the solution is simple. All I have to do is to create a custom page size (90mm by 120mm) with 1mm margins and no headers or footers (they're not really needed). I then change the font size to 10 and email the pdf from the print menu of my Mac. Nice and simple, even if a bit time consuming.

Of course the big plus is that I can email this pdf to anyone who wants it, and they too can read it on their Kindle too if they have one. Perhaps there is already a neat and easy solution to generating readable pdfs for Kindle from applications. I know there is something that will convert a document into the correct format for Kindle, but I haven't explored that yet.

I wonder if some bright spark hasn't already, or maybe would like to write an app onto which you can drop a document and it will reformat it for you. Rather like the way Tofu puts a file into columns to make it easier to read.

Schrodinger's Cat

2011-12-06T15:12:00.001Z

A couple of people posted this on Facebook. It reminds me of university days studying chemistry and physics. Long time ago now.

Credit: George Takei

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Ministry and mission preparation

2011-12-03T20:39:00.001Z

Here's an article that's worth a read if you are thinking/wondering about the role of the minister in a post-Christendom world.

One key quote to think about:

One of the most disastrous effects of Christendom upon our systems of theological education has been the unhelpful assumption that the Church does and should exist at the center of our society. Under this vision, seminaries have equipped leaders who would excel at managing and maintaining this system. However, as the missio Dei and its implications for the Gospel and the Church come back into focus in Post-Christendom, we submit that our systems of theological education must be re-imagined for the purposes of training missionary leaders. These will be leaders whose concerns and skill-sets revolve not around managing churches as part of an ostensibly "Christian" culture, or in the interest of "church growth," but around mobilizing the people of God for participation in God's mission in the world.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A Fragile Life

2011-11-30T10:05:00.001Z

I'm not a big fan of football, but I do tend to watch Football Focus on a Saturday while we have lunch. Maybe it's tradition, maybe it's because I like sport and it was always the introduction to Grandstand for many years.

I watched it last Saturday.

If you did, then you too will have listened to Gary Speed talk about football. Like me you would never have thought that the following day you would wake up to the news that he had apparently decided to end his life. I sat stunned. Was there anything he said, any body language that gave away any sign that this was about to happen? No. Not that I saw. One rarely does in these circumstances.

I'm not about to pontificate about suicide and faith. There's no need. We do not sit in judgement on anyone who chooses when and how to die. Life may be precious, but God is a God of grace and mercy. If anyone understands the depth of human emotions and how we respond to them, then surely our creator does.

No, for me it's the numbness one feels when hearing such news, even when you never knew the person. I've only been involved with the suicide of one person. After a long illness, they decided that they had finally reached the point where they could no longer face the daily struggle. But the numbness doesn't only arise from the sense of tragedy and loss, but also from the realisation that life is so very fragile.

We are a complex arrangement of emotions and feelings. We live in a fallen world that besets us with our own failures and insecurities. A world that constantly seems to push us to breaking point with deadlines and expectations. It is, to me, no wonder that for some the pressure becomes unbearable and that they choose to bring it to a premature end.

And what about faith? My faith doesn't protect me from such feelings, from the pressures. There are times when the hope it offers seems a very long way from the reality in which I find myself. Truth be told, sometimes my faith makes it even harder. Because of my faith I choose not to say what I really want to say or do what I think I really want to do. Because I choose to seek to be obedient to the call and example of Jesus there are times when the pressure makes me wonder if my heart isn't going to explode as I bear the weight of all that see and feel.

My life is fragile too.

The one thing I do know is this: my fragile life is in God's hands.

A friend and I were talking many years ago about Christians and suicide. For many Christians suicide is unforgivable, but in the end I'm not so sure. Perhaps we ought to think more about grace than judgement. Perhaps God's response to the person who chooses to end their life prematurely is simply to say, "You're early, but you're still welcome."

Dealing with uncertainty

2011-11-28T09:02:00.001Z

How do you approach uncertainty? I think my preferred approach might be to hide inside a wardrobe until its all sorted itself out! I think part of the problem with uncertainty is that it brings with it a sense of powerlessness. Some of rise to the challenge and set about determining our own destiny. And that's okay, maybe even for followers of Jesus it's okay to take some control and plan and determine what to do next. But where does faith fit?

The problem with an uncertain future, one you cannot describe in detail backed up by evidence, is that no matter what your present looks like, you are about to swap something you know for something quite unknown. To others it might look very exciting, but they aren't the ones who will have to live with he consequences of the decisions you make and the outcomes you experience.

Our future is uncertain. We are making plans, but we'd be foolish to suggest that we are certain in any way about the absolute rightness of the choices we're making. Maybe this is where faith steps in and plays its hand.

I guess you might say that we are trying to make open choices and not to box God into a corner where he has to do what we want in order for our faith to be satisfied. It's an exercise in disciplined thinking and faithful obedience.

While the wardrobe offers a safe place to hide, and maybe even the possibility of another world (think Narnia at this point), it's not going to much of a walk of faith. More a crouching insecurity, a paralysis of faith, a timidity of heart. So I'll leave the wardrobe to be a place to store clothes and not a place to wait for the future to write itself.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Doing what?

2011-11-22T11:04:00.001Z

As I promised, here's the outline plan for the future such as it is. The more I talk about this idea, the more it seems to become real, but it remains a long off right now.

We have begun to look at houses not too far from where we are at the moment. We've made friends with some folk beyond church and in all honesty I don't want to give up those friendships and start all over again in yet another new place. I'm tired of doing that. When you move on from a place everyone talks about staying in touch, but few rarely do. Life is busy for us all, and although we can pick up the 'phone, send an email or even a letter, we don't. I don't!

So, living somewhere with easy access to Canary Wharf will be good for Anne's commute. But what am I gong to spend my time doing? I could spiritualise this and get all holy about it, but the bottom line is that I could make a case for prayer and other valuable spiritual pursuits as priorities, but I also need to be doing something that contributes to our household income. So I've decided to explore becoming a Sports Massage Therapist. It will take me a year to train, but while I'm training I will be doing some practice (any willing volunteer clients?). There are therapy logs and case studies to do. The course is one day a fortnight over about 11 months.

At the same time I'm going to do a short course on nutrition and maybe have a look at some life coaching stuff. In my ideal world this will provide me with opportunities to work flexible hours and leave sufficient time to explore how to do church organically and simply. This is a true expression of bi-vocational ministry. It's not full-time ministry on the cheap for the church that cannot afford it, but ministry done in partnership with others who all bring their gifts to the table and share fully the responsibility for leadership.

So there it is in the proverbial nutshell. A new adventure in a new area of skills with a new focus but the same heart to serve God. Hopefully that will never fade away. Perhaps it might even be renewed as the pressure and expectations of ministry fall away.

At the O2

2011-11-21T23:11:00.001Z

Not the best photo in the world, but it wasn't easy to take pictures! This is the view at the O2. That's Andy Murray to the right, prowling around the court on his way to losing to David Ferrer this afternoon.

We saw a good game of doubles first up and then the singles. We had about five minutes between the two matches, so no real time to do much except stretch and sit down again.

After the Murray match there was a presentation to Roger Federer of the fair play award and the fan's favourite player award.

It was certainly a very good venue for tennis. I wouldn't have minded trying the court, it looked like a very nice surface to play on! Had to settle for the all-weather courts back home in the evening where I won my mens doubles match 6-2, 6-4!

A New Adventure?

2011-11-16T17:28:00.001Z

It is now public knowledge that Anne and I will leaving our current church setting in a few weeks time. It's been a hard decision to make in many ways, but the truth is it was probably the only decision to make. I'm not about to dissect what has been happening that has brought us to this point. It's enough to say that things haven't really worked and it's time to recognise that.

The question is: What next?

The answer is: We don't know!

What we do know is that it's unlikely that we will be going to another church with me as the minister. We're not leaving the church or rejecting the church or losing our faith or anything of the like. God has, or at least I think he has, been challenging us both about the nature and expression of what it means to be the church. We've tried to explore this in an established church seeing, but it's become increasingly difficult to do so.

So, before we get too old, it's an opportunity to explore simpler, more organic ways of being church. I'm going to retrain in order to become self-financing if possible, and we're going to look to settle into a community and put down some roots.

This post is by way of introducing the plan, such as it is, and to open the way for me to share thoughts and conversation with others about the journey we are about to take. There is much that scares us. Finding a house, getting a mortgage, learning new skills, getting a job or starting a business/practice (I'll blog more about my ideas later), are all big things. But probably scariest of all is setting out on an uncharted journey without any maps and no familiar landmarks by which to navigate.

At the moment we feel very much alone in this, but by God's grace we will meet others who will join us on our journey, keep us company and keep us sane! As news develops I'll try to reflect on it through my blog. Please feel fee to enter the discussion through comments.

Shallow answers to deep questions

2011-11-15T07:14:00.001Z

There's a man on the radio proposing a simple strategy about giving up your car. He is not saying that everyone should do this, or that it is practical that everyone should. He is not saying that a car is a bad thing, an unnecessary bit of equipment that destroys the environment and a danger to life.

But you'd think he had from some of the immediate responses. "Try living in rural West Wales without a car," was one text. "How do you go shopping with a family?" was one question asked. I grew up in a village with a limited bus service. We survived and we didn't even have our own dedicated telephone line. Shopping trips were made by bus and were a day out not a daily excursion.

My point is this: how easily do we get angry and upset with an idea primarily because we fail to engage with the idea beyond a very superficial level. We think we understand way before we actually understand. We open our mouths before our brains have done any useful listening and reflecting.

The lesson is simple. We must slow down, and listen more than we speak. It's always easier to produce a knee-jerk response to any question. And that is never more true than in deepening our discipleship. There are no shortcuts to a deeper walk with God.

Been away

2011-11-14T09:25:00.001Z

So we've been away for a short break in Portugal. All very nice. Played tennis, walked around the marina, sat in coffee shops talking about the future and most importunely on a holiday like this... picking out a shortlist of villas and apartments to buy! If only we had the money!

That'a the thing about holidays, you can dream about what it might be like to live in a place without actually doing it. I don't know if we'd really want a place on the Algarve or in Spain or somewhere similar. Truth be told, I could list a whole lot of places I'd like to spend my unlikely early retirement years.

Anyway, let's not get all melancholy about it. A week away was certainly what we needed, and it came at just the right time. Now we're back we need to begin the process of focussing on the shape of our future. Before we left we'd made the decision with the church to step down from leadership. We will finish in December in terms of all the public stuff and then we will have several months to sort out where to live and what to do next. At this point we are not thinking about another pastoral role in an established church setting.

Quite what shape the future will take is uncertain, but I'm looking at retraining in order to be financially independent, which in turn might enable us to explore new ways of being church that doesn't require starting with an established congregation meeting on a Sunday morning to sing songs and listen to a monologue. But things are far from clear at this moment in time.

Now we are back, and now it's publicly known that we are leaving our current setting, I can blog a bit more about what's been on my heart and where that might take us. We are not giving up on church, and we are not giving up on ministry. We're just stepping out of what we've been doing for the past 20 years and into a new adventure.

The Protesting Church?

2011-11-01T09:59:00.002Z

It's both fascinating and sad to watch the story unfold at St Paul's. Sad because of the distraction form the issues raised outside the building because of the events inside the building. and there's the sign that keeps popping up on the news bulletins: "What would Jesus do?"

What would Jesus do? Would he join the protesters outside in their campaign, would he sit inside the building teaching those inside about the implications of what is happening outside? What would he do?

Would he provide Latte's and Panninis for the gathered crowd? would make enigmatic comments about paying tax, taking responsibility and the dangers of increasing pay gaps and inequity in the workplace?

I don't know.

Maybe the only thing we might be able to say with any certainty is that he probably wouldn't be looking to the legal system to address the issues.

Who's paying the price?

2011-10-28T08:15:00.000Z

So, directors pay at the top companies is up 50% in the last 12 months.

It does rather beg the question how does that reflect the present government's mantra that we are all in this together, sharing the burden of the financial woes, now doesn't it?

Taking up a new challenge

2011-10-27T08:12:00.001Z

I have a friend called Phil. Phil is another maverick kind of person who believes that the church needs to change, but that's not all he is. Phil suffers from a condition that has seen his sight deteriorate over many years, but that hasn't really stopped him. Last year or earlier this year, I can't quite remember circumstances changed as Phil's sight disappeared completely.

He's blogged about how this has affected his life and the changes he's had to make. But here's the thing. He's become a sportsman! Encouraged by others, Phil is now taking part regularly in sport. Ask him yourself and you will find out that it's the last he expected to be doing. But just taking part in sport isn't the only reason that he's become captain of the NRSB cricket team.

He reflects on it all here, and it's worth reading if you need a bit of inspiration to take up a sport, or if you are wondering about how to increase your connections with folk who are far from God (one of my reasons for taking up tennis last year). Maybe he wouldn't use quite the same words that I use, but like me Phil is putting himself in close proximity to people Jesus misses, and he's enjoying it too! If Phil doesn't do it, who will? If I don't do it, who will? If you don't do it, who will?

Both he and I are doing something we love in a way that, by the grace of God, might just make a difference in someone's life. Neither of us would ever say that we set out to play sport in order to do evangelism. That would be the worst of reasons. I'm glad Phil is enjoying the friendship and enjoyment that comes through sport. So am I. And I'm considerably older than he is!

The point I'm making is simply this. Why do we always seem to want to reach people on our terms, inviting them onto our turf, to do things our way at a time that's convenient to us? Why don't we occasionally try inconveniencing ourselves for the sake of the kingdom?

Speaking of which, it's Thursday and I need to get down to the tennis club for a fun morning of doubles.

All power to your elbow Phil.

Now but not yet

2011-10-25T08:04:00.000Z

I saw a link on a web feed that said: "Jesus helps a woman with a "Personality Disorder". Now I don't want to disrespect what Jesus has done for this lady, praise God for any healing she has received, but it did make me smile as I thought to myself, "given some of the Christians I've met over the years, this hardly sounds like headline news!"

On a serious note it also reminded me of my friend Keith. He died at a young age from complications that arose when his appendix ruptured. He refused treatment from a lady doctor because he was a man and she was a woman and that didn't seem right to him. He took his Bible very literally and once told my wife that if she wanted to work she should sell cloth because that was what Lydia did.

Keith was a bright, intelligent young man who had gone to university but who dropped out when his schizophrenia began to surface. I don't know enough about the condition, but apparently someone spiked a drink with a drug of some sort and that either precipitated his illness or exacerbated an underlying condition. Irrespective of his condition, Keith's faith was deep and personal. If you looked closely, and past his illness and the effect it had on his personality, you could often see the inner struggle he faced, you could almost see the battle raging in his mind.

The great thing about our faith is surely this: one day I will see Keith again. He will be sitting somewhere in heaven, maybe under a shady tree, and he will be at peace. His mind will be clear and the battle will be over. Jesus will have set him free, totally free from everything that held him captive through those difficult years. During his life-time he never experienced the full release and healing that might have been, but now he has.

Maybe that's the deeper message of these two stories. Some people get to be healed now and enjoy the blessing of that experience of the power of the kingdom, others wait. In the end though, everyone who trusts God will experience it one side of heaven or the other.

It's Monday again!

2011-10-24T07:22:00.000Z

It's Monday morning. Two pigeons are sitting on the wall opposite the house. One sits quietly, the other edges closer. He's probably a male of the species trying to sneak up on a female as pigeons are prone to doing. I think they are just as confused by the unseasonal weather as the rest of us.

A crow and a magpie are having a dispute about where to sit on the roof of the house beyond the wall, and apart from the quietness being broken by the sound of a passing aeroplane, nothing much is happening out there.

A take-away coffee cup lies in the gutter, unmoved by passing traffic and of little interest to the pigeons who have left the scene, only to reappear on the grass verge pecking at the ground. Perhaps they are just friends and there is no amorous intent from either one.

It's a quiet start to the week!

The reality of life is that is actually mundane most of the time for most of us. We go about our daily routines with the expectation that tomorrow will be just the same. It's pretty difficult to imagine living a life of significance in the middle of normality, in the middle of the simply ordinariness of life. But this is where God has placed us. Perhaps even those who we secretly envy for their dynamic and large-scale ministries, who have amazing stories to tell about how they helped this person find faith and how God spoke to them and directed them to make this stop on their journey, perhaps even they get up most days to an ordinary life with ordinary struggles and ordinary falling short of goals. Maybe their to-do list never ends just like yours, and their disappointments accumulate just like mine.

And yet, it is in the very midst of all this ordinary living that we are called to serve an extraordinary God. To offer our lives as living sacrifices, to take up our cross each day, to bear burdens, share good news, weep with those who weep, mourn with those who mourn and laugh with those who laugh. Called to weep for the lost, for the cities.

I hope and pray that your day, and my day, unfolds into a canvas upon which we draw with God the story of our lives as we interact with him and with others. I pray that today God will use me to sow seed, to water the ground and to bear kingdom fruit.

Tim's Goliath thing!

2011-10-18T21:18:00.001Z

Not quite sure how to introduce this, but here's something Tim from our church wrote. I'll let him fill in the details.

As I sat listening to my church minister talk about the story of David and Goliath, he drew out some key points that I had never heard before. In that moment I felt as if God dropped a concept into my mind. I’ll begin with a paraphrase of what my minister was saying;

Saul was a man chosen because he was head and shoulders above everyone else. He was Israel’s ‘Big Man’. When the Philistines drew up their battle formation they called forth their ‘big man’, Goliath. Goliath called to Israel ‘Bring your best warrior to fight me!’
What Saul saw as a man too big to defeat, David saw as a man too big to miss!

The concept that fell into my thinking was this: Today’s modern church has a ‘Saul’ mentality about it. The church used to be looked up to and respected, and like Saul has a reputation to defend. It was once a proud institution that commanded the respect of people and leaders and kings. But over the years ‘Goliath’s’ have risen up to challenge the church and it has shrunk back behind its battlements in fear. Pride and tradition and misplaced expectations have crippled her. A failure to see with eyes of faith for what God can do through obedient humble people will bring the mission of Gods church to halt.

And then along comes David. The runt of the litter, the boy, the shepherd, the youngest, who brings in supplies for his brothers. With eyes of faith he sees this target that he cannot miss and asks permission to bring down this blasphemer. But look at what Saul does! He tried to put David into his armour!

This is what the church has done to modern-day Davids! Anyone who sees with eyes of faith and desires to take a stand has rightly sought the wisdom of the elders and been told, ‘this is how you must do it.’ But those ways WON'T WORK. That armour is too heavy. It isn’t that David is not yet big enough or old enough. The simple truth is, he can’t win a battle with human wisdom and human strength or by human tradition! David fought in the name of the Lord, and there are young people rising up in faith and we must let them take their stand or the church will be overcome by ‘Goliaths’.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Psalm 119

2011-10-18T08:27:00.001Z

As I continue to read through the psalms, I find myself consistently being challenged about the quality of my devotional life and the impact it has on my lifestyle choices. So often the things we choose to do are at odds with what we know to be biblical, yet chose to ignore because it's simply inconvenient. Perhaps issues surrounding the environment are not the only inconvenient truths with which we must contend!

Take today for example. As I'm wandering through Psalm 119 I came across the following statements:

My comfort in my suffering is this: your promise preserves my life

And:

You are my portion, Lord;
I have promised to obey your words.
I have sought your face with all my heart;
be gracious to me according to your promise.
I have considered my ways
and have turned my steps to your statutes.
I will hasten and not delay
to obey your commands.

If you read that and think, "So?" then read it again, slowly. Have I made and kept that sort of promise? Have I really sought God at that deep and intimate level? Am I that quick to obey?

These are the questions that arise immediately in my mind, and many more. In the Old Testament, seeing the face of God meant certain death. If it meant you would die, would you still seek it?

No wonder Paul spoke about having been crucified with Christ and yet still living.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Ongoing thoughts about discipleship

2011-10-04T07:48:00.000Z

A couple of interesting things from a book I'm currently reading called Growing the church in the power of the Holy Spirit.

People need to be incorporated into the kingdom of God by being born again. The fruit of the Spirit needs to be cultivated so that people are transformed into increasingly Christlike character. Unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God must be nurtured, growing people in their understanding and in their personal relationship with Jesus. And men, women, and children need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit so that they can be empowered to do everything that Christ commands, each playing their unique roles as members of the body of Christ.

This sums up the early chapters of the book rather well, and the foundational argument of the book as a whole. But it's also an important summary of the fundamentals of church.

Later there is a compass point illustration which is rather helpful:

N: New life (incorporation)
S: Sanctification (transformation)
E: Empowerment
W: We (fellowship)

As I continue to think about discipleship, these things are proving helpful along the way. I was listening to an interview with Bill Hybels the other day and he said something very interesting. The Reveal Study has been on the receiving end of some harsh, and unwarranted criticism, over the years since Willow first shared its findings. But I've often wondered if that is because it revels exactly what we've actually known deep down inside.

People don't tend to grow through a programme, they tend to grow through active personal involvement and engagement. Not that might be over simplifying things, but I've watched and participated in a lot of personal evangelism training and I don't see any great improvement in my ability to share the gospel or in the church's engagement with mission. I've prepared a lot of Bible study notes, but I'm not sure that I've seen much actual spiritual transformation taking place as a result. I've preached a lot of sermons, but I cold count of the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone has accurately reflected the content of a sermon back to me.

Anyway, the thing Bill H said was how he would remind the congregation that they were responsible for their own growth. "We can't read your bible for you, we can't say your prayer for you," is a paraphrase of what he said. That isn't to say that the church as an organisation doesn't have a role to play, but spiritual growth depends on the desire of the individual to grow not on the range of courses offered.

Disciple-making

2011-09-30T10:08:00.001Z

A couple of weeks ago Mike Breen posted the first part of a series of posts about discipleship. It caused a bit of a stir, mostly because it forecasts the failure of the missional church movement and people seemed to have latched onto that. Read the article carefully and you will clearly see that the point is that any model of church without discipleship will fail, not just those who call themselves missional.

Through the series the process of discipleship and its importance is discussed. We cannot ignore the validity of Mike Breen's point. His analysis is surely correct when he states that:

The reason the missional movement may fail is because most people/communities in the Western church are pretty bad at making disciples.

It's not the type of movement, its the basic structure of most Western models. Have we not learnt this lesson form all the studies and reports and analyses we've had over the past 20 or more years? We simply are not making disciples. People are not becoming whole-hearted, fully devoted, followers of Jesus Christ. We are making users more than we are making disciples.

If one was being cynical, you might say users are easy to spot. They are the ones who ask if tithing is really important and did God really mean 10% and is that before or after tax. Users are usually familiar with Bible stories but can't paint a big picture of the biblical narrative. They are, to put it plainly, biblically illiterate. Users are often more interested in what they get out of church than what they put into church. More interested in how their needs can be met than it how God's mission can be implemented. For users discipleship is an inconvenience that disturbs their essentially selfish pattern of life. It is too demanding, too time consuming, too life altering and too costly to comtemplate. "Just give me forgiveness and assurance and let me get on with my life", might be their motto.

That might seem harsh (re-reading it and it does seem quite harsh), but maybe it's time we took a long hard look at the reality. It's time to ask ourselves some tough questions. When was the last time you took stock of your Christian life? When did you last try to answer question like:

How is Christ being formed in my life right now?
What am I learning about God through my daily interaction with him and his word?
How am I partnering with God in his mission to the world he loves?
What things are holding me back from full commitment?

None of us really like being asked these kinds of questions, but how are we supposed to grow as disciples if we won't ask the basic questions we need to ask? Have we really reached a point where we actually think that tomorrow we will wake up more committed than today without doing a thing to grow?

It won't happen.

I rant, or appear to rant, simply because I know myself. I know how much I resist asking the tough questions and avoiding the honest answers. Yet if I truly want to grow, if I want to develop the spiritual capacity to walk with Jesus, sensitive to his prompting and obedient to his mission, then I simply cannot afford ignore my discipleship.

Articles to read

2011-09-28T10:13:00.001Z

I have a confession to make. I believe I'm far from alone in this confession. My confession is this: much of my life is shaped by irrational beliefs that make no sense. So, just because I make a mistake or someone criticises me, I drift towards believing I'm a terrible person destined to fail forever.

If you never feel this way, then bless you. But I do, and I'm not alone from the evidence of conversations I have.

There's an interesting and helpful article, particularly for church leaders that discusses three irrational beliefs that I certainly recognise in me and maybe you will recognise in yourself. Read it here.

A second article is more of a short review of Michael Quicke's book Worshipless Preaching. The book looks interesting. The review article is a bit short, only really introducing the idea and illustrating it. But it's enough the make you stop and think for a while about the place of the sermon in worship and the place of worship in the sermon.

I've long since wondered what we are trying to do when we preach. My formative Christian life was in a church where the preaching was very much the teaching focus of the church. That extended into the para-church organisation with which I was connected. Over the years I've come to realise that the church teaches a lot and sometimes does something with it. Much preaching seems to feed the mind but fails to inspire change.

I have my theory about that and the reasons why it is so, but I won't go into that now!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Taking your church Missional

2011-09-23T20:14:00.000Z

Taking your Church Missional is a downloadable paper from Leadnet.org. It makes interesting reading. The focus of the paper is the cost to the church leader. Here are some of the more challenging quotes to whet your appetite:

In his book, The Present Future, Reggie McNeal warns, “It takes enormous courage to give spiritual leadership in the North American church culture, because the church is increasingly hostile to anything that disturbs its comfort and challenges its club member paradigm.

“The biggest thing to realize is not to model yourself on the traditions of the past, but on Christ—what he did, how he would love people and talk to people. And that gives validity to the model,” says Lee Clamp.

“For years we have trained our congregational members to come to the pastor when the system becomes off- balance—a personal problem, a complaint, a boiler issue, a janitorial issue. Becoming missional means spinning off small satellite clusters of folks who offer their assets to the larger group. It is a cost because people have grown accustomed to running to the pastor. Redefining the call of the pastor finds new ways of working together, with Christ—not the pastor— being the centrifuge that keeps the system turning.”

“Leaders are shifting away from being the doers and concentrating on leadership development. God puts the passion in people—we’re not going to do it for them. Well-meaning churches have had the hired gun mentality, but now we are equipping people for works of service. It’s a transition from catching people to releasing them, and getting people to see their own personal mission.”

“Going missional sounds risky, doesn’t it?” Reggie McNeal. “That’s because it is. You will bet your life and ministry on it. But you may also discover that committing your life to the missional journey will help you find it.”

So there you go. I'm not commenting on the validity of these comments, but I know from personal experience how difficult it can be to get your head around some of the issues that face you as a leader as you seek to shift your ministry towards a missional focus.

You can find the paper in the resources section of the website. It's free and there are plenty of other papers worth a browse too.

Jeff Vanderstelt on being missional

2011-09-21T09:54:00.001Z

I'm often asked questions around why I am so passionate about the need for the church to change, for the church to grasp the fundamental idea of what it means to be missional, to be in partnership with God in his mission in a whole-life way. Trying to help people grasp that mission is not something we do but something we are is quite a shift for many in the established church.

One way to help is to keep trying to expose ourselves to new ways of thinking about church and understanding this language. Somebody who I find really helpful in doing this is Jeff Vanderstelt of Soma Communities.

Here's a short video interview with him where he talks about being missional, what it means, how it applies and what the journey for an established might look like. Listen out for his definition of missional life in terms of family, missionary and servant and for his observation on the problem of the traditional church model. You might not like what he says, but personally I think he's absolutely correct in his analysis.

Jeff Vanderstelt // The Meaning of Missional from Newfrontiers USA on Vimeo.

Psalm 113

2011-09-19T08:47:00.002Z

1 Praise the LORD.
Praise the LORD, you his servants;
praise the name of the LORD.
2 Let the name of the LORD be praised,
both now and forevermore.
3 From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets,
the name of the LORD is to be praised.
4 The LORD is exalted over all the nations,
his glory above the heavens.
5 Who is like the LORD our God,
the One who sits enthroned on high,
6 who stoops down to look
on the heavens and the earth?
7 He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
8 he seats them with princes,
with the princes of his people.
9 He settles the childless woman in her home
as a happy mother of children.
Praise the LORD.

"Praise" occurs five times in the first three verses. Do you think the psalmist is trying to draw out attention to something important?

As I read this I almost said out loud, "I think we get the point!" I wasn't angry, I was just smiling and thinking to myself how easily we forget to praise God. I wondered when the last time was that I started my day with praise rather than lament or petition. When was the last time I responded to something with praise and worship as my first instinct. Maybe we need to train ourselves to do this, to make a disciplined choice to start with adoration as the old ACTS acrostic reminds us so to do.

Did you start your day with praise? Are you willing to stop now and put that right?

Non-Religious Funerals

2011-09-19T08:37:00.000Z

Imagine getting a call from a Funeral Director asking you if you'd be prepared to take a non-religious funeral. What's your very first thought? Is it, "What do they mean by non-religious," or is it, "How could I dishonour God by taking part in something that doesn't acknowledge him."

Our response is crucial, and our first response might actually say more about us than we imagine.

Okay, you might not think in terms of dishonouring God, but I'd hazard a guess that there would be all sorts of questions that might have more to do with missing an opportunity to preach the gospel or something similar. I have them too. But I'm also drawn to wonder what role I might play by getting alongside a family and simply serving them as best I can in a way that meets their needs at that time rather than fulfilling some theological criteria.

And it's not just a theoretical question. While I haven't yet been asked to do a non-religious funeral, I have been asked if I'd be prepared to do one. And that in itself makes me wonder what I might do and how I might do it. It seems to me that while the family might not want anything religious that doesn't mean I can't prepare prayerfully, serve prayerfully and support them in prayer, even if they don't know it! I don't stop being a disciple of Jesus Christ just because I'm in a non-religious setting, doing non-religious things.

In the end, non-religious might simply mean not having someone in a cassock with a dog-collar on. I've done plenty of funerals where the family have said to me, "He wasn't very religious you know. He didn't go to church, but he did say his prayers every night."

It's not for me to judge, I'm there to serve. All people matter to God. It's a phrase I learnt from Willow Creek and it's a phrase that shapes much of what I do and think. All people matter to God, and therefore all people should matter to me.

Perhaps a final word from Paul might focus my thoughts:

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters,

Thoughts on Psalm 112

2011-09-16T08:51:00.000Z

I most definitely do not subscribe to the point of view that suggests that God wants all his people to be rich, but Psalm 112, at first glance might be saying that this should be true. After all those who fear God and "find great delight in his commands" are blessed and "wealth and riches are in their houses".

While most of us probably wouldn't balk at the idea of facing the dangers and pitfalls of wealth, of which there are surely many, most of us will not get the chance to find out if it's difficult or not to remain generous and gracious, full of compassion and lending freely, conducting our affairs with justice.

The issue of personal wealth is not actually the heart of the message of Psalm 112. The Psalm goes on to talk about facing darkness, enemies and bad news. Perhaps the downside of wealth is that no matter how wealthy you are, you can't avoid bad news.

Whilst their houses might be full of riches, it is their righteousness that endures for ever. It is as the righteous that they will be remembered, not as the wealthy. What they do for the poor far outweighs what they might have done for themselves. I guess that's because our ability to be generous is predicated upon our experience of the generosity of God. If we have not experienced God's grace, if we fail to live in the shadow of that grace, then we are highly unlikely to extend that grace to others, especially if it is going to be personally costly to us.

Same seed, different soil

2011-09-15T08:36:00.003Z

A long time ago, in a church far far away.... Well not that far and certainly not that long ago that it sounds like a Stars Wars epic, I preached about the sower. It is such a familiar story that we don't often dwell with it to see beyond all the normal things we've been taught to see. Of course that's true of most of our familiar and favourite passages in the Bible.

One day, so Jesus said, a sower went out to sow seed. The seed went everywhere, indiscriminately falling in all sorts of places. Good, fertile, well prepared soil; along the path, trampled down and hard by the passing of many a pair of feet. Some found it's way into gaps between hard ground and rocks where there was some soil, weed free but shallow and some of the seed bounced around in the thorn bushes until it hit the ground beneath them.

Every place you could imagine became home to a seed, the same seed.

But not all soil produces the same crop from the same seed.

Some of it rejects the seed because it's hard and the birds get to eat it, picking it easily from the surface. Some soil is too shallow to sustain lasting growth because it doesn't have the nutrients or it can't retain the water needed under the prevailing weather conditions. Some soil is too busy feeding weeds to provide space for the growth of the new seed, a more vulnerable seed than the apparently defiant, resistant and more resilient thorns and briars.

Some soil is good. It receives the new seed, nurtures it, sustains it and as result it flourishes, producing fruit that can go way beyond the imagination of the sower.

It's a great story, but what about the sower, the character almost at the heart of the story. Was he a success or a failure? An accountant might say he's a failure because he's careless about how he sows. He might get lucky with the crop he gets, but how much more could he have harvested if he'd been just a little more careful about the sowing process.

But what if the sower's only job was to sow? All he, or she, had to do was to give every type of soil the opportunity to work with the seed that was being sown. Whether the soil responded or not was someone else's responsibility. Are they a success now? You decide.

Just remember, if Jesus has called you to sow the seed of the kingdom of God, then don't ever forget to sow.

A question of discipleship

2011-09-14T16:55:00.000Z

Mark Greene in his monograph The Great Divide says something along the lines of: the greatest challenge facing the church today is the need to develop whole-life disciples. Apologies to Mark if I'm misquoting, but I think I have the gist of it and as I recall you'll find the exact sentence of page 20 unless mt memory is playing yet more tricks on me.

Anyway, the point is this, we need to be making disciples, followers of Jesus Christ, who are living out that discipleship in their everyday lives not just their Sunday and housegroup lives.

Discipleship has always been at the heart of the things that move me most. I'm constantly asking myself about what discipleship really looks like, if it's actually defined by all those evangelical niceties I was taught when I first came to faith, or are they a smoke screen that too often allows me to treat my life with God superficially? A topic for more thought I feel.

Well, I was catching up with stuff from around the blogosphere this afternoon and a post from David Fitch popped up about the Missional Learning Commons that is coming up in Chicago in October. I see the information about these events and wish I could be there or at the very least find a few like-minded folk who would do it here in the UK near me!

These are some of the questions that will be shaping their discussions this October and I think they are questions that should be shaping our thoughts too.

What does discipleship actually look like in our lives?
Does the gospel we preach naturally and organically lead people into discipleship, or does it feel like an extra-curricular activity?
How should the call to make disciples shape and guide our church practices: what we do, and how we do it?
What is the significance of discipleship as the core component of the formation of Christian leaders?

Perhaps we should add at least a question about what we are going to do next about discipleship in our particular setting. At least that makes it practical and focussed.

I'm particularly drawn to the question about the Gospel we preach and whether it naturally leads to discipleship or not. Certainly in the past we preached a gospel of escape from judgment rather than one of transformation.

Feeling another's pain

2011-09-09T07:08:00.002Z

Yesterday I spoke with someone who is having a bad week to say the least. Very little has gone right, and as we talked I felt the pain, wished I could have been able to do something to change things and make them better (which I can't do) and wanting so much to absorb the pain myself (but I can't do that either).

Of course as a follower of Jesus, I can pray and pray I have and pray I will.

I think that if we are not attentive we can so easily see prayer almost as a none response. Maybe even to the point of thinking, "What good will that do, things won't rally change." I think happens because our understanding of prayer, particularly answered prayer, is more focussed upon getting what we want rather than on submitting ourselves into God's hands.

Changing tack, I read an article yesterday about skipping church. It was by a minister and was his reflection on having what everyone else might consider a normal Sunday, actually a normal weekend. He used an interesting phrase when he talked about the sacrifice people in ministry make because their weekends have no options to wake up and decide to do something different. Already I can hear the cries that it's only two day a week that are so defined for ministers, everyone else works a five-day week at the least.

Sorry, but that's not the point. Many, if not most, manse families have two working adults. That accounts for all seven days every week. Anyway, this isn't a moan about time off and understanding ministry life. The point the original author was making was somewhat different and I've drifted into other areas. I love the flexibility inherent in ministry, but sometimes I wish I knew when my day ended or when my week ended. I'm never quite sure. Mind you that makes a weekend off even more special.

Talking of flexibility, I've been thinking about how I can connect with more people who are far from God. Some time ago I thought to myself that one of the problems with the way we usually do connecting with others is quite artificial. Ages ago, in a previous setting, I wondered about setting church money aside to enable church folk to take up an evening class. Not just as an evangelism strategy, please not another put-them-under-pressure-to-share-the-gospel programme. No, just a simple way of helping people make friends with people far from God. Maybe it's because I have so few friends outside of church (do I actually have any in church I find myself asking!) that I think like this, but that was my thought.

It then morphed into the idea that why not find something you really enjoy doing and then go and do it with people who are far from God. Not original to me. I got the idea from a story I heard Bill Hybel tell about buying a boat and sailing with a bunch of non-Christians. I've just got permission to run a social tennis morning in the park. I wonder what connections that might make.

Well. the day calls. Errands to run and jobs to do. I've just got a text message from my wife that read "Ecc 3 12 to 13" I assume that's a Bible reference and not a chess move. Better go and look it up in case she quizzes me on it later.

Rethinking church and its mission

2011-09-07T14:26:00.004Z

Here's a helpful reflection on the process of rethinking the church in a context of mission. It doesn't use all the confusing language of missional church that seems create uncertainty and panic for some, but the heart of it is about asking what the church looks like in a new context. a question at the heart of the search for a missional expression and understanding of the church in a cultural setting that no longer shares the same narrative or values.

Early Prayer

2011-09-07T07:52:00.000Z

Getting up early to pray might be a laudable thing to do, but when the alarm rings and you haven't slept much, it can be the last thing on your heart. Today is the first shot at having a dedicated prayer day in the life of the church. I don't how many people have remembered it, and it probably didn't help that it wasn't mentioned on Sunday, but we're making a start.

I would say we've planned, but the truth is it's my idea and I've suggested a plan of having three times for corporate prayer through the day. The first was at 7:00am, the second will be at 9:30am (although I think some might come for 9:00) and the third will be at 8:00pm. The two morning times are half hours and the evening one a full hour.

My hope is that each month will have a theme or a focus that will shape part of the prayer time together. Today the theme is simple: Unless the Lord builds the house the labourers labour in vain.

Other times I hope we will focus on things like those who work in retail or those in care services, education, the business world, etc.

This morning three of us gathered at 7:00am, if you can call three a gathering! We had a great time. It was wonderfully quiet and peaceful as we shared our hearts with God. In fact I think it was probably the most peaceful it's ever been in church! Sometimes the noise from outside filtered in through the open door, but that simply served to remind us that we are in the world even if we're not part of it as Jesus might say. And yes I'll be honest I was expecting to be alone, so having two people with me was a great encouragement.

For next month I hope to be able to provide some basic information the Sunday before, just to keep everyone in the loop. But we really ought not to need too much paperwork in order to be able to pray.

All this reminds me of something I have buried away somewhere in my study about the differences between a church that is committed to prayer and a church that prays. While the differences might be obvious I've yet to work out a successful plan for making the journey from one the other, from praying to a deeper commitment to prayer. And that's as true for my personal life as it is for the life of the church. It's far easier to not pray than it is to pray. As the sign outside one church read:

Why pray when you can worry and take tranquillisers!

Speaking of which, sine I don't take the pills I'd better get to praying again.

Missional Community

2011-09-06T17:34:00.000Z

I know I worry some folk when I talk about simplifying church and missional church and doing life together and other such crazy talk. But it is precisely because I am passionate about the local church reaching its full potential as agents of of God's kingdom that I am drawn to ask deep questions about how we do church.

Anyway, here's an inspiring article that tells the story of one small missional community, how it began and how God has been at work through it and in it.

A story of one MC.

Shane Claiborne Podcast

2011-09-06T09:38:00.001Z

If you want to listen to Shane's talk from the other night at the Oasis Centre, then there's a podcast of it here.

It is worth listening to, especially if you haven't read the book.

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A Feral Underclass

2011-09-06T09:31:00.001Z

So, Ken Clarke has given Middle England the data it needs to breathe a huge sigh of relief that the riots indeed where the work of a criminal underclass. According to the statistics on the BBC Breakfast News this morning, 75% of those arrested in connection with the recent events had a criminal record.

Case proved, it's not our fault.

At no point during the hour the news was on this morning did I ever hear anyone ask why they had a criminal record and what might have contributed to the situation. Again the marginalised are simple pushed further away from protected green belt of middle class morality.

Let me say that in no way endorse any of the behaviour that we saw so vividly displayed on our televisions. There are no excuses. But there are explanations, and until we get to grips with the social and economic conditions and inequalities that create any kind of underclass nothing will get solved.

Telling us they were all criminals already really doesn't help solve anything.

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Achieving something

2011-09-01T06:50:00.000Z

There are days, weeks even, when the though of achieving anything is a somewhat utopian ideal. At least it feels like that! It's nice, then, to be able to report that I actually did achieve something in August, if only in the arena of counting steps.

At the beginning of the month I set myself the goal of taking 5000,000 steps in a month. I'd never done this before. In fact I think I only broke the 400k barrier once or maybe twice last year. (I've just looked, it was three times!) So 500k was, to pardon the pun, quite a step up. It meant doing the equivalent of nearly 8.5 miles of walking a day, every day for a month. In a straight line, that would be about 250 miles. Imagine where you would be if you travelled 250 miles from home.

But I did it. It took quite an effort in the last three days because I had one day when I didn't walk at all, doing only 2000 steps. Now at the beginning of the month making up the difference over the course of a week would have been okay, but I had three days. That meant 10 miles a day, but I had a plan. On Tuesday we went to this event with Shane Claiborne and I made sure I walked everywhere I could. On that day I did 31k steps, which made it a whole lot easier to complete the job. So, yesterday afternoon as I set out to walk to church to do a small job, I passed the 500k mark. There were no balloons or major celebrations.

To be honest it has been far more difficult to hit a daily target of 16k than 10k for obvious reasons. It's further! But it's more than that. I can do 10k just walking to the station and back twice a day with Anne. That's a fairly steady, even distribution of steps. But the higher target relied more heavily on big days making up for low days. And by low I mean down around 12k! Anything below 10k was really low.

So, for example, I had 7 days over 20k and 1 day over 30k. I had 9 days where the cumulative average was below target, and overall I missed my target on 16 days. So it was a lot tougher than any previous challenge. But in the end I made it and I'm glad I did. To have missed out would probably have meant that I would have tried again, although probably in October because that's the next month with 31 days!

I guess I've learnt that I can do 8 miles a day, that 15 miles is still possible, and that it takes a large dose of disciple to sustain yourself to the end.

What's next? Well I will probably keep using the pedometer, but I'll stop keeping a daily record. I'll walk less, but I'll swim more. I haven't been in the water for a long time. I pulled a shoulder muscle or damaged a tendon of some sorts that kept me out of the water and I couldn't swim and do my 16k steps every day. So maybe this month I'll swim more if the shoulder is okay.

Transformation from the inside

2011-08-31T13:46:00.000Z

Take some time to think about this:

We often want to force change on a culture when we see it does not align with Scripture. Forcing change from the outside is like kicking down a brick wall – it is possible, but it is going to take a long time and it will hurt. Instead of forcing external change, we need to plant the Gospel within a culture, disciple people to obey what it teaches, and enjoy watching God transform that culture from the inside out. Although the process of discipling this way takes time and is not easy, the transformation is deeper and more lasting.

You can find a video along with this quote here.

How can you plant the gospel in your cultural setting so that it can bear the fruit of transformation from the inside out?

The Upside Down Kingdom

2011-08-31T05:55:00.000Z

We, as in Anne, Ally and myself, had a really good evening at the Oasis Centre last night listening to Shane Claiborne on the upside down kingdom. There's one London date left on the tour in Bromley tonight and there are a few tickets left. visit Bromley Baptist Church's website for details.

Much of what Shane had to say is in his book The Irresistible Revolution, but it was good to hear him speak and to reflect again on how we step towards living in this upside down kingdom where the first become last and the marginalised are welcomed. Not everyone in response to the call of Jesus will move into an inner city area, form a community and challenge the status quo. But everyone can, and everyone should be thinking about what being kingdom Christians means where they find themselves.

We live in a very middle class place, among very middle class people. So what does the upside down kingdom look like here? Answers on a postcard please. Maybe it's time to consider starting a movement of Suburban Expression!

Psalm 103

2011-08-25T08:18:00.001Z

I reached Psalm 103 in my slow passage through the book. I remember learning several verses from this psalm many years ago. Perhaps I should have learnt more! Anyway, here are a selection of my favourites:

1 Praise the LORD, my soul;
all my inmost being, praise his holy name.
2 Praise the LORD, my soul,
and forget not all his benefits—
3 who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases,
4 who redeems your life from the pit
and crowns you with love and compassion,
5 who satisfies your desires with good things
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

10 he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
13 As a father has compassion on his children,
so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

17 But from everlasting to everlasting
the LORD’s love is with those who fear him,
and his righteousness with their children’s children

Up in the air

2011-08-23T07:26:00.001Z

No, this isn't about unknown futures or playing volleyball. Yesterday I went for a flight in a light aircraft. I saw the local area from 2,000 feet from a small two-seated cockpit. It was quite an experience!

There were moments of pure wonder as we left the ground and as we circled around. There were also moments of near panic as we made what seemed to me to be very steep turns! At one point we dropped about 500 feet very quickly. It took me by surprise.

So okay, there were moments when I wanted to say can I get out one please, but it was good. I don't think I'll be doing it again. I prefer something a bit bigger and with a little more legroom (although some passenger jets are not great for someone of my height).

The world certainly looks different from two and half thousand feet. there were things I never knew existed because from ground level you just can't see them. Makes you realise that if it's true about geography, it might just be true about life. Perhaps there are things we can't see unless we look from a more heavenly perspective. But I didn't really have to get philosophical, I was concentrating more on not looking straight down!

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Basketball arena at the Olympic Park

2011-08-21T14:26:00.001Z

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Whom do I serve?

2011-08-17T05:26:00.001Z

An extract from an interview with Richard Foster, author of Freedom of Simplicity, Celebration of Discipline, streams of Living Waters.

Dallas Willard once told you, "You need to decide if you are the minister of the people or a minister of Christ." What's the difference?

Dallas knew that I was being pulled in all kinds of directions because of people's expectations for a pastor. If I'm a minister of the people, then I'm controlled by what the people think and feel. If I'm the minister of Christ, then he is the one who calls the shots, and then I serve the people. Be a minister of Christ, then your work among the people finds its proper place.

Can it really be that simple?

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And here's another clever video

2011-08-15T15:05:00.002Z

What if?

2011-08-15T14:55:00.002Z
Here's an interesting video I came across via an RSS feed I read

Riots

2011-08-12T07:10:00.001Z
Before we condemn outright those involved in the recent outbreaks of violence and criminal damage in our cities, perhaps we should spend some time listening to those who know the communities and who understand what marginalisation and hopelessness does to a people.

Perhaps too, those middle-class and middle-aged Christians and non-Christians who advocate National Service as a solution should remember that our elders thought the same about us.

Justice, yes, but what about education, opportunity and hope. Who is going to to provide that?

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The Great Commandment

2011-08-12T07:01:00.001Z
I was preaching this last Sunday on "The Great Commandment" from Luke's Gospel. Jesus is approached by an expert in the law who asks about the greatest commandment. Funny how religious people can be preoccupied with what the most important rule might be.

By way of an answer we hear words that would have been very familiar to the religious community of the day. Put simply: Love God wholeheartedly and love others in the way you want to be loved. this precipitates a further question about neighbours and the parable about a good Samaritan.

What intrigues me about this discussion between our expert in the law and Jesus, the fulfilment of that very same law, is that he never asks Jesus about how to love God. He has no question about how to love God wholeheartedly.

He has no questions about what to do with the philosophical questions that he faces or the temptations he conjures up in his imagination and what that has to do with loving God with all your mind. He seems unconcerned about how you keep loving God even when you reach the end of your physical, emotional and spiritual capacity to do os. When you’ve used up all your strength.

None of this worried him. He’s just bothered about who his neighbour might be.

Is that you? Is it me?

Are you so concerned to make sure that you limit the measure of your grace towards others so that it is manageable but still honouring of God that you’ve forgotten that the primary commandment is to abandon yourself into God’s hands?

Surely there is a missing the question that this expert ought to be asking: How do I love God that fully?

Paul gives a clue about how he saw it working out in the lives of Christ-followers:

#1 Root your faith

So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. (Col. 2:6-7)

#2 Focus your heart in the right place

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. 2 Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. (Col. 3:1-2)

#3 Serve God in everything

Whatever you do, do it wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord (Col. 3:23)

What are your missing questions? Are you more concerned with making your faith manageable? More concerned about fitting Jesus into your life than building your life around him?

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The Great Commandment

2011-08-08T09:43:00.000Z
We began our summer series with a look at the great commandment in the story of the expert in the law and the parable of the good Samaritan. It's interesting isn't it that just like the rich young ruler, the expert in the law is preoccupied with a sense of personal justification that obedience to the law doesn't appear to be giving them. They both as the same question: What must I do to inherit eternal life?

Note the emphasis on self and on doing. But the gospel is not about what we do for God, it's all about what he has already done for us. Without the cross, the commands are just rules that lead to self-rightous moralising if we are not careful.

But there's a twist in the story in the form of the missing questions. This expert never asks about loving God. Surely that's the big question. How do I love God with all my heart, soul, strength and mind?

I wondered yesterday if we too focus out attention on the limit of our grace towards others in order to avoid asking the difficult questions about our life with God.

Summer series

2011-08-08T07:54:00.001Z

We began a short summer series looking at four great themes through Luke's gospel. Interestingly we started withe great commandment from the Good Samaritan story, which happens to contain great compassion, great commission and great commitment too!

The artwork was the easiest thing I could think of doing!

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End of the year!

2011-08-01T06:51:00.002Z
Having faithfully carried my pedometer since August 1st 2010, I've completed a whole year of recording my steps. The bare statistics paint one picture, but the whole is more than the sum of the parts. July saw the greatest number of steps taken in a single month since I started to keep a record (422766) compared the previous highest which turns out to be June! So the last two months were the most successful if you count success in terms of steps taken.

But what if you count days when more than 10k steps were taken (the daily target)? Well, that would make May the best because I didn't miss a day and I took the most steps in a month when I didn't miss a day.

The value of the pedometer is not just in the simple accumulation of steps, but also in the motivation to monitor activity. It's so easy to sit at the desk for a day and do nothing. The numbers, for me at least, got me out of the house and into my trainers.

So, for the last time in the past 12 months, here are the facts:

From August 1st I've walked a total of 4,565,972 steps, which is about 2283 miles at an average of 6.25 miles per day.

The pedometer will stay in the pocket as a reminder to get out and walk, but I think I might just stop keeping a long term record although I might set myself a new target, I'm not sure. I'm still wondering if I could hit 500, 000 steps in a single month. Given that August has 31 days, it might not be a bad month to try!

Prayer and Preaching

2011-07-25T10:10:00.001Z
Here's a useful article about the importance of prayer in the process of sermon preparation.

It's true that prayer often features as a perfunctory step in the process, even as an act of desperation as Sunday morning approaches. But we all know that payer ought to be a central feature not a peripheral part of the process. As the author of the post says:

We need to regain a theological vision in which prayer becomes the posture of the preacher, for before our people can hear from God through us, we must hear from God ourselves. And hearing from God through his Word is the fundamental work of prayer.

But not only is prayer about hearing from God, it is also about something more fundamental too:

The point of prayer is realignment, as our hearts assume a posture of dependence and humility before God. Prayer places our needs in the perspective of God's sufficiency, our problems in the perspective of his sovereignty, and our desires in the perspective of his will. Prayer is not a monologue. Rather, prayer invites God to have the last word with us, and for his Word to shape and define us.

This is true whether you are praying as you prepare to preach or whether you are praying as you prepare to live out your daily life for the glory and honour of God.

I'm a father-in-law!

2011-07-25T09:59:00.000Z
I think it might just be sinking in that my daughter is now a married woman. Even on Saturday, as I swapped between leading music and solemnising the marriage, it all seemed a little unreal. As Ally and I sat in the wedding car–a white classic VW Beetle convertible–we both said how surreal it all felt. But there we were, Ally in her wedding dress and me in my dress-suit.

At church we had a great time. Thanks to everyone who took part the worship was good and the congregation relaxed and informal. Even the photographs were fun!

So, now I'm a father-in-law and I've handed over responsibility for my daughter to someone else, not that I will ever really give up being responsible, but now they have a life to build, a life that we will be a part of but not shaping. It will be their choice. I wonder how you work out the line between concerned intervention and interference?

The problem with church is...

2011-07-13T08:00:00.000Z
We had an interesting discussion at the ministers' gathering yesterday. Sparked by me I have to say before anyone looks for someone else to blame! The question I wanted to raise comes out of a continuing desire to see the church blossom and flourish as a missional community in partnership with God. It does not arise from any personal agenda beyond a conviction that we are not all that we could be. That there is an adventure of faith that we are yet to experience and enjoy.

I just needed to say that before anyone gets upset or worried about the question I raised and the analysis I offered.

My question was this: Is full-time ministry as we deploy it in today's churches the very reason the church is not flourishing? In other words, are we as minister the problem?

The reason for the question is probably rooted in a concern that the primarily management model of ministry into which we have fallen has removed the pioneering, church planting pattern of the early church. We have as they say, moved from mission to maintenance, and we need to move back again.

But there is more. This shift has produced a professionalisation of ministry to the point where I think it is in danger of being detrimental to the spiritual growth and ministry involvement of the majority of the church. We defer to the minister as the one trained to do what biblically we are all called to do. We look to our ordained leaders as omni-competent, able to fulfil all the required roles of the leadership of the church. This is not good. I don't believe any one person can fulfil the role of apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher and evangelist, and neither does anyone else as far as I can tell. But we act like it's true. We say the days of the one-man band are over, but we carry on doing things in the same way. Perhaps, if we didn't have so-called full-time minister, we might see more leadership talent released and more ministry happen as we all share from a similar position busyness. Who knows.

A second danger is the reenforcement of the sacred-secular divide. Ministry is what the pros do in the scared places at sacred times. Everything else falls outside of this and is therefore secular. Any meaningful engagement in ministry for the non-ordained specialist is limited to occasional involvement on a Sunday or in a mid-week group. How unhelpful is that?

I recently attended a meeting at LICC where Mark Greene did a great job launching a new initiative aimed at supporting Christians in their workplaces and challenging the churches along the way about how they empower them to be effective whole-life disciples.

All of this makes me wonder if we don't need a radical reimagining of leadership and ministry in order to make the shift to a more fully engaged and involved community of faith. If the five-fold pattern of Ephesians is a workable model of leadership then most churches cannot afford to pay for that, so it would mean a flatter, less professionalised understanding of ministry and leadership.

Still much to reflect upon.

Thinking about stuff while waiting to catch the train

2011-07-05T15:07:00.000Z
Has discipleship replaced having a hobby for many Christians? That's crazy talk I hear you say, it's ludicrous. But hear me out as I think out loud about it for a moment. And anyway, even if it is crazy, this is my blog and I can be as crazy as I want to be in my own world can't I?

Back to the question. I keep thinking about the number of spaces we all occupy. There's the family space, the work space and the leisure space. Some argue that there isn't room for a fourth space, so Church or faith activity has to compete for attention with the other three spaces. Work is a non-negotiable space for most people, so in fact the competition is with leisure and family. When we fill our diaries with lots of well-intentioned activities focused on being part of a faith community, it will be either our leisure time or our family lives that will have to give up part of their space to make room for being a follower of Christ.

So maybe the discipleship question we should be asking is how do we integrate faith into our lives in order that it doesn't have to compete for time and resources and space. In other words, how do we we become everyday followers of Jesus, following him and serving him through the ordinariness of everyday life?

I don't have an easy answer to that question.

What I do know is that there are times when we are clearly too busy being Christians to be effective in God's mission. Our wholehearted commitment to meetings and planning and events distances us from the very people with whom we could be spending our time and who we could be influencing for the kingdom.

I don't invite people who are far from God to come to any church related events because I simply don't know any people in that category well enough to know how and when to invite them (and what to invite them to as well!). I'm addressing that by becoming intentional about getting to know some people who are far from God, people who are missing from the kingdom.

It's not easy. It's time consuming, and in my case energy sapping because it involves throwing myself around a tennis court for the most part! But I'm doing it, not to create evangelistic opportunities but to get to know real people who matter to God just as much as I do. Maybe one day I'll get the opportunity to extend an invitation and maybe one day someone will say yes. What is certainly true is that without this intentional move on my part, I probably would never get the opportunity in the first place.

No Longer Alone

2011-07-01T08:39:00.001Z
It was while I was studying theology at what was then LBC (now LST) that I became aware of my grandfather's involvement in mission. He responded to an urgent call for mission workers to go to Africa at the turn of the 20th century. Disillusioned, as far as I can tell, he retuned home a few years later and it would appear had little to do with the church after that. I never knew him, so I never had the chance to ask him why.

I've often wondered where he stood theologically, and whether we would share anything in common. I've wondered if he prayed while in Africa for the church in the UK to be renewed and to recommit itself to God's great mission. I've wondered who or what inspired him to cut short his studies and set off on his missionary journey.

All of this has often left me feeling somewhat alone in the family. I don't dwell on it, but there are times when I would love to be able to reflect on theological issues with my close family in a way that just isn't available to me. No one has gone this way before, or so I thought. And then I found out something new.

My Grandmother was my Grandfather's second wife. His first wife was called Mary, and they had a son and a daughter as I recall. Owen and Dorothy. Mary, it turns out was the sister (I hope I'm remembering this correctly) to Uncle Ernest. Uncle Ernest turns out to the J Ernest Rattenbury a Wesleyan theologian. It gets more interesting too. Ernest and Mary's grandfather was John Rattenbury, another Methodist leader from the late 19th century.

A quick email to a methodist friend of mine produced the following response:

Hi Richard,
Always good to hear from you dear friend. Well how amazing. As your e-mail came in I was reading an article about the Methodist Conference of 1861 which was held in Brunswick Chapel Newcastle, the place where I subsequently grew up. The President of Conference that year was, yes you have guessed, Rev John Rattenbury, described as a hypnotic revivalist preacher! His son was H Owen Rattenbury the father of Revs J Ernest Rattenbury and Harold Burgoyne Rattenbury.

So I no longer feel quite so alone as I once did. Maybe John was a maverick too, a preacher passionate about God's mission, determined to follow Christ and preach Christ.

Everyday Church

2011-07-01T08:19:00.000Z

As I think about what to do next in terms of Sunday mornings, I began to think about a series based in Peter's letters. To be honest, I've often shied away from them so that I don't have to try to explain about spirits in prison and the place of the ark in salvation history!

But those things aside, Peter's first letter has alway struck me as an important reflection on life as a Christian in a non-Christian world, and that's just the kind of world in which we generally live in the Western world. We may have some modernistic view that the world around us was once Christian and that the church ought to have a preeminent place in society, but such a world, if it ever truly existed, is long consigned to the past.

Anyway, thinking about Peter's letters, I came across Everyday Church along with one or two other resources and set about reading them through. I haven't got too far into this book, but I do find it refreshing and interesting and thoughtful and helpful as I prepare to outline my ideas.

The book is not a commentary but rather a reflection from a missional perspective on the implications of life for the Christian community in a hostile environment. Seven chapters cover the ideas of life and hope on the margins, what "everyday church" looks like in this context ad some thoughts about the next steps to take. Community, pastoral care, mission and evangelism are all explored.

A few things have caught my eye in the early pages. firstly the idea of storying. Storying is the process of understanding the culture of the people you are trying to reach and then creating a set of Bible stories that cover the key turning points in the story of salvation, along with bible stories that address the barriers and bridges to belief in that culture. I want to find out more about this, o I will need to do a bit of research but it sounds interesting.

The second thing that has caught my eye is a series of questions we need to ask ourselves. Boiled down, they become:
Where are the places and activities in which you can met people ('the missional spaces')?
What are the patterns and timescales of your neighbourhood ('the missional rhythms')?
What 'gospel' stories are told in the neighbourhood (stories about why we are here, what has gone wrong, what are the solutions and what are the hopes)?
There are of course many more questions, but these questions draw us into a deeper engagement with the world around us. It forces us to ask "What does the gospel lok like and sound like for the people of my neighbourhood. It forces me to stop asking why they don't conform to my story and to ask how I can influence their story with God's great story.

I shall continue reading!

June Walking

2011-07-01T05:41:00.000Z
I thought at one stage that I might have done another 100 consecutive days, but that came to an end after 46 days when I took a rest! With one thing and another, I've had a few more days that below 10k, but then again I've had 6 days that were over 20k, so the average for June turns out to be 13, 709.

So, the numbers for June were:

Total steps: 411, 271

Approx. miles: 206

This takes my total step count from August 1st last year to 4, 134, 206, which is about 2067 miles! That's only the second month when I've passed 400k steps, March was 405k.

July will probably be my last month of record keeping, but I will keep walking. I wonder if I could do 500k steps in a single month? That would be over 16, 600 a day or about 8 miles. Maybe if I played tennis everyday I could manage that, but I doubt that is going to happen!

The Trouble with Fair

2011-06-30T07:06:00.000Z
It always bothers me when I hear myself or someone else begin an argument with, "It's not fair." I try to avoid it because I've long since given up on fairness as the measure. That doesn't mean that I'm happy with injustice and inequity, quite the opposite, but fairness just seems overrated or even dare one say a little selfish these days.

Fairness is on the agenda today as Public Sector workers take industrial action. We're told it's all about protecting pensions and there will undoubtedly be lots of debates and discussions about the fairness of change or the unfairness of change depending upon your point-of-view.

It seems to me that it would be much more productive to talk about what is equitable rather than fair. Perhaps what is righteous and God-honouring. In our current studies of Isaiah fairness doesn't get mentioned but righteousness and justice are constant companions throughout the text.

To some of us it doesn't seem very just that the very institutions that gave the highest quality rating to very suspect financial practices and instruments which in turn took us into the wort recession we've experienced, should also be dictating the policies of the government of Greece in it's current crisis. To some of us it looks less that righteous for highly paid executives to retire on handsome pensions while others who are significantly less well provided for pick up the pieces and the price-tag.

I'm not at all sure what a more equitable solution might look like, but all the time we debate what is fair I'm not sure we will ever come close to finding it.

I wish I had an answer!

Doing well?

2011-06-21T22:05:00.001Z
John Ortberg has written an interesting piece on the Leadership Journal website. Here's a quote:

It is not acceptable to Jesus that hell prevail. Your job is not to meet a budget, run a program, fill a building, or maintain the status quo. Your job is to put hell out of business.

That's what it means for your church to do well.

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Simple ways to be missional

2011-06-21T06:09:00.000Z
It can be very frustrating trying to define what is missional when by it's nature it defies definition in a programmatic way. It can also be frustrating trying to understand it when it can't be defined with ease. So, in the end you just have to keep describing it in the hope that eventually everyone will get it.

Enter a helpful article by Jonathan Dobson on the Verge Network. In this post he outlines the following 8 simple ways to be more missional:

1. Eat with Non-Christians.

2. Walk, Don’t Drive.

3. Be a Regular.

4. Hobby with Non-Christians.

5. Talk to Your Co-workers.

6. Volunteer with Non-Profits.

7. Participate in City Events.

8. Serve your Neighbours.

Take a step back for a moment and you will quickly see that you cannot be missional and remain locked into the Christian ghetto.

Neil Cole on Imagination in mission

2011-06-15T21:55:00.001Z

Cufflinks

2011-06-15T11:26:00.000Z

We have a wedding coming up in a few weeks now and as both father of the bride and the minister officiating, I thought I'd get myself some new cufflinks for the occasion.

I rather like wearing cufflinks, not sure why, but I do. I suppose I think of them as something rather smart.

Anyway, I came across Cufflinkman via Google and I just wanted to say what a great service I received from them. I only ordered some nice mother of pearl inlaid cufflinks yesterday and they arrived this afternoon.

Very impressed.

Liked the site too. Plenty of choice and now I'm the proud owner of five sets of cufflinks, not all bought yesterday, and including a rather nice pair that actually came out of a Christmas cracker, I bought a storage case for my growing collection. And I'm rather pleased with it all!

Mind you, I've just checked and today's shirt of choice doesn't have cufflink friendly cuffs!

Conduct Gospel-Centred Funerals

2011-06-15T11:04:00.000Z

This book is part of a helpful series of practical guides to ministry. If you've never done a funeral and you are just starting out in ministry, then this book could be a really useful resource.

Written for an American market, it still has lots of hints and tips that apply in a UK context. However, you will need to find someone who can help you put it into a UK context if you are untrained in conducting funerals.

Of course the best advice and old hand can give to a novice is to trust the funeral director to help you be in the right place at the right time. I've always found them really helpful, and they have much more experience that I do!

There are a few concerns about the book. The section on choosing music seems to place the responsibility with the minister to vet all possibilities and although one is encourage to accommodate the family's wishes, the emphasis is upon music that promotes the gospel as far as possible. I take a rather different position. I see the funeral as a reflection of the personality of the one who has died and a time for the family to remember them and choose music that fits with those memories. I've yet to have felt the impulse to veto an choices made by the family.

Doing funerals is one of the privileges of ministry, and the responsibility is not to taken lightly. Weaving the story of God's grace and the good news of Jesus into the service can be a challenge. This short book will help you think these thing through as well as help you consider the practical side of this important ministry.

Some helpful questions

2011-06-07T07:31:00.001Z
I've bee reading a paper on missional church and came across these questions:

How did you see God at work in your life this week?

What is God been teaching you in his word this week?

What conversations are you having with pre-Christian people?

What good can we do around here—and how we get some of our neighbours in on it?

How can we help each other in prayer?

These aren't just questions to put in your journal, they are meant to be used as accountability questions within the church family too.

Any questions that causes us to stop and think is probably not a bad question. In the past I've used such questions as the basis for a morning or day in prayer.

In fact it's high time I did another such day. I feel pretty frazzled at the moment and a day's reflection would be a good thing. There's a place not too far from home that I could use.

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Attempting and Expecting

2011-06-03T10:24:00.001Z
What have you attempted for God recently, and what have you expected from him?

I was recently reminded of William Carey's quote "Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God", and asked myself just that question. The honest answer is probably the same for most of us. We've probably only attempted what we can safely accomplish, and we've expected little. Too busy and too tired, we don't push our faith to it's limits.

Years ago I was in a small Bible study group, not long after I became a follower of Jesus. In one of our studies we had an illustration of two people. One was standing on a frozen lake holding a large book with the word "faith" on the cover. It was meant to represent the amount of faith this character had. The sign by the lake read "thin ice". The other picture was someone with a small amount of faith standing beside another frozen lake with a sign that read "thick ice".

We spent a lot of time talking about the implications of these two pictures. Who was the person with faith? Was the man on the thin ice our model because he took the bigger risk, or was the man who applied his small amount of faith to thick ice more reasonable. I don't remember us coming to any absolute conclusions.

In the end I'm not too sure that faith is the determining factor when it comes to taking risks, to attempting something great for the kingdom of God. I think fear has a lot to do with it. Security is also a factor. Most of all perhaps we just don't spend enough time allowing the Spirit of God to inspire us to adventure. Perhaps we are too busy taking care of business, getting through the day, that we just don't have the time to become a pioneer for the kingdom.

William Carey was ignored, chastised and rejected for his radical assertion that lost people in other cultures actually mattered to God and ought to matter to the church. He was told in no uncertain terms that if God wanted to convert the heathen, he would do so in his time and without Carey's interference. But Carey persisted in dreaming a big dream. He persisted in preaching a missionary message about a missionary God and he offered himself for the task.

Eventually his persistence and commitment saw the birth of a missionary movement and he became its first missionary. He attempted something great for God and God did something extraordinary through him.

So where does that leave us, where does it leave me? Perhaps we need to remember our dreams, to revisit our passions, to seek first God's kingdom, to get on our knees and ask God to inspire a fresh wave of radical discipleship that will settle for nothing less than a big vision of God accompanied by a willingness to risk everything for the sake of the kingdom.

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May walking stats

2011-06-01T05:57:00.000Z
It looks like May was my third highest month for walking since I began counting steps back in August last year. March was the only month that I passed 200 miles, but this month I managed 195. That means another 390, 000 steps have been taken, taking my cumulative total in the year to 3,731,935. That's equivalent to a total distance of 1866 miles.

I managed my 10k steps every day in May, which was quite pleasing, and I've had a run of 41 consecutive days. I might just make the effort to get to 50 and then see where we get to from there. Another 100 days seems possible, but that would take me into August, so it still has to be a day at a time at them moment.

At least I should pass the 4 million step mark by the end of June!

Sunday School

2011-05-27T09:10:00.001Z
I only went to Sunday School for two weeks. After the second week, when I arrived home, my mother asked me, "How was Sunday School?" "Boring," I replied, "I'm not going again," I added quickly.

I was then informed that I had to go because it was good for me to go to church. My response was to point out that my mother didn't go so why should I.

I never returned to Sunday School!

If you are responsible for Sunday School or if you are wondering about how to reinvent it, then this blog post might help get you thinking.

The post ends with some great questions:

Do we want our children to learn how to be be compliant and "good"? Or do we want them to know to their toenails that they are beloved children of God, called to be ministers?

Do we want our children to know rote verses and have cultural literacy in terms of being able to identify the stories about Noah, Abraham, and Jesus? Or do we want them to understand the spiritual journeys of our spiritual foremothers and forefathers while figuring out their own?

Do we want our children to focus on getting themselves into heaven (which seems rather self-serving, doesn't it)? Or do we want them to learn that following Jesus is the best way to live on earth?

There's also a great book out of Willow Creek called The Fabulous Reinvention of Sunday School that helped us reshape children's ministry in a previous church.

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Revised date for world's end

2011-05-24T07:17:00.000Z
I heard on the radio this morning that Harold Camping has decided that his maths was wrong and in fact the world will end in October.

How is it that someone can miss the most obvious statement of Jesus that no one knows, and get others to believe them?

It's a salutary lesson to everyone who would seek to become an expert, a teacher first and a disciple second.

Preaching from Isaiah

2011-05-24T07:12:00.001Z
So, I took on the challenge of preaching through Isaiah as the result of a conversation with a small study group we have at church. It's a big book, but that doesn't mean we should shy away from it just because of its length. Neither should the complexity and span of history put us off either.

I decided to try to take a fairly broad approach and pick up about a dozen themes and ideas from across the whole book. One of the things I keep saying to both the study group and the church congregation is to look for echoes. Echoes of both the New Testament in the Old and of the Old in the New. For example, when Isaiah speaks prophetically about the gathering of the nations in worship and discipleship in chapter 2, where does that echo in the New? Possibly Paul's declaration that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess or when Jesus speak of making disciples of all nations.

As I work through I'm also reading an interesting book about Preaching Christ from the Old Testament by Sidney Greidanus. It has quite an interesting survey about how the early church did it, and it lays out a method with examples of a Christocentric model. I'm also using Motyer, Goldingay, Webb and Oswalt's commentaries and a very useful book by David Jackman called Teaching Isaiah. It's a guide to developing sermons and series.

What have I learnt so far? Well a few things come to mind. Firstly I guess it becomes very clear very quickly that the nation, indeed the nations, have a case to answer before God, but while God's judgement is inevitable so too is the hope that comes from God's eternal purpose of redemption. In fact you can quite easily see why some of the church fathers looked to Paul's faith, hope and love triplet as a basic hermeneutical method.

Secondly, there's the challenge to choose your story. Chapter 7-9 express it clearly as Isaiah paints the picture of the present reality, the near future and the distant future to come. You can choose to live by the story of gloom and distress or you can choose to live by the story of hope and redemption.

There is so much more that has direct relevance to our present-day situation that Isaiah cries out to be preached. I just hope we do him justice!

Praying in the pool

2011-05-24T06:49:00.002Z
So I went for my first swim in ages yesterday. Didn't swim far, the pool got busy and there was a water aerobics class starting that I hadn't noticed in the timetable. I did about 24 lengths, and when I stopped for a breather and to take my goggles off for a moment, I got talking to a fellow swimmer about life and stuff.

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to share what was said, but it's where the conversation went that caught me by surprise. A simple remark opened the door to the opportunity to pray, and so there we stood, by the edge of the pool, with swimmers going up and down and me praying a blessing on someone I'd never met before.

Weird isn't it? I often wonder how many God-moments I miss in the daily run of my life. We're all so very busy going somewhere, doing something, that we probably don't notice a lot of what is happening right in front of our eyes. Worse still, perhaps we are like the religious characters in the story Jesus told about the man who got mugged by thieves and ignored by religious people. Stepping over his body or crossing the road, they moved quickly to avoid contamination that might interrupt their ability to be devoutly religious.

As I continue to read Isaiah, and remind myself of some of the other prophets too, I can't help but notice that when it comes to religious service, God seems to have a somewhat different perspective to us. Rather than focussing on the songs we sing or the sacrifices we make, or the prayers we speak, he talks about the justice we seek on behalf of others, he speaks about righteousness rather than self-righteousness. To use post-modern missional language, he seems to talk about engaging with our culture to transform it rather than huddling together in isolation in order to condemn it.

Do you think that being incarnational might just be reflected not only in the way we live out our discipleship spiritually, but also in the way we live it our practically?

I wonder, when I go out later today, if God will present me with another opportunity to be his co-worker?

More of Reggie McNeal on Missional Church

2011-05-23T10:14:00.000Z
Came across this video of Reggie McNeal talking about missional church.

What caught my attention in this video was the discussion about "Cross Domain" partnerships. The idea of working with the community rather than for the community. When we work for the community we are less likely to engage the community, but when we work with the community, engagement is set to rise.

So I guess the question is: Where might God be calling us to work with our community as we partner with him in his redemptive mission?

There are some other resources available too, particularly a paper about engagement. This can be downloaded from here. The paper is called: Fast Forwarding Your Church’s Engagement in the Community

Telling stories

2011-05-17T10:26:00.001Z
I had a thought as I walked up to church this morning. All this talk about stories got me thinking. We have Alpha and we have Christianity Explored and we have a whole plethora of access courses for people who might be interested in faith, but is there room for something different? Maybe it already exists, I don't know, but here's an idea.

A course based around the simple practice of retelling the stories, the story if you like, of God. Stories about his love and grace, about his involvement in human history and his intervention on our behalf.

We could start in Genesis with creation. Not as a way of arguing against evolution, but as a way of telling the story of who God is, reflecting on why we are here. We could look at Genesis 3 and talk about how we got into the mess we appear to find ourselves in, the loneliness and emptiness that sometimes invades our lives.

Of course we would tell the stories of Jesus and the early church too as lives got changed.

The thing is, much of our "investigating Christianity" material can require a high degree of Biblical literacy, but how many people know the stories? And telling the stories is not about educating people in Christian narratives, but opening minds to the possibility that God actually is at work in the world around us.

Just a thought.

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Standing firm

2011-05-17T07:41:00.000Z

If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all.

This little phrase slips into the narrative of Isaiah 7 almost unnoticed. With so much attention given to the sign of Immanuel, Isaiah's words to Ahaz about faithfulness can easily get missed. But if you stop and read carefully, these 15 words hit you square between the eyes.

Ahaz was not a faithful king. Uzziah and Jotham before him, even with their faults, were basically faithful kings, and Hezekiah, who would follow Ahaz, was another faithful king. But Ahaz was not like his father and grandfather, nor was he like his son.

Yet God still called him to faith, to live out of a position of trust. He spoke to him as if were a person of faith. That doesn't mean that he was, just that God treated him as if could be. In a sense, I guess you could say that Ahaz was full of faith potential, he just refused to act upon it. He'd rather look to kings and countries than to God for security.

Driven by a fear of everything except the power of God, and believing anything except the word of God, Ahaz had no faith in which to stand firm. The conclusion is there before us. He would not stand at all. His political alliances would let him down and his false piety would reveal his brokenness.

But as for me, well today is another opportunity to stand firm in my faith. It's a day-to-day opportunity. Yesterday's successes or failures belong to history and tomorrow's can wait their turn. I can only stand one day at a time!

Missional Community

2011-05-12T16:19:00.000Z
There is a great video over at Missional Church Network that gives a great insight into what it means to be part of a missional community.

Definitely worth a watch.

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Church for Men?

2011-05-11T16:52:00.000Z
Been reading David Murrow's book Why Men Hate Going to Church, very interesting. Having recently been to a meeting about church and men, it's given me quite a lot to think about. We are looking at how we do ministry to and for men at church, and the questions raised by both the recent breakfast meeting and Murrow's book need addressing.

The pivotal issue is simply this: is church to feminine? To which the answer is almost certainly yes. Odd then that if the culture of the church is predominately feminine, why are most of the senior leaders still men? Hmm.

Murrow suggests that over time the church has simply fallen into line with the culture of the people who fill the pews, on average 60-70% female. So we come into buildings that are decorated with flowers, painted in pastel colours and designed around a nurturing, comforting, caring ethos. Now none of those things are bad, no one is saying that. The point is that the environment and the content of our services leans away from a masculine agenda and towards a feminine agenda.

How we reset the balance, according to Murrow, is to choose to set the thermostat of the church to more male-oriented settings like challenge rather than comfort. But doing this is maybe not so easy to work out. We can preach challenging sermons but are they presenting the right kind of challenge? I don't know. But it certainly bears some reflection and some thought about how we prepare and present our material in order to challenge everyone in appropriate ways.

I've always maintained that following Jesus was the most courageous decision I have ever made in my life. It has been a hard life, not the easy life that many non-believers think it to be. If I hadn't have chosen to commit myself to becoming a whole-hearted follow of Jesus Christ I could have sailed through life selfishly seeking my own goals and meeting my own needs. I could have been driven by whatever desires I had. Instead I chose to submit myself to someone else's authority. I also chose to follow God's call into ministry, another courageous choice that has been anything but easy.

So why does the gospel I preach come across as uninteresting or irrelevant to men? Maybe I've failed to emphasise the risk and challenge of following Jesus in favour of the language of relationship and sentimentalised commitment. Maybe I've not lived out a discipleship that is strong in heart.

Whatever the reasons, the need to think seriously about we engage men for the kingdom of God remains.

More to come I'm sure!

Choosing your story

2011-05-10T20:06:00.000Z
Working through Isaiah for our current Sunday morning series is a challenge! It seems a bit of an understatement to say it's a big book and doing it justice in a comparatively short period of time is a tough ask, but it's a good challenge.

Anyway, some of the things I've been reading and thinking about fitted quite interestingly with a discussion we had at our monthly Baptist Ministers' lunch. We got talking about the general level of illiteracy about the Christian narrative in our society and what we could or should be doing about it. As I thought about it, it struck me that as evangelicals in particular, we have become somewhat fixed on telling the whole story at every opportunity. But typically we don't actually tell the whole story, we just tell the bit about atonement and repentance and sin and grace. Now that's not a bad story to tell, but if the world around us doesn't share our frame of reference, they have no context in which to understand our story of redemption.

Perhaps, I suggested in our meeting, we need to retell the stories in order to provide that framework.

I then got thinking about Isaiah and the topic for Sunday and the chapters I'd been reading and studying this morning. As the prophetic narrative moves from chapter 7 through chapter 8 and into chapter 9 there seems to be a very simple question being posed to the listener: Which story will you choose to live by? Will it be the darkness and gloom of the Assyrian invasion, or will it be the light and deliverance of God's new king and new kingdom?

While this story is most definitely a story of redemption, it is also a story about hope. And who doesn't need a story of hope. Could these be the stories we need to be telling, stories of hope, stories of peace storied of reconciliation. And as we tell them, to frame them in the wider, bigger story of God's redemptive work done on our behalf.

I'm not sure how we do this, but I think it is something that we need to take a good look at and ask ourselves what the stories are that we tell the world around us. I fear we might find out that we're actually telling the world how doomed it is and how dreadful it is and how dark it is rather than telling it how loved it is and how available light is to it.

Perhaps, as someone else pointed out, too few of us actually know what our hope is, and therefore cannot tell the story.

It was a great discussion and reminded me about the things I still miss from college life 20 years on from completing my MA.