The Church needs to Repent

I have a regular alert from Google that picks up anything on the internet about "missional church". This morning I came across a blog post about the need for the church to repent and it listed seven areas in which the author thought the church needed to repent. In brief the were:

1. We need to repent of our insistence on keeping people busy, busy, busy, with church activities and services that might make for good church members but are not making good followers of the way of Jesus.

2. We need to repent of our religious legalism. We’ve created long lists of “do’s and don’ts” – all intended to help people get closer to God – but instead we’re keeping people from God. Instead of helping people find life – we’re known as those who suppress life.

3. We need to repent of our arrogant – know it all attitudes. In our need for certainty we’ve lost our humility and have forgotten the many mysteries of God...  We’ve convinced ourselves that our understanding of God and the Bible is totally flawless and that being “right” is more important than being “loving.”

4. We need to repent of our angry – often hate-filled, and mean-spirited ways. Jesus said that “blessed are the peacemakers”. Jesus told us to love our neighbors and our enemies.

5. We need to repent of our smug, condescending, judgmental, and critical spirits. Jesus said “don’t judge and you won’t be judged.” “Don’t condemn and you won’t be condemned.”

6. We need to repent of tying Christ to one political party’s agenda and making monsters out of anyone who sees things differently than we do. Jesus came declaring that all of the kingdoms of the world are flawed and that people need to align their lives with God’s kingdom and his agenda. We need to spend more time seeking “God’s kingdom and his justice” (Matt. 6:33) and less time seeking a given parties kingdom and its ideas of justice.

7. We need to repent of our narrow view of the gospel. We need to go back to the scriptures and re-learn what the essential gospel message of Jesus was and is.

It's a very interesting list, and something that we might want to think about quite seriously. At least we ought to be asking some questions about our personal attitudes and where we might need to repent.

You can read the whole post here.

Waiting for a delivery

So, today should be an exciting day. Amongst all the usual Friday tasks connected with the coming weekend, I'm awaiting a couple of deliveries and have one collection to make. The collection is my new glasses. I've been struggling for a while and booked an eye test two weeks ago. Turned out my current specs were too weak for reading and too strong for distance! Hopefully the new ones will solve the problems and I'll be able to see a little more clearly again, although I don't think my catching will improve!

A few weeks ago we were playing rounders and I became very aware that I just wasn't able to catch with the ease that I used to be able to do it when I was 30 years younger! Even though I say so myself, I took some pretty spectacular catches when I was a regular cricketer. I guess you just lose the ability to adjust quickly enough and get your hands in the right position.

Anyway, back to my exciting Friday. You won't be surprised to discover that one of the deliveries will include a few books. I'm searching out some resources for the Autumn, and there are a couple of study guides on John's Gospel that might arrive today. I've spent a lot of time on and off over the last 20 years trying to work out how to preach through John's Gospel while doing justice to its structure. I still haven't figured it, but we're going to work through it in the Autumn by looking at the people Jesus meets as the story unfolds. These guides might help us connect Sundays and small groups more effectively. The big idea for the autumn is to try and integrate things in order to support spiritual growth.

We will see how it goes.

The other delivery is a new printer. I've got a reasonable laser printer in my study, but I saw an opportunity to explore wireless printing with the potential added benefit of a scanner and copier all-in-one machine. I've got some documents that I could do with scanning, and while I would love to be able to buy something like the Fujitsui document scanner, I really can't justify the outlay. So a compromise is to try a multi-function printer with a document feeder and scanner built in. It will save me having to get the flatbed scanner out and do each page individually and it will enable me to print photographs too.

I've gone for an Officejet 6500 from HP, which seems to have a reasonable set of reviews. I've always liked HP printers every since I bought my first Deskjet way back in 1990 something. I'm probably paying less today for a full colour multi-function machine than I did for the black and white Deskjet I bought back then!

Well I never!

There are times when technology even surprises me. It usually involves being able to do something far more easily than I imagined. Let me set the scene.

We're starting a new Sunday series from John's Gospel in September and I found some old study notes I prepared on various characters and themes. They look useful but they need modifying if we're going to use them in the Autumn. Unfortunately I can only find the printed copies, the computer files lost in the processes of changing from one computer to another and another. I certainly backed them up before changing, but that was probably on 3.5 floppies which have long since headed for the great obsolete technology pile in the sky.

So I was looking at either retyping the notes, scanning them page by page on my flatbed scanner or investing in a scanner with document feed capabilities. I even looked at cheapish multi-function printers.

So it was that I wandered down to the church to see if the photocopier would play nice and act as a scanner. I was thrilled to discover that it can work with removable media, only the one I tried sent it into a tail spin of flashing error lights and I had to restart it.

Reading the manual I discovered that it had a "send" function that could email documents. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder...

So I loaded the paper feeder, chose send, entered my email address and pressed start. All the pages went through the scanner and that was it. No messages to say it had worked or not. I wandered back down the church to my office/study and checked my email. And there it was. A pdf version of the document I'd just scanned. Brilliant.

So credit where credit's due, well done to the copier. I now have my documents in electronic form. The only problem is that they are images rather than text, but I have some ocr software at home which solve that problem, we shall have to wait and see.

When Jesus doesn't play by the rules

Another good article that came my way this morning is this one by Gordon MacDonald. It centres on the healing of the crippled woman, a story only Luke records, ad how the synagogue ruler reacts with "indignation" to the routine of his Sabbath worship being rudely interrupted by the audacious healing of the woman in question. Why couldn't she wait and get healed tomorrow or any other day of the week. It was just plain wrong of Jesus to do this on the Sabbath, it didn't fit with his version of reality.

Recognise his attitude in anyone you know?

The truth is, we are all in danger of becoming like the synagogue leader. We are all susceptible to reducing worship to what we can handle, and the unexpected isn't usually part of it. We like slick, orderly, well-planned and well executed worship. Without appearing to espouse chaos and disorder, where does the supernatural find its home in that kind of box? Where is the flexibility to respond to the prompting and leading of God's Spirit?

Here's some of Gordon's reflections:

Then I realized that, on occasion, I've been there, done that. I have known, experienced, perhaps even, regrettably, contributed to this kind of dead, out-of-touch kind of religion. Not always, but sometimes.

I thought about how the kind of institutionalized religion in this story slowly loses all of its humanity, its compassion, its ability to flex in the moment of great surprise. And that is exactly what Jesus brought through the door of the synagogue that day: humanity, compassion, and flex. What bothered the ruler was that the woman's healing wasn't done his way, according to his theological understanding, at a time that didn't interrupt his Sabbath. But for Jesus, even a sermon was "interruptible" if a person like this woman was in the room.

The story is also about systemized thinking, a kind of logic that takes on a life of its own over a period of time. It is demonstrated in the reaction of a religious leader who is so trapped by an analytical way that he can actually bring himself to believe that her healing is an unfortunate thing. It leads me to ask how does a mind get so locked into a system of thinking that it can take in the specter of a healed woman—bent over for eighteen years—and call it a violation of God's rules?

Somehow we must protect ourselves from ever becoming religious leaders who define what God can do and when he can do it. Roll on Sunday and the opportunity to be surprised by God if not by the congregation or even the minister!!

Measuring Church Health

I'd never heard of Virginia Apgar until I read this article about an APGAR test for a church. Turns out she suggested a simple way to assess the health of a new-born infant. Anyway the article is an interesting read and offers two simple ways to take a snapshot of the health of a congregation, one based on Acts 2 the other on Revelation 2.

Very interesting I thought.

How do you prepare?

I have a sketch book that is steadily filling up with all sorts of my version of mindmaps. Over time I suppose I've developed my own approach, as I suspect most people do.

For me the value of minpmapping is the opportunity it gives me to just think. You can follow a single thought or just keep generating new ideas. Eventually it has to be resolved into something, but as a process I find it really helpful. I use mindmaps for all sorts of things, not just preparing sermons.

I've tried various computer based mindmapping programmes, iThoughts on the iPad being a firm favourite, but a pen and paper seems more natural to me and actually easier to create. The biggest problem is finding a plain paper notebook. Eventually I bought an A4 sketchbook which does the job.

If you haven't tried mindmapping you may find that it will take time to settle to a process that suits your thinking processes. It did me. But persevere and you might be surprised how you get on.

An August Challenge

Where Anne works they, well some of them anyway, are taking part in a challenge through August. The challenge is to walk, run or jog 200, 000 steps in August. Now that works out at 6452 steps a day, which if 10,000 equals roughly 5 miles for the average person, is about 3.25 miles or 5.16 Km.

I'm not offering any prizes, but this is the sort of challenge that is just the thing if you want to kick start yourself into doing a bit more exercise. You could use Google maps to work out whether getting off the train or bus in a different place will give you a mile walk. Doing that at both ends of the day already gives you two miles, an evening walk around the block could easily give you the extra steps. Take the stairs for at least one floor or two instead of the lift all the way. There are all sorts of little things you can do to add extra steps to your day.

There is one caveat, you can only count the first 10, 000 steps each day. Any steps over that are good for you, but they don't count towards your total. So don't think you can catch up at the weekends with a long walk through the woods!

And if you don't have a pedometer, my long-time favourite has been the Omron Walking Style II, currently £17.24 from Amazon. I'd still have my original one if I hadn't put it in the washing machine!

There are plenty of others on the market, but this has proved to be nice and robust. And, you don't have to clip it to you belt announcing to the world that you're a step counting fanatic. Just stick it in your pocket and way you go.

Another nice feature is that it keeps a rolling 7 day record, amongst other things.

Great and unsearchable things

As I was preparing for Sunday's talk I wanted to check a Bible reference quickly, so I turned it up just to make sure I was quoting the correct verse. I was looking for Jer. 31:3 I have loved you with an everlasting love. On my way to the correct verse I bumped into another verse in Jeremiah that usually catches my attention when I find myself reading this prophet.

Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.

I wonder to myself what might those great and unsearchable things be? Not an easy question to answer given that I don't know them in the first place because God hasn't revealed them to me yet! And that's not being flippant, it's an admission that in fact until God chooses to show me these things, whatever they are, I simply can't know what they actually are.

There are times when we all come to God and ask him to show us something, but all too often we come with an assumption about what that is going to be. A couple of weeks ago now I told my baseball story, the one about God answering my rather daft prayer for a baseball to come out of the stadium near where I was sitting. As I introduced the story I asked a simple question: What shape do you expect the answers to your prayers to be? It's a more profound question than even I thought at the time.

Of course the baseball wasn't the shape of the answer I was expecting. I expected God to say no to be honest. It was a rather ridiculous request after all. But I got the baseball and yet that wasn't actually the answer. The real prayer that was hidden away in there somewhere was this: "God, what are doing with my life? Tell me where to go and what to do next." Instead I got a baseball and a question: Do you trust me? Not an audible question, just in case you think I have some hotline to heaven, but just that sense that something is going on here and I think God is trying to get something through to me.

So, when I read this verse in Jeremiah I'm rather cautious about trying to define what "great and unsearchable" might mean.  Then again, I'm unlikely to find out unless I ask. We're unlikely to find out unless we ask.

Having asked we then have to face the tricky task of being observant enough to realise what we are seeing. Perhaps "great and unsearchable" might look rather mundane and ordinary if we've predefined it as miraculous and extraordinary. How different might our perspective be if we were more aware of what God is doing under our noses.

New Artwork

Having spent all that time working out how to hang the Counter Culture artwork in the church, it seemed daft not to use the space for something new for the August series. So here's our new artwork for the series that starts today.

This is it complete, but the idea is that the verses and references will get added each week as the series develops through the summer.

Something as simple as this acts as a visual reminder of the things we are reflecting on each week. The hope is that it inspires people to take something away from the celebration.

In case you were wondering, the five coloured squares represent the five amazing things and have a tenuous link to the "Five a day" fruit and veg message that we get from government and health bodies.

Quitting Christianity

Don't panic, I'm not talking about me, well not yet! No, it's the title of an article I came across about Anne Rice, the author, who has decided that Christianity is no longer something with which she can be associated. I have some sympathy.

According to the article Rice:

"questioned the word “Christian”, asking when a word becomes “unusable … so burdened with history and horror that it cannot be evoked without destructive controversy”. The next day she concluded that she was “out” and announced her refusal to be anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-artificial birth control, anti-Democrat, anti-secular humanism, anti-science, and anti-life in the name of Christ.

“In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian,” she concluded Wednesday.

From the rest of the article it becomes clear that this isn't about giving up on faith. It is about someone struggling with everything about Christianity that fails to reflect Christ. A struggle we ought all to take seriously. This is why some have looked for an alternative word or phrase, red letter Christians for example.

Perhaps we need to reimagine the meaning of "Christianity", to think about how we can redeem the term and rescue it from all that isn't Christ.

Preaching Deeper Sermons

What is it that we want from the Sunday morning sermon? Do we really want to be taught three things we already know about a text we've read before or do we want something new every week, as if Sundays is some form f religious entertainment?

Well of course we would never reduce Sundays to entertainment, but I've been in many churches where I've heard people say, "We need more teaching," and I've often wondered what they mean by that. In many ways the church is over taught and under experienced. Our lives don't live up to our knowledge. Except they do if our knowledge is only shallow.

So, maybe what we need is not more teaching but more depth. Depth not in the sense of more information about original languages and building layers of supporting Biblical references, but in the sense of a deeper connection with a growing spiritual life. A deepening of the soul, if that's a valid concept.

In thinking about this I was interested in an article that appeared on the Christianity Today website about deeper preaching. The article suggests five kinds of deep sermons:

• Biblical depth
• Intellectual depth
• Experiential depth
• Cultural depth
• Applicational depth

Several things strike me. First you can't do all of these, and maybe you shouldn't try to them all, in a single sermon. Second, why would you try to them all every time. It's interesting to think about all the factors that come into play when you are both preparing to preach and actually delivering a sermon.

Personally I find that I write more notes these days in order to keep myself on track. Sometimes I develop my sermons a little like a mystery story. Trying to find the question that a text or theme raises and then seeking to unfold the answers. Other times it's more about presenting the flow of an idea that runs through the passage and the context. I'm keen too to connect the small things with the bigger picture. It's easy to forget the big theme of the bible in order to focus on the small thing. How does grace impact on how we interpret passages about discipline, about divorce and about a thousand other things?

Anyway, the article is worth a read and something to which I will return and give some more thought.

The Journey Ahead

If it were a simple matter of discovering a new vision in an old context, then maybe the journey would be easier to plot. But that's not our situation. We need to reimagine church for a new context. If we look for a vision before we recognise the changing context then we are in danger of imagining only what we are used to imagining. Let me explain it this way. If all we have known is a pattern of being the church that focuses upon getting people into the church, then we will reimagine the church in exactly the same way. We will be pushed towards developing programmes geared to filling the church.

On the other hand, if we recognise a new reality, a reality that focuses upon getting the church out and active in the community, building relationships and reconnecting people with the God who misses them most, then we will imagine a very different church. At least I hope we will.

To help plot our course we need to identify some of the key themes that will help us along the way. At this point we need to make one thing really clear.

Everything flows out of our personal and corporate relationship with God.

We should not take this for granted. We should carry this like a valued possession,wear it like a badge. I believe that everything Jesus did arose out of his relationship with his Father rather than his ability to do them himself. He was fully God and therefore capable of performing miracles in his own right, but he chose only to do what he saw the Father already doing (John 5).

Accepting this principle means that anything we do has to arise out of a deep and intimate relationship with God. Jim Packer, commenting on the state of the American church once said, "The problem with North American Protestantism is that it is three thousand miles wide but only half an inch deep."

The last thing we want is a lukewarm, shallow version of Christianity. That simply will not satisfy and may ultimately prove to be the real reason people have left the church of many years. They're bored with an expression of Christianity that lacks the life of Christ. As Sweet and Viola put it:

To be perfectly candid, there are few things that are as dull and boring in life as a Christianity without the living, breathing, radiant, triumphant Christ. It's a first-degree snoozer. If you could bottle it, you would have the cure for insomnia. 

Jesus Manifesto

Jesus Manifesto

I've just about finished reading Sweet and Viola's book, and I'm not sure what to say about it. Sometimes I find Viola's attitude towards the church a little irritating if I'm honest. It was the same in Reimaging the Church.

But, Jesus Manifesto is a really good, challenging and inspiring book. There is much to commend it's central message. As the jacket notes says:

Christians have made the gospel about so many things-things other than Christ. Religious concepts, ideas, doctrines, strategies, methods, techniques, and formulas have all eclipsed the beauty, the glory and the reality of the Lord Jesus Himself... We know a lot about trying to be like Jesus, but very little about living by His indwelling life.

Perhaps the book is unnerving because it goes to the heart of what it means to be the church, to be an authentic follower of Christ in whom and through whom Jesus lives and ministers. In doing so the authors challenge much that has been taught and continues to be taught. Perhaps too it's uncomfortable to think that all the sermons you've every preached may be rejected as inaccurate and un-gospel!

If you're evangelical and keep telling everyone that "it's all about Jesus", this book might just make you stop and think about what you really mean when you say that.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Inception

We wandered over to the cinema yesterday afternoon to see  Inception, the much anticipated film of the summer. At just short of 150 minutes it is a long film but you'd never know from watching it. Never a dull moment.

Without giving away the story, we've got the pain and suffering of failing to deal with the past, carrying bucket loads of guilt around with you, issues of denial and reconciliation and the science fiction stalwart theme of trying to figure out where reality begins, ends or even exists. Add to that some clever use of special effects and you've got a really good piece of cinema.

Where do we go from here?

If the church stands still, or worse still tries to go backwards to some nostalgic period when everything seemed to work, then we will find that the very people we are trying to reach will have moved even further away than they are now. So we must move forwards, the only problem is, which way is forwards! Because we are people of our time and our history, we tend to answer this question according to the things we have learned and experienced. Unfortunately that can lead us to answers that won't work in the age in which we find ourselves. The story has changed, life is different, and we need to discover how God's story challenges and reshapes the story of post-modern life.

We need a new imagination of church, but we also need some parameters within which to begin our journey of re-imagining. The good news is that a lot of people are taking this journey and there is a lot of interesting stuff with which we can interact as we shift our perspective towards what it means to be a church deeply committed to following Jesus and fully involved with our community in partnership with God on his great mission.

In this we are all novices. This is not a road down which we have travelled before and it is unfamiliar ground. We might look like we are lost, but we are not. And it won't be quick either. Frank Viola says that the church is not a train, it is a group of people out for a walk. What we know for sure is that business as usual won't actually address any of the challenges we face with respect to reaching our communities for Christ.

The Problem with Programmes

The problem with a programmes based approach to church is that it too often removes people from the communities in which they live and work and transfers them into a church community disconnected from their ordinary lives. Programmes can simply serve to keep people busy, too busy in the end for any real involvement in God's mission.

But we can't stop having programmes! Programmes help us organise ourselves, they help us strengthen areas of weakness and encourage areas of strength. Programmes are good provided the programme serves the purposes of the church and doesn't distract from it.

The second problem with programmes is that they don't always work. In a long term study carried out through the Willow Creek Association, they found that no matter how good your programmes for discipleship might be, very few people were actually being discipled through them. The people who were actually growing in their relationship with God were the people who were actively involved in the ministry of the church, and I'm not just talking about weekend services and internal church stuff.

The Fundamental Shape of the Church

I believe that the fundamental shape of the church can be summarised like this: Christology (what we believe about Jesus) drives our missiology (what we believe about our purpose) which in turn drives our ecclesiology (how we "do" church).

Jesus is at the heart of everything we do, or at least he should be. In fact we could go so far as to say that he is both the centre and the circumference of who we are as his followers. He is, to paraphrase Sweet and Viola (The Jesus Manifesto) the preoccupation of the church.

How do I see the Church?

More from my random thoughts paper.

It is probably best summed up by the quote from Rowan Williams that: It's not that the church of God has a mission, rather that the God of mission has a church.

Our role, as God's people is to partner with him in the mission he is orchestrating in our world. We were formed for this mission and called into this mission. Roxburgh and Boren put it this way:

Mission is not something the church does as an activity, it is what the church is through the mystery of its formation and memory of its calling.

Introducing the Missional Church p45

Taking on such a perspective requires a re-imagining of what church is and how it functions. It is not about developing new programmes of things to do, it is about a new imagination about being missional, of partnering with God wherever and whenever he is at work in the lives of those around us. It is important to understand that this is not about redefining the church in terms of evangelism. Missional does not equal more evangelistic in the traditional sense of those words. Evangelism is part of mission, but it is not the whole of mission.

Over the centuries I believe that the church has lost this missional edge. It has replaced being the church with doing church, it has replaced a relationally based community of followers with a programme based community of adherents.

Relational Capacity

I am currently trying to piece together all my thinking about the church. Not an easy task! There are so many thoughts and ideas and challenges to process. It feels almost like trying to write a memoir but having forgotten the order of events! So I've started by writing a series of random paragraphs about questions and quotes that have influenced, clarified, or affirmed my thinking. I also find from time to time that a book comes along that helps provide a vocabulary for my thoughts.

So I thought I'd turn some of these paragraphs into blog posts and see if that triggers more thinking rather than dumping the whole thing on the internet in one go. After all, who has the time or inclination to read a 2,500 word blog post that isn't even finished!

Relational capacity is a phrase I came across. Put simply it is about our capacity to form meaningful relationships. Here's what I wrote:

A quote I heard recently went like this: "Your missional effectiveness is directly proportional to your relational capacity."

In other words, we can't reach people we don't know. Traditionally, the way we have done church has diminished our relational capacity and hindered our missional effectiveness. We simply do not have the time to meet unchurched people, people far from God, the very people God misses most.

When I talk about the way we have done church I'm not talking about Sundays as much as the rest of the week. When I look at the typical church calendar the simple truth is that very busy people become even more busy with church focused activities. Small groups, prayer meetings, leaders meetings, members' meetings, worship practices, planning meetings. They all pile into our diaries and leave precious little time to do anything else.

Maybe the only way we are ever going to open the door to increasing our relational capacity is to simplify church so that it doesn't demand so much of our time. But if we do that, we will need to commit ourselves to using the time released in a positive kingdom way.

Making such a change will also require a shift in thinking about what it means to be in church and more importantly what it means to not be in church! When I was a young Christian if you chose to spend time with unchurched friends rather than with Christians, it was a sign that you were backsliding. Your salvation was in doubt and your commitment questioned. Not exactly a supportive environment! I'm not so sure that such an attitude still exists, but it does highlight our perennial focus on being in church rather that on mission.

That leaves us with a simple question: How do we increase our relational capacity?

Answers on a postcard...

Praying about what you see

I do find it rather interesting how going for a walk can help me pray for my community. You see people and places and things going on that, if you are looking, can be helpful.

Today's walk took me through some open fields, past the cemetery, schools and local shops. I went past some remote houses too. Each of these helped me pray. As I passed the cemetery I prayed for those who are grieving and for those who would have their day interrupted by loss. The remote homes made me stop and wonder if anyone ever visited them to share God's amazing story or where their lives as isolated as their homes.

Could I have done this sitting at home? Probably. But I'm not sure I would have thought about the same things without the visual prompts.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Peer Supervision

Everyone, at least everyone in ministry, knows how lonely and hard it can be. Having a second voice to keep you sane and help you reflect is vitally important. The second voice gives you a safe place to let go of all the frustrations and heartaches, to share all the joys and highs with someone who knows what it feels like to walk this road of the servant leader.

The question is will peer supervision provide that place? For some I think it will, for others I'm not so sure. The concept is fundamentally sound. The principle of having a fixed relationship with another practitioner who will listen to the issues, share the journey and ask the tough questions is good. Whether that needs to be a single voice is up for grabs.

In Bedford I was privileged to be part of a small group of ministers who met once a month. Some might call it a fraternal, but it was more than many a fraternal of which I've been a part. We shared our stories, we listened to the questions, we never judged each other. We prayed for each other and we never let each other get away with simply moaning about things. Maybe above everything else, we knew we were not alone. We knew that some of the questions for which we had no answer were questions we shared in common. And none of us had answers for them!

So, yesterday was a valuable day. Initially I thought it was an information day, but it turned out to be a taster day. Fortunately my partner for the day had come to see in the same way I had come to see, so we talked about how the process might work for us and what we might do without actually committing ourselves to the process.

The biggest challenge to any process of peer supervision or peer mentoring is that you moan together. That you share sympathy and avoid responsibility. But that can be avoided. The other area of concern is the assumption that we all begin with the skills needed to offer this kind of mutual support. Those who have trained in counselling will approach the task with skills and questions that are not necessarily possessed by every minister no matter how competent they might be.

Personally, I'm still looking for the level of friendship and support I had previously. Perhaps it's an unrealistic search!

Of course none of this takes away from the process of reflection and prayer that should be the practice of every leader. Self-mentoring or self-leadership is an area in which we can all develop. Taking time to reflect on pastoral situations and leadership issues, personal discipline and spiritual growth is healthy. I bet there's a website somewhere about that.

I know I go on about it, but keeping a journal is a really helpful tool, especially if you review it. You can learn a lot about the recurring themes that are impacting your ministry. It can also help you get a perspective on things. Perhaps the reason you are feeling down about something is because you haven't really faced it, truly faced it. Your journal will show you this is you're honest when you write and when you read it back.

Glass of wine anyone?

Will wonders never cease! Marks and Spencer are doing wine by the glass to save you carrying a bottle to the picnic.

A plastic wine glass with a foil top is just the thing you need to not look too desperate on that picnic i the park outing. I've no idea what it tastes like, so I might just have to try it.

Do you think a stemmed glass and an M&S carrier bag will make it acceptable on a bench than a bottle of Shiraz in a brown parer bag?

Stressed in Ministry?

Measuring stress in ministry is not an easy thing. The particular nature of ministry has its own internal stresses. So it was interesting to come across this simple self-assessment tool.

I did a quick self-test and was surprised by the result. Apparently I'm less stressed than I thought I was!

Another (spiritual!) reason for an iPad

Joking apart, it was interesting to read how one pastor uses an iPad in his devotional life.

How an iPad improved my devotional life

It's not a cure-all for any lack of discipline you experience, but it might just inspire you if you've bought an iPad and want to try the apps suggested. I use Youversion for my Bible on the iPad and iPhone. I also use iPastor and Prayerjournal.

The Creative Process

Thank you Tim for the link to this picture of the creative process!

Find it here.

The church. What's it all about?

I'm off to do a funeral in an hour, one of the privileges of ministry. It's never easy, and the older I get the more I feel as if there must be someone better equipped to do it than me! I thinks it's the ministry equivalent of golfing yips, the involuntary movement that creeps into your putting stroke and ruins your game. Just ask Berhard Langer!

Anyway, before I go I've been working on trying to get done on paper some thoughts about the church, its mission and purpose. Stuff about vision and structures and strategies. No easy task, I can assure you.

Currently I'm looking at a pile of 16 books and a dining table covered in post-it notes with ideas and thoughts scribbled on them. Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to translate a book from a language I don't know using only a dictionary. But I persevere.

My journey with the church and the mission of God began to take shape when I wrote a paper for my theology degree. It was my attempt to look at what Jesus had called the church to do and how we could realign ourselves with his commission. I wasn't very successful at answer the question I really wanted to ask, and I'd like to go back and rework that essay using some of what I've learned since.

So in a sense I guess that is what I'm trying to do. It's just going to take some time to get it out of my head and onto paper, electronic and wood based!

At least I'm putting my iPad to good use!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

We Can Do That

When I first took delivery of this book I read down the contents list and immediately put it to one side. I guess my first thought was that nothing in this book was going to connect with my church setting and more to the point I wasn't sure I shared any common ground with the authors about what church should be.

Then I came back to it and picked out a couple of chapters to read. Initially I found them irritating if I'm honest. Where are these guys coming form? What planet do they live on? And a few other thoughts crossed my mind.

I decided to read the introduction to see if that helped. It did. I began to see more clearly the heart and the perspective behind the book. I started reading it from the beginning and this time I found it more helpful.

There are still things that just don't connect at all, but that's not a problem. This isn't a prescription for fixing church. It's actually quite an interesting insight into how larger churches function. There's some useful stuff about keeping people informed, navigating change and leadership.

I'm still not comfortable with a number of things, but skipping over certain chapters that have no relevance to me at all, and picking up on some of the others has been very useful.

Walking the streets

For some time now I've had a map on the wall of my study at church showing the local area. I've outlined the perimeter with a yellow highlighter. My best guess is that it is about 8 miles or so around the edge. But my first task was always going to be to walk various sections as prayer walks. My goal is, eventually, to have walked every street, but that is going to take some time and an investment in a new pair or two of trainers!

So, I divided the area inside my yellow line into three sections and I've now walked all three. They take about 60-80 minutes each to complete, and need a little modifying. It may be better to make them four, especially because I've just realised I've missed out a bit!

It's certainly given me a slightly different perspective on the place.

Walking and praying isn't that easy. You tend to get rather repetitive. I usually listen to some worship as I go and allow that to shape my prayers, but I don't pray all the time.

I sometime wonder if just being out of the streets, encircling a place, is a bit like Joshua and Jericho. Hopefully spiritual walls will fall rather than garden walls! Perhaps I should invest in a vuvuzela before the football finishes and they're no longer available. Mind you, I'm more likely to get arrested for disturbing the peace if I start blowing one of those at 7:00am!

The Inner Conversation

Here is another helpful article by Gordon MacDonald about the need for time alone with God.

It is always helpful to be reminded of the necessity for such times of reflection and re-calibration of one's spiritual life, especially as a leader. We are often pulled in many directions at once and need to press the spiritual reset button.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Flowers

Just a flower in the garden of the place we stayed on holiday.

Was it only a week ago that we were staring at Stonehenge and wondering where to go next?

Sadly, because I don't particularly want to carry my camera around with when I'm walking, I don't take as many photographs as I could.

But then again, sometimes the best subjects are just outside your door! These plants were in the small garden outside the converted cart shed in which we stayed.

I quite like taking pictures of flowers and plants. This is just using the normal lens on the camera. The trick is narrowing the depth of field. But you knew that anyway!

Most new cameras have a flower setting that does it all for you. I remember the days when you had to change the shutter speed and balance the aperture to get the exposure right and the depth of field just where you wanted it. Then you waited for the film to be developed only to discover you hadn't got it quite right. Happy days!

I like the waxy texture on these buds.

Incremental Preaching

Here's an interesting article about preaching.

Incremental Preaching | LeadershipJournal.net

I actually read quite a lot about preaching and about how different churches approach building series and planning programmes. I still believe that there is a place for the sermon, but it has to be part of a wider, and maybe deeper, commitment to living transformed lives. I worry that we have we invested so much time and effort in teaching truth that we've lost our ability or even desire to implement that truth. We simply don't do application very well.

It isn't that we don't strive to find the application, it's just that we rate clever alliteration and sound doctrine above the actual life changing application of the message. We prefer intellectual stimulation over the uncomfortable challenge to live differently.

I know I don't always succeed to do this, but when I preach my intention is to inspire us to see the bigger picture, to grasp the amazing possibilities of what a life lived in the hands of God might look like, and then to pursue it with everything we have. I am, I will confess, less interested in teaching a group of people stuff they probably already know, and much more concerned with how we are being transformed into the image of Christ.

Anyway, I found this article interesting and helpful and challenging.

Standing Stones

These standing stones need no introduction, but in case you're not familiar with Britain's ancient past, this is Stonehenge.

There's much speculation about the origins and purpose of these stones, but at the very least they stand as a testimony to the ingenuity and perseverance on the folk that dragged them into position.

See the world!

The stone globe at Durlston Head, Swanage.

Reliving old holidays

When I was growing up, we spent several summer holidays with my Aunt and Uncle in Swanage, Dorset. Well, this last week we've been staying on a farm in the New Forest and not too far away from there.

So we decided, or at least I proposed and everyone else agreed, that we spent a day in and around Swanage and Corfe. we took the chain ferry from Sandbanks, another nostalgia moment, and drove into the old town. Nothing much had changed. Obviously some shops had come and gone, but many familiar things were still there. The British Legion Club across the street from where my Aunt and Uncle lived, the Mowlem restuarant where my Aunt once apologiesd to some people she didn't know because of the noise we were making. We were laughing about something or other and she simply turned around and said, "I'm every so sorry about the noise, it's my sister-in-law, she's omly visiting us." Needless to say, we laughed even louder.

Then we went up to see the Tilly Whim caves, a favourite place all those years ago! I remember getting to see around the lighthouse one day, and exploring the caves too. The caves were closed to the public in 1976.

Here's the lighthouse.

From there we drove over the Corfe Castle and looked around the model village and the ruined castle.

I can't remember what age I was, but I do remember spending the day at Corfe taking photographs on an old Kodak Instamatic. One of the pictures I took was of the model castle with the real one in the background. The trees have all grown now, so it's a little more difficult to take the same photograph, but you can still do it.

Perhaps if I search through all the old photo's I'll come across the original one I took over 40 years ago!

The model village is a wonderful work of art.

A Good Church Meeting?

I realise for some that the idea of a good church meeting is as much like an oxymoron as military intelligence or well-organised chaos. But I actually think we had a good church meeting last night.

Firstly it wasn't too long. An hour and a half. I've had shorter meetings, but this wasn't bad, and it didn't drag. Secondly, there were lots of interesting ideas and discussion. Okay, so we didn't all get the point of some of the things about which we were talking, but we all got to have our say and we discovered a few interesting tangents to explore too.

Thirdly, we prayed together. We prayed a lot for a church meeting. It's something I'm very keen that we do. Without it becoming a stop start thing, I'm always looking at the agenda and the things we discuss to see where and when it's most appropriate for us to stop and pray.

I think the layout helped too. Instead of rows of chairs facing forward, we had seats on three sides so we could all see each other. It seemed to create a different atmosphere, or at least support one.

There were other factors I'm sure, but these were the things that I noticed that I think contributed to us having a good meeting.

On the size of the pitch

I know this will be worrying all of you...

The pitch at West Ham's stadium is 100.5m by 64m given an area of 6,432 square metres. Twickenham is 105m by 68m, which doesn't sound much longer or wider, about 4 metres in either direction. But do the maths and the area is 7,140 square metres! That's over 700 square metres more playing area to cover!

Interestingly the Wembley pitch is 105m by 69m. In case you were wondering!

Well it's about time I actually got on with something useful.

Me and Three: Plan B

Just so you don't all worry, plan B worked!

Being a genius, (a machine at a service station on the M1 told me I was genius when I was about 10 as I recall and who am I to argue?) I swapped the SIM card from the Mi-Fi to the dongle I bought last year. The software associated with dongle allows text messaging and so I was able to set up a new online account.

Simple really, but still a bit of a nuisance.

By the way, if you have a Mac and are running Snow Leopard, don't use a dongle. Ally tried it and it broke her computer. did something to the kernel and she needed a new hard drive as well as fresh installation of the operating system. The newer dongles might have fixed that, but the Mi-Fi seems a safer option because it doesn't require any software or drivers.

Me and Three

I just love the wonderful logic of some organisations and companies. Take Three for example. I've just recently bought a Mi-Fi with a rolling contract at £5 for 1Gb of data. Not a bad deal as far as I could see and this way I get to connect any device to the internet rather than just a 'phone or portable computer or my favourite new gadget, the iPad!

Anyway, I thought it might be rather simple to add the new SIM to my existing Three account for the dongle I bought a year ago. Not so. I called customer services, got passed around a few times and eventually I lost the will to listen to more music and hung up. A job for another day I decided.
Then the letter arrived. It welcomed me to the network and introduced "My3" as "the best way to keep track of what you're spending."

You can access this facility over the internet, but you need a three 'phone to receive the text message that gives you the link to set up the account. I've been down this road before, last year in fact, but I hoped things had changed. But wait, something new, here's a "what to do if you don't have a Three 'phone". Wonderful I thought, just what I need. Things have changed!

Visit the webpage, enter your mobile number and we'll send you a link. Great. So I do just that. Wait a minute, it doesn't like my number, it's not a Three number. Well of course not, I don't have a Three 'phone! Okay, so I try the number from the new Mi-Fi. Works a treat. Number accepted, link being sent. Wait a minute, where exactly are you sending the link.

The penny drops.

The link will have been sent to the number I've just entered. The one for which I don't have a 'phone and can't receive text messages through because.... I don't have a Three 'phone. Arrgh!

The last section of the letter asks, "Any Question?" Yes, I've got questions!

I think it will have to be plan B, but that is a job for another day!

A Question of Treasure

Yesterday at church we explored what Jesus had to say about storing up treasure in heaven. We really didn't have the time to explore every angle and every thought. On reflection there are some things I wish I'd talked about and a few I wish I hadn't!

Part of the problem with such a passage is how do avoid the extremes of either over spiritualising it, or indeed under spiritualising it. In other words, how do you avoid separating what Jesus had to say about money from our real world experience of wealth and poverty, and turning it into just three or four spiritual lessons?

Well you certainly can't avoid his main point that you can't serve money, or wealth, and God. And secondly, that your heart will follow your treasure, what you value most. Now the first is surely not saying that wealth is incompatible with Christianity, but it does serve as a warning about being enslaved to wealth. The rich young ruler faced this problem and couldn't deal with it.

Perhaps the 21st century issue is more about our economic model than pure wealth, although I'm sure wealth remains an issue. Is it too simplistic an observation to suggest that the current economic crisis was fuelled by wealth driven ideals and that having broken down it will be the poor and lower paid members of society that will pay the price to fix it. Governments borrow money to bail out the banks and then cut benefits and public services to pay for it. The wealthy remain relatively untouched by the crisis but the disadvantaged and marginalised becoming more disadvantaged and more marginalised.

But back to the economic model. What does Jesus have to say about that?  Well, in the passage in Matthew 6 I think he has something to say. I think he would say, "Don't be a slave to the economic model that says you will always need more." Now I don't think that he is calling us to sell up and move into communes where we grow our own vegetables and live like a new Amish community of some sorts. But we all know that our current model is simply unsustainable. If we export that model to the developing world we know we face disaster. But what are we to do? We are driven by the need to consume more and more in order to sustain the economy that is built upon providing stuff for us to consume.

I don't think it is wise to generalise about what we all should do, but it would do us no harm to sit down and think about how we can shift our priorities away from storing up treasure on earth and what a new economic model would like in that context. Maybe then we would find the liberation Jesus offers us to serve him wholeheartedly without worrying about what it might cost us.

Global Day of Prayer

Sitting in West Ham's stadium my first thought was how small the pitch seemed compared to somewhere like Twickenham! However, we weren't there for a football game, we were there for a prayer meeting.

How exactly do you organise a prayer meeting on this kind of scale? How do you work out the programme, the scope of it. Well first of all you make it a three hour event, four if you count the warm up, which I thought was going to be rather too long, but in the end the time went quite quickly. Oddly, although I assume we got all our tickets at the same time, we were not sitting together. That didn't really matter.

The prayer topics were well planned and well led. It was particularly moving to hear the prayers for the persecuted church. Okay, so some times the people praying appeared to assume God was somewhat hard of hearing. But that's not really a problem. Just because I'm not wired up to be loud doesn't mean other people can't be. It would be a sad world and a somewhat boring church if we were all the same!

It surprises me that more people weren't there. There was quite a good crowd. I think we were in the west stand, but I've no idea how many people that would have been. It would certainly have been good to see more of the stadium filled.

Volunteers needed?

I was invited to attend a meeting of "third sector" organisations which happened today. The Third Sector refers to voluntary, community and faith organisations, in case you didn't know! We had a really helpful presentation of the new government's flagship policies and some discussion about how they might affect the VCFS organisations.

Of course the major factor will be in funding. Much of which will simply disappear as the collective belt of local government is tightened by central government. But that was going to happen whoever controlled the purse strings. What was interesting was the idea of a Big Society. Two principles should get us thinking.

First the idea of a return to philanthropy. If by that we mean people giving in order to care and support the disadvantaged, maybe all well and good. However, do we really want to turn the clock back to a time when the rich cared for the poor and society didn't? Perhaps I'm being unkind to the idea of a new philanthropy. I'm just not keen on leaving the poor and disadvantaged of our communities in the hands of the wealthy.

The second idea concerns volunteering. If people are going to get involved in their communities we will need to crack the issues and challenges surrounding volunteering. Do people readily volunteer in today's society? In church we rely heavily on volunteers to get everything done. But even in church we never seem to have enough of them. Mostly it seems to be a function of time. Not enough of it to do the things everyone wants to do. People are too tired or too stressed or working too many hours to be able to give much time to volunteer.

If we want to release people in order to be able to volunteer in the community, churches will have to look at what they expect of members and we will need a new imagination of volunteering as a society. I certainly don't believe compulsory volunteering is an answer. I'm not sure how we do this, but I'm also not convinced that the community at large is ready to take on the tasks and responsibilities required in the big new society envisioned by government. We have a lot of work to do.

Maybe churches can lead the way as we release our people to volunteer beyond the church. Instead of pressing more people into action to run more programmes in the church, maybe we should be reducing our programmes in order to free up time to serve our community where it needs it.

I don't know. But it's something we are all, church or non-church, are going to have to come terms with in this brave new world of smaller government.

Life with an iPad

I purposefully haven't gone on and on about having an iPad, partly because not everyone is interested and partly because I don't want to sound like a Mac-junkie drooling over the latest offering from Apple Corp. But I've had it two weeks and I'm settling down to using it.

The wow factor hasn't really worn off, and most of the people that have shown interest in it are equally wowed by how it does some things. In terms of mobile computing, I don't think it will be long before we see more of these kinds of devices. They are lighter than traditional portable computers, the screen is easier to read than most portable computers I've seen and functionally they do what you need them to do. Okay so currently the iPad doesn't multitask, but I sometimes wonder what we mean by multitask. Usually it's about having more than one document open at a time and flipping between them. Rarely does it mean having two programmes running at the same time doing two different tasks. Having said that, I know it's important and for some a let down that iPad doesn't.

So how have I been using my iPad? So far it's been about notes. I used to carry an A5 version of a Filofax system around with me. The iPad probably compares quite well on weight, but it wins hands down when it comes to carrying it. The Filofax was quite thick and therefore awkward to carry in your hand. The iPad is quick and easy to use to make all sorts of notes, and better still, organise those notes. I use Evernote for this and it works well. I can review my notes by tags or date.

Secondly, if I want to write I can do that with Pages, the Mac word processor that has an iPad version. It's neat, easy to use and you can share your documents via iWork.com. I'm awaiting delivery of iWorks '09 which is designed to work with the iWork cloud. I recently did a a sort discussion paper for the local minister's group. I did it on the iPad and used the iPad at the meeting. No paper! Could it be that the long promised days of reducing paper use have actually arrived? The text is so clear and so readable I didn't feel the need to print out my two sheets of A4, one of which would have had about three lines on it.

Which brings me to book reading on the iPad. Clear text, bright colours, easy navigation. Finally I feel able to read e-books without ruining my eyesight or needing to carry another single function device around with me. Okay so I'm not about to stop buying printed books any time soon, but I'm very impressed with the iPad's reader interface.

My personal let down? Well that would have to Keynote. Looks very easy to use, but it is let down when you use a projector. For some reason, I'm sure someone will say a good reason, once you begin a presentation on an external monitor, the images disappear from the iPad. Why? I don't know,but it seems obvious to me that anyone doing a presentation needs to see what they are presenting! Maybe there's a setting I've missed, but given that most Mac software and hardware seems to do exactly what you expect it to do without fiddling about with settings and control panels, I think this is a major flaw in Keynote.

I think that by the time we reach the third or fourth generation of iPad and iPad derivatives, we may well see the end of the either the desktop computer or the traditional portable laptop. But while we wait for that day I'm really pleased I've invested in the iPad, especially when i walk out the door without a briefcase weighed down with a MacBook, a diary and a good book to read. Lightweight and paperless. Do you think there's at least an advertising jingle in that?

Are we Building on the wrong foundation?

It was my turn, well actually I volunteered, to share something at the minister's fellowship. Not wanting to be controversial, I thought I'd raise a question about the church. Here's what I talked about.

To get us thinking I want to make a suggestion about the church. First I ought to let you know that I believe that it's time for the church to change. I'm not altogether sure what that change will ultimately look like but I know that somehow we need to find a way to realign the church with the mission of God. It probably requires fresh vision and a new imagination.

It will require us to move from programmes as the solution to things and towards lifestyle choices and patterns as the alternatives. It is, at its heart the debate about what it means to be missional.

One quote that constantly comes to mind is something Rowan Williams said: It is not that the Church of God has a mission, it is that the God of mission has a church.

Within that discussion, the discussion about programmes, core values, and priorities that spring from a changing perspective of the nature and purpose of the church, I'd like to introduce a question.

My proposition today focuses on something Paul wrote to the church in Ephesus.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord

Eph. 2:19-21

One simple question. Have we built the church on the wrong foundation?

What is not at issue here is the cornerstone role of Jesus. This remains the bedrock on which we build. The issue is the first layer of bricks! Paul speaks of the apostles and prophets. Our model tends towards the pastors and teachers. Where does that lead us? Maintenance and isolation. Apostles and prophets push at the boundaries, pastors and teachers preserve and purify. This isn't about devaluing the role of pastors and teachers, or indeed to ignore the contribution that evangelists make. The question is simply one of the basis on which we build church.

My proposition is that the progress of the early church came through the apostolic ministry and not the pastoral ministry. We could, and should discuss the nature of apostolic ministry in today's church. But if we do, let's not modify it to fit our theology or more importantly perhaps our lack of experience of some aspects of a New Testament perspective of an apostle. In other words, let's not turn and apostle of the first century into a CEO of the twenty first century!

I guess my fundamental question has more to do with how we recapture the pioneering, church planting, life transforming, gospel culture that seems to have been lost to the church as a result of focussing upon our teaching and internal care as the foundations for our fellowship and not the grand mission of God.

And that's where I stopped and we talked. I'm not sure we came up with any answers, but there is an underlying sense amongst all of us that there is something fundamentally broken about the way we do church. It simply isn't working as it should for the glory of God and the purposes of the kingdom.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Artwork for Sunday

This is our latest piece of artwork for church. I like having things like this around. It's original and useful and interactive.

The white space has now been written on and some room left for more comments. During Sunday morning's celebration we asked the congregation what they thought was counter-cultural today. Hopefully we might get a few more added as we work our way through the Sermon on the Mount between now and the summer.

The artwork in the picture is 1200mm tall (4ft) and 1800mm wide (6ft). Next time we might go for a 20ft by 8ft piece! This one is hanging on the front of the pulpit.

Thanks to Matthew and Ally for all their hard work putting this together.

The Beatitudes

The Beatitudes from richardpool on Vimeo.

When celebrity is good

If I'm really honest I don't generally give much thought to celebrities. Being famous for being famous or being famous for knowing someone famous never seems to be much of a career. True there are those who achieve celebrity stays because of gifts and skills they've developed and used to their advantage.

But I'm watching a bit of Soccer Aid, and I must say that here is a good use of celebrity status.

Perhaps a social scientist would be able to tell us if Band Aid was a turning point. Was this when celebrities came of age and realised they could do something that would make a difference in the world?

Who knows, but the 70,000 in the crowd are having a good time, the two teams are having fun and money is being raised. All power to the collective elbow of the celebrities who are taking part and to the footballers involved.

Or should that be collective foot!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Oil, but at what cost?

There are many reasons why I've been following the story of the oil disaster impacting the Gulf Coast in America. As someone who has a background in environmental science I'm interested in the processes involved in stopping the leak, and sorting out the damage. It amazes me that it has taken so long. I understand it's a complex business at the kind of depths that are involved, but where was the contingency plan? Why do the oil companies between them appear not to have a strategy for this kind of thing?

Then there is the clean-up. We don't seem to have made much progress at all in dealing with oil spills. The technology looks little different to the things that were in use in the 70's. Different chemicals I guess, but I haven't seen much that suggests innovation.

But there is also the need to ask questions about our continually increasing dependence upon oil, a dependence that drives us to more risky attempts to extract the oil form the earth. It seems to me that we must ask questions about a development model that puts our environment as so much risk.

Which do you think is the greater eyesore, offshore wind farms or large areas of coastline covered in crude oil and uninhabitable to wildlife?

The secret power of time

Animated talks

Came across some really interesting animated talks about motivation, use of time etc. Here's the one on motivation.

Praying for Cumbria

It's always a time of questioning things when you wake up to the news of events like those that occurred yesterday in Cumbria. For me it's made all the more vivid by knowing the area. I love the Lake District, and I know the places mentioned in the news reports. Many times I driven a similar route from Whitehaven to Boot through the peaceful countryside of West Cumbria.

I find it hard to imagine this part of the Lakes becoming the scene of such a terrible day's event. But then I guess that was also true for anyone who knew Hungerford all those years ago.

So I'll pray for the families and the people of Cumbria today. I'll pray for the survivors and the grieving, I'll pray for the people with questions that I suspect will never be properly answered. I'll pray too for those who somewhere will carry a sense of responsibility as they wonder if they were the one who applied the final straw.

May they all know God's grace, experience his tenderness and find a place of comfort in his mercy. If Jesus wept over Jerusalem, I believe he still weeps over tragedies like this.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Reflecting on funerals

I had the privilege of leading a funeral today. Not an unusual thing for a Baptist minister to do. It certainly doesn't get any easier with the passing of time. Maybe it's something to with not wanting to get things wrong, maybe it's to do with a sense of one's own inadequacies, I don't know.

Today was an interesting mix of many things. We had Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and another piece of music drawn from the 50's. We sang There is a Green Hill, and Make me a channel of your peace. We read and prayed and as usual I looked out across the faces and wondered just how much sense we were actually making of death and grief and loss. not a lot I suspect.

Everyone is always so appreciative of what you do at a funeral, at least to your face! But do they ever get what you're trying to say. I wonder. I don't blame them. If I blame anyone, I blame myself for failing to make it clear.

But it must be hard when you've lost a friend or a family member and you have no faith context in which to try to make sense of it all. The words that are so familiar to churched people must sound very strange to the unchurched ear.

I guess in the end, doing funerals reminds me of the significance and importance of the mission into which we have been commissioned. For if we don't help, someone else will, and they might hear a different story. A story that doesn't carry the hope that our story carries.

It reminds me too that sometimes we get so caught up in the petty things of church life that we forget what's really important.

Letting go of personal agendas

Mark 8:43ff finds Jesus challenging his hearers to deny self, take up a cross and follow. We can all generalise about what this means, but what about at a personal level? What does it mean to you,what does it mean to me to deny ourselves, take up our crosses and follow Jesus?

I know there are many things for which I've been praying over the years. Things that I think will improve my ability to serve God. But they are my ideas not God's. Perhaps the journey to discovering how to deny oneself and carry a cross comes through the things God does not give us as much as it might through the things he does give us.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Songs of Fellowship index

I've tidied up the Excel version of the Song of Fellowship index that I made for myself. I've corrected a numbering error, removed a few anomalies and added book numbers for those who use the individual music copies.

If it's of help you can find it here.

I suppose I should point out that I've done this to make my life easier when producing the song list for Sundays. Any errors are my fault!!

I noticed that the link I put in the comments to this post has stopped working. Very frustrating! If anyone has been trying to get to the file, I'm sorry but I rarely check these things, I just assume that the link continues to work. Oh well, here's a new link: 

SoF Excel Index

I've tested the link and it was working as of today, 15th Dec 2017.

I still haven't got hold of an index for Volume 6 (I don't have a need to buy the books anymore). If I dogged hold of it I will add it to the database. 

The inclusive Jesus

I'm currently reading Mark's gospel for my devotional reading. It reminded me of my probationer minister days. On one occasion I was involved in a discussion about the encounter between Jesus and the Syro-phonecian woman. There was some debate about what Jesus was doing and whether the story shows him changing his mind.

Having studied Mark's Gospel in some detail the previous year, I suggested an alternative view that he was acting out a parable. I wasn't prepared to concede that Jesus didn't know what he was doing, it seemed more than likely that he knew exactly what he was doing.

At this point in the gospel Jesus seems to begin to express his heart to be inclusive as he reaches out across cultural and religious boundaries. On Sunday we looked at the story of Cornelius and how God pushed the early church to break down barriers and cross boundaries in order to reach the people missing from the family of God.

Everywhere I look in the story of the Bible I see God reaching out, crossing boundaries, entering cultures in order to win the lost. So how come we're not so good at it? Have we become so insecure that we feel that we will be compromised if we let this group or that type into the church?

The co-housing folk seem to interview prospective members quite extensively before letting them join. Do we do the same? Do we make it difficult for the people Jesus misses most to find their way in because we are less willing to cross a few boundaries?

How can we follow Jesus across the fence?

Just amazing

I've spent the day working with my iPad and I must say it is quite amazing. I did wonder if Steve Jobs was over doing it in the keynote, and I did wonder if the advert wasn't a bit to other-worldly, but I have to say I can find little wrong with it.

Is it a laptop? No, it isn't. Will it do the job of a laptop? Yes it will. When the apps become available I can imagine that I will take this into meetings and seminars to make notes, draw mindmaps and all sorts of things.

So go have a look when the queues die down in a couple of days. I think you will be impressed even if you're not a Mac groupie!

On the road with the iPad

Okay, so I thought it might be quite neat to be the first person to sit in my local Costa Coffee with an iPad, but there is more to my being here than that!

The idea behind buying an iPad was to look for something lighter and easier to carry around than my MacBook. It is certainly that!

So far the set up has been typically straightforward and the interface and keyboard easy to use. It's a bit frustrating having to choose a different keyboard for some of the everyday symbols, but you get used to it pretty quickly. Perhaps having an iPhone makes it easier to adapt.

The keyboard is nice and big, which makes a change from the iPhone!

Once the Pages app is released I think it will be even more versatile. But for now I'll have to make do with notes if I want to write. Although there's probably a writing app out there already.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Living in community

Sadly a post I wrote earlier today from my iPhone seems not to have made it to the server. Maybe it's lost in cyberspace, who knows!

Anyway, I saw a really interesting piece on BBC Breakfast this morning about a "co-housing" project. A group of people have decided to live in a community together. Not a commune, but a community. They have their own homes but share social outdoor space, eat together regularly, share chores and even baby-sit for each other! A utopian experiment bound to go wrong, or a group of people who exploring the fundamental human need for community?

As a church we are a faith community. We're supposed to be leading the way in demonstrating to the world how you can live as part of a larger connected group of diverse people. Unlike the co-housing project, we don't get to choose our community members based upon compatibility. But what is interesting is that this experiment in community living belies a deeper human need as social beings.

Building community takes time and effort. It is costly. Just as a coalition government requires adjustments on both sides, building community will always involve compromise. It seems to me that shared values, core beliefs, are the things that bind a community together. The ability to embrace diversity it was enables it to flourish.

I guess the bottom-line question is are we willing enough and brave enough to build the kind of community that reflects our faith?

What to do while you wait for vision

Came across this quote in an email newletter:


If you can't see the vision, work God's mission until you get His vision.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Landscape or landfill?

I got one of those automatic book recommendations that come through various online book vendors. This time it was about a book about capturing our lives in a digital technology age. One comment struck me among the reviews. The reviewer remarked that he wasn't sure if capturing all this detail was the landscape or the landfill of our lives.

Now I'm sure there is at the very least an illustration in there and more than likely a sermon title.

There must be ideas in there about how we can choose to landscape our lives or simply clutter them up with the rubbish that accumulates, the landfill approach. Maybe it's more to do with looking to simplify. Whatever you make of it, something about the contract between landfill and landscape resonates somewhere, I'm just not sure where.

I'll mull it over and see what comes to the surface. Meanwhile, is your life more landfill than landscape? A place where you store old junk, or a place where you are planting new tress and flowers?

iPastor App fix

iPastor has been updated with a fix to the "review by strategy" problem. Just in case you were waiting for me to tell you!!

Mark 6:56

And wherever he went—into villages, towns or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.

Mark 6:56

Here is a really simple question but of potentially profound importance, at least to me: How do we touch Jesus in the 21st century? It's not the best framed question, but it will have to do. The point is this. "all who touched him were healed". So how do we get to touch him?

I don't have a slick answer, just the question.

Guess who's coming to dinner

Have you ever done that thing were you try to work out the guests at a dinner when you can choose anyone from history? Even if you narrow it down, it's not that easy.

If I were to limit my choices to Biblical character and exclude Jesus, for no other reason than it's a given that you'd want him there, then who might I choose? It could end up as quite a long list.

I'd probably start with Abraham. I'd be fascinated to hear his story about how it felt to be called to make that epic journey. How he felt when things stalled and promises were a long time coming. Elijah would be on my list too. I'd ask him about how he dealt with the low points and how it felt when God spoke to him in the whisper and challenged him with that question, "What are doing here?" That's a question that follows me around a lot! I often sit down and talk with God about that.

I might invite the wife of Jeroboam. I wonder how the prophecy about the death of her son affected her. Did she make any changes in response to that or did she just carry on?  Human beings are strange creatures. They often say that they'll believe if only God would make things clear, but when he does, they just as easily turn their backs and pretend it isn't so.

Isaiah would definitely be on my list. To have had that kind of vision, showed that kind of commitment and courage and then discover that your ministry is all about decline in the nation, that must have been a hard road to travel. Daniel too would be an interesting guest. Remaining faithful throughout that long period of captivity, finding a way to serve God and serve the king with integrity. Many lessons to learn from Daniel.

From the New Testament there would be Peter. I just want to know how it felt to walk on water. Barnabas could share almost anything and make it encouraging. Synteche and Euodia. Did they ever make up?

The list could go on, but the dining table is already crowded.

The thing is, would I be disappointed with my guests or would I disappoint them? Heroes often turn out to be less impressive in person. They have their flaws. Perhaps Elijah wouldn't have any answers for  how to deal with my low days, maybe Isaiah would own up to carrying a crushing sense of failure even though he knew what God had called him to do. Maybe even Barnabas would hold a few grudges!

Who knows? In the end I'd hope that our dinner conversations would be like any other dinner. Lots of laughter, lots of stories. Lots of discovering that we are all human and that God still loves us, wants the best for us, calls out the best in us, and rejoices over us.

Time to face the day. I wonder what God has in store for me today?

Facebook privacy crisis

Here's a blog post about why we should consider leaving Facebook.

As many users will know, Facebook has changed much of its terms and conditions, most notably in the area of privacy. I was quite amazed to see how much. It would seem that the only things that you can now keep private are you birthday and contact information.

This may or may not be a problem to you if you use Facebook. On the other hand it does raise a question about who sees your data and how do you decide who can see it rather than letting the company decide that for you.

At the moment I don't particularly feel under threat, but given how many young people use Facebook, maybe we should be a little more vigilant about the erosion of privacy in social networking.

It's finally coming

Ah the Apple iPad. Very soon to be available in the UK and anticipated with some excitement in the Pool household by at least two of us. Three if it dispenses cat biscuits!

I have pre-ordered mine and I'm looking forward to finding out if it's as good and useful as I hope it will be. I know some people can't get their heads around what Apple have done with the iPad. some people think it's just a big iPod Touch or iPhone.

I understand it to be far more than this. It won't, I suspect, replace my MacBook. Too many things i like to use on the MacBook won't be available on the iPad. But I don't think it will be long before some pretty impressive software starts to appear for it.

So roll on the 28th May and don't expect me to be anything but excited for the next week!

National Day of Prayer

Today is a national day of prayer for the police service.

Just in case you didn't know.

Can we make the jump?

Currently I'm working my way steadily through the Gospel of Mark. Mark has a sense of immediacy about it, so reading it slowly doesn't quite fit the pace of the writing style, but it's not a problem. And pacey doesn't mean rushed, Mark does some very clever things in the text to allow time to pass.

The problem is that we don't always spot these little devices and maybe we miss the bigger picture and the connections that exist. Take today's reading, the feeding of the five thousand. We get so focused on the actual miracle and all of its implications that we forget where it starts.

The apostles gathered round Jesus and reported to him all they had done and taught.

The miracle that is about to unfold comes on the back of their recent experience of ministry. They had just come back from preaching, driving out demons and seeing people healed. But they couldn't make the connection between that experience and the current experience. None of the disciples asks Jesus to help them join up the dots and see how they could feed all these people based upon what they've just seen happening elsewhere. They just seem to revert to type.

They couldn't make the jump. Jesus had to walk them through this new situation and many more besides.  We're no different. We struggle to apply faith lessons learnt in one situation to another. Jesus has to walk us through each new situation.

But the challenge still remains. Are we able and willing to make the jump in order to move forward in our daily discipleship. As I experience God's faithfulness in one area of my life, am I able to apply that elsewhere without having to start over.

Still in a fix

Well I thought we might have seen the end of the story with respect to the election by the end of the day yesterday, but Gordon Brown had other plans! His resignation seems to have thrown a spanner in the works and given Nick Clegg a headache to boot.

I do think it is high time the media began to educate listeners, readers and viewers about the constitution and how we actually go about getting a Prime Minister. All this talk about "unelected PM's" is a distraction  from the core issues that parliament might just need to become a place where democratic discussions lead to better policies.

Is there really an app for that?

Not sure what to make of this, but it is quite amazing what you can do with an iPhone!

Counter-culture

I'm working on the next series for our Sunday Celebrations. It's based around the Sermon on the Mount and hopefully will explore the counter-cultural nature of the kingdom. That;s the idea anyway!

As I reflect and pray and gather idea and resources, I came across this audi only of an Early Mars Hill talk. Very interesting.

Ironing man: Maybe better than the original?

Thanks to Tim via Facebook for the link to this:

Early election reflections

Well, after many long weeks and even months of media frenzy, we appear to be headed straight into a balanced, or hung parliament. No surprise there then. In fact, watching the election coverage the only surprising thing seems to have been that this time they actually predicted the correct outcome. That and a few odd gains and losses that were not on the infamous hit lists. When the dust settles, it will be interesting to read the analysis of what has happened and why.

It makes you wonder what the politicians are now going to do if they actually have to win the argument in order to get a policy through parliament. It's bee a while since the party of government has had to work with a small majority let alone no majority at all. Might we see a little more thoughtful debate on key issues? The cynic in me suspects that deals will be done behind closed doors in order to get things through. The optimist in me hopes for a better outcome.

I do worry about the appearance of "The Christian Party". I'm all for Christian involvement in politics, but I'm far from convinced that all Christians should agree to the extent that we can form a party. And the large ad that appeared in the main street where I live read more like a piece of nationalistic propaganda that something I'd call Christian.

The thing that did surprise me was the turn out in some places. Seeing people queue around the block to vote is an astonishing sight in the UK. Of course the ranting and shouting by those who found themselves unable to vote was not so unusual. Perhaps the system has simply adapted to the so-called voter apathy of past elections. What we would we do if everyone turned out to vote!

If history repeats itself, then I guess we can look forward to doing this all over again in the Autumn.