Tool Chest Project (update 3)

Had a little time to myself today so I did a little work on the tool chest. I had to buy the hinges for the top and I found some nice brass case latches that I might put to good use. 

The handles are from the pack I bought when I made the tool box last year. They came in a pack of 10, so with five used here, one on the tool box and another on a case I made, I've almost used them up. 

What's the betting I do something that needs four next time!

Anyway, it's looking like it's nearly finished. Not sure what I'm going to store in it. I might put a tray in the top drawer for my chisels. There are about 14 of them as I recall. Some mine, some inherited from my father and grandfather.

I'm pretty sure I'll fill it up!

Acts 2 Church

You may have heard the phrase "Building an Acts 2 church" from time to time, especially if you have been around any Willow Creek events, but I'm not sure I've ever heard a succinct definition of what it means. I'm sure I've heard lots about it, but over the years it gets muddied by lots of other things.

So I was really pleased to hear Bill Hybels do a four phrase synopsis of what and Acts 2 church is all about. Here's a precis of what he said.

An Acts 2 church is about:

• Helping people far from God find faith
  
• Growing believers into fully devoted followers of Jesus
  
• Developing a Biblical community
  
• Carrying a servant towel
  

So there you go. I think it's a really helpful description of the purpose of church, it might even make it to my wall!

Pdf to Word anyone?

One of the things I've always liked about the Mac is the ease with which you can create a pdf version of a file. Simply choose the pdf option from the print menu and the operating system does the rest for you.

I like pdf's because everyone can read them and see them exactly as you send them. No need to make sure you have a compatible version of a programme. This is great for me because I use programmes like Omnioutliner and Scrivener, and when I want to send the data I can simply convert it to a pdf.

The only problem is what do you do when you get a pdf that you want to edit? Well, if you are a Windows users, then you might find this application worth a look.

You can find the download here, and there's a free trial version.

As a Mac user I haven't tried it but thought I'd point it out in case anyone I send a pdf to wants to be able to edit the content!

I've yet to find a pdf editor for the Mac that I really like, but that may be because I haven't looked particularly hard.

Tool Chest Project (update 2)

 Final update from the workshop! 

I made my runners, rounded over the front ends using a sanding drum attachment for my power drill. I had the drill in the stand and used a small platform to provide a flat, stable surface from which to work. The only problem was that the sanding drum sheet kept riding up off the rubber cylinder. 

I can't see how to fix this, so it's a bit disappointing, but I managed to get the job done. Perhaps a big washer that overhangs the rubber drum would do the trick. It's the first time I've used it and I did wonder id this might happen.

I pre-drilled pilot holes for the panel pins that hold the runners in place. They are also glued in!

After that I dry assembled the whole think and fitted the drawers. There was, and still is, a little bit of adjusting that needs doing. But everything fitted together.

So now it's all glued up and the drawers are eased and have their cleats fitted ready for the locking mechanism to be made.

So that's the end of today, and I'll get back to it in a couple of weeks time. Next week I'm off to learn more about wood-turning, so I dare say there will be more woody blogs after that.

Tool Chest Project (update)

The project is coming along nicely. I'm just taking a break for lunch and thought I'd post a few pictures of the progress so far. 

The first thing I did this morning was to set up the router to make the rebates for the half-lap butt joints for the two trays that form the lid of the tool chest.

I was a bit overcautious and they are not a close a fit as I'd like, but they're okay. Once I'd glued them and clamped them I left them to dry for a while before adding the ply skin. I decided to use some 6mm ply in a contrasting colour rather than make some 12mm matching ply tops. I just thought it might give a nice effect. We shall see later when it gets the finishing treatment.

Next I reset the router to run the grooves in the sides of the drawers.

This took a little time to figure out the best way to do this for maximum stability. In the end I put the bottom of the drawer against the fence and marked on the table the start and stop points so that I didn't break through the front face of the drawers. Running the groove from the back is easy because it goes all the way. You just have to make sure you stop at the pencil mark. From the front you need to lower the drawer onto the cutting bit. I usually start this slightly away from the mark and the pull the draw back to the pencil line, then push forward.

After that I put a flush cutting bit in the router and trimmed up the top trays before putting the router away and getting the circular saw out!

I needed to make some runners for the drawers and found a piece of 9mm ply (remember this project is all about using up the ply I had left over from the blanket box project) from which I cut the runners using my sawboard.

Here's the "mock assembly" so-to-speak. You can see how the top trays will fold out and the drawers are not yet on runners.

The runner material will also provide the cleats for the drawer ends as part of the locking system.

The next challenge is setting out the runners so that all the drawers run smoothly and accurately in and out of the frame. I need some 1mm shims to help with this and so I'll have to see what I've got or go and get something from the shop.

Eugene Peterson

I've been listening to an interview with Eugene Peterson from 2007 where he's talking about books and literature and reading and things. He made a really interesting observation about the purpose of church (in the sense of the gathered community I would say).

He said that we gather this group of people together on a Sunday to:

incrementally build a true, whole picture of God.

And that the role of the pastor was to:

keep the perceptions clean about God.

Clean as in clear and pure.

These two together are quite a challenge when you start to think about them. Perhaps one can almost hear an echo of Paul's word that he taught the whole counsel of God not just a part of it. 

I wonder whether some of problems we have with God arise because we don't see the whole we only see the part. There's that great scene in Bruce Almighty when he decides that the easiest way to deal with all the prayers is simply to say yes to them all. I believe it's one of the deleted scenes where God shows Bruce that by doing so he robs people of the experiences that shape them. There's a boy, as I recall, who asks to be able to climb the rope in the gym, and he does because Bruce says yes to his prayer. But his "success" creates a mean-spirited person rather than the thoughtful and reflective poet that he could have been.

So here's to the gathered church as it seeks by faith to reveal the whole and true picture of the God we know and more importantly who knows us.

From the BBC

Great quote on the newsfeed for the BBc website:

Robinson takes home Orange Prize

Well of course they do, they make the drink anyway!

It made me chuckle.

Measuring success

Listening to an interview with Bill Hybels he shared these two questions when it comes to measuring ministry success:

Did I hear God's calling for my life accurately?

Am I carrying it out faithfully?

When we're tempted to measure our personal success in ministry by comparing ourselves with other ministries, or by numbers, then maybe these two questions have real value.

And while typing he said this:

If I'm doing the work of God at a pace that destroys the work of God in me, then I'm in trouble.

Pentecost, The Spirit and Mission

I was at our housegroup last night and we were reflecting on the Pentecost theme from Sunday. The reading was part of Peter's sermon, but we read right to the end of the chapter. 

As we read and talked I began to reflect on some of the things I've been reading lately and the overall pattern of my thinking about church for the last 20 or more years. As I looked at the whole story of that day recorded in Acts 2 a questioned formed in  my mind: When we ask God to pour out his Spirit upon us, what do we expect? Moreover, where is the focus of that outpouring? 

I think most often the focus is on the church as the inside world of the believing community. We want God to pour out his Spirit to enrich our worship, improve our discipleship and increase our experience of him. But that's not the point of the outpouring on Acts 2.

In Acts 2 the impact of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit was mission. The church as it was in the meeting room found itself empowered and thrust out into the community. 3,000 people were added to the church, not by being drawn to the room, but by their encounter with the gospel.

I just wonder if the biggest challenge is to set ourselves free from the selfishness of prioritising our needs over and above the mission of God. 

The change in mindset that this requires might be a quantum leap for many of us as we move away from developing programme after programme of outreach towards becoming a truly missional community. It's a change that will take great courage and faith, but a change that I feel more and more convinced will need to happen if we are going to become the partners of God in his great mission-movement to the world he loves so dearly that even the life of his Son was a price worth paying to redeem it.

Models for Ministry

My post the other day about an ideal working week got me thinking about how we measure what we do in ministry. Some people will advocate really tight measuring to check effectiveness, others might take a more eternal view, arguing that you can never really measure the true effectiveness of ministry this side of heaven. 

But that's not the kind of measuring I'm thinking about today. It's more about the appropriate use of time and the concentration of effort. With all the tasks that present themselves for us to do, how do we determine which ones to give what amount of time to doing? 

This got me thinking about Acts 6 of course. The apostles have a very clear view of their role and their primary responsibility. But 21st church is not like the early church! That made me think about Ephesians 4 and got me wondering if here was a framework for ministry just as much as a description of the ministries God gives to the church.  

Now I know that the passage clearly states that God gives some not all to be apostles, prophets etc. And I believe that we need all the offices fulfilled if we're going to be effective as the church and  active as partners with God in his mission. But, I just wonder if these roles at least provide us with a model for ministry, a rough guide, where we are the primary leader and sometimes the only leader. 

If you do not yet have a team around you that provides these key leadership functions, then you can at least look at the structure of your diary and the pattern of your ministry and check it against the list. In other words, if you carry the weight of leadership in your local congregation, then simply ask yourself how you are fulfilling the role of apostle, prophet, pastor, teacher and evangelist.

Perhaps, as you criticise yourself for not doing enough visiting, you might just want to ask yourself if the visiting you are doing is in proportion to the evangelism you are doing or the teaching. Do you get the idea?

I certainly do not believe in the one person ministry as an effective model, but over the years I've found myself in just that kind of situation form time to time. Maybe asking these kinds of questions would have helped me get a better perspective on what I was doing.

Glorious June

Welcome to June!

The wonderful weekend weather has continued into today and my thermometer says it is 24 deg. C in the shade.

I feel an iced tea and lemonade has my name on it somewhere. Garden chair here I come!

PS To read of course, in the light of my previous post!! (actually I had my prayer-time out there earlier this morning does that count as work?)

The Working Week

Over the years I've been asked, quizzed, interrogated and grilled about what I actually do week by week. The simple answer is that it's actually rather difficult to quantify, and the day the put a time-sheet against ministry will probably be the day I stop doing it! Ministry is hard to measure in a way that truly reflects the nature of a call and an office.

On the other hand, it's always helpful to review what you think you do and what you think you ought to be doing. Most of the ministers I know work really hard but think they are lazy at some point in their lives. And it doesn't help when you have to listen over and over again to the comment that you only work one day a week! I think it has a lot to do with the mix of personal expectations and the expectation of the church you're serving. That and the feeling that you're never quite "there" when it comes to doing the job.

Years ago I did a survey for the national statistics people. In the process, and it was early on in my ministry, I discovered that I was working incredibly long hours. More than even I thought was healthy. So I sat down and wrote out what my ideal week might look like. Somethings have changed along the way, but it still looks pretty similar even today.

The problem is trying to put hours against things like Sunday, or pastoral care. But in order to keep myself sane and not present myself as just another overworked workaholic who can't stop themselves and whose time disappears from view almost as quickly as it comes into view, I've written out my list again.

For what is worth, here's my outline of what might happen in a typical or ideal week. The kind of week that rarely ever happens in my universe.

For want of a better term, I'm going to list "tasks" and the hours  a week I'd like to devote to them. Some are not really tasks, but you'll get the idea.

• Prayer & reflection: 2 hours a day
  
• Reading: 1 hour a day
  
• Study time: An afternoon a week = 4 hours (I remember John Stott talking about an afternoon a week, a day a month a week a year or something like that)
  
• Preparation time (for Sundays): 12 hours a week ( this is really hard to quantify because I don't sit down at 9:00am and work until it's finished, but it's not a bad guess)
  
• Administration (we all have to do it no matter how much we hate it!): 3 hours a week (I can always dream!)
  
• Sundays: 8 hours (we only have a morning celebration, so it's not as long a day as it has been in the past)
  
• Pastoral Care: 8 hours a week (how do you measure this? I still don't know, but it seems reasonable to give it a day so-to-speak.)
  
• Leadership & meetings: 4 hours a week (if only!)
  

So that all comes to 60 hours and then there's community stuff and spending time with people who are far from God. And I guess there are degrees of overlap. I think that if you totalled it all up in detail it could come to as much as 70 hours, but then again it might come to a lot less depending on how you count it. As I said it's not easy to quantify.

Some of you might be thinking only 8 hours for pastoral care. Just remember it's a guide, a guess if you like. You might also want to know how much of the two hours prayer is personal and does that count.

The thing is, ministry is not a job you do, it's a life you live and you just can't stuff things in a box and say that's my private world, that's my ministry world. I have quiet weeks when I rejoice in being able to kick back and relax, knowing full well that the 'phone can ring at any time and will be thrown headfirst into a crisis or something that could demand five minutes of my time or five hours.

And of course this is not like an office job, it's not as if you're doing 60 or 70 hours without a break and chained to a desk. It's very different.

Having written the list out quite quickly, I'm wondering now if I've missed something. for example where does writing my blog fit?? Better stop now and get back to some real work.

Mind you the weather is looking good and I have got a couple of books I'd like to get stuck into!

The Present Future

Although an examination of the North American church, this book has much to say to UK church culture too. I've managed a first pass through the book in three sittings, which I reckon to be about 4.5 hours. 

The style of the book makes for fairly easy reading but the content is far from easy to read. I found myself recognising many aspects of church culture with which I've always struggled and whispering a quiet "that's right" like a punctuation mark throughout the text.

For some time now I've been convinced that the church must change and move away from it's inward looking, club mentality towards a more outwardly focused mission orientation. The tough questions (six of them) that McNeal asks in the context of six new realities he identifies are a helpful but far from comfortable framework for this shift.

Written in 2003, this book reads as relevant today as it was then, if not more so.

I'm looking forward to reading the second book, Missional Renaissance to see where that takes me.

What's wrong with the church?

Amazon delivered another brace of books this morning via Royal Mail. The two books in question are The Present Future and Missional Renaissance by Reggie McNeal. I've got a presentation to do and I thought these two books might help crystallise my thinking a little.

I like the following as a working definition of the problem we face as the church:

Church leaders seem unable to grasp this simple implication of the new world–people outside the church think church is for church people, not for them.

In other words, whatever it is that people are looking for, they are not looking for it from the institutionalised church. So, all the energy we pour into making the institution of church more attractive might just be an enormous waste of energy, and a resource better spent elsewhere. People don't necessarily want to be part of  church, but they might be interested in a movement.

Fortunately, although Jesus did say he would build his church, I think he had something more in mind than a self-perpetuating institution and more like a mass movement of people experiencing the transforming power of the gospel.

That's my guess.

Defining Church

Something Reggie McNeal wrote in the forward to Neil Cole's Organic Leadership struck me as a helpful definition of the church:

engaged in the world as partners with God in his redemptive mission that targets all of human experience, not just church life.

Worth pondering I thought.

Toolbox project

Being a Bank Holiday, and being a rather nice day too, I decided to get the woodworking bench out and do a bit of work on a toolbox project I started last summer.

I got the idea from a magazine article. Th original was made from oak, but I've been using leftover 12mm hardwood ply for my version. It was really just to see if I could make something a little more complicated than the things I'd already made.

Anyway, I set to work today to add the rear top rail and the 6mm ply bases to the tool tray and the toolbox. Having done that little job using my homemade router table to run the rebates for the panels, I turned my attention to the 5 drawers I need to make. 

Running the groove for the ply bottom was no problem, having cut all the section to length for the fronts and sides, I ran them through the router. The backs would be cut to size after making a rebate for them which needs to be set in from the end of the sides. This is because of a clever little locking system that will make sense when I post some pictures of a finished drawer.

To create these rebates I needed a mitre gauge and a simple, repeatable set-up to get them all in the same place for each side so that the drawers are nice and square. This is what I came up with for the job.

The mitre fence is made of two pieces of 12mm ply glued together at right angles. One rides on the surface of the router table and it is attached to a piece of timber that runs against the edge of the table. You can see it on the second picture.

The stop-block allows me to set the distance from the end of the rail to the rebate, and the two-piece fence keeps the fingers neatly tucked away and also away form the cutter-head. 

I guess I could make it even safer by incorporating the hold-down clamps and sled from my sled.

With the router bit set to the correct depth and a few test runs completed, I was able to make all the rebates for all the drawers quickly and easily. 

As it turned out, I was able to use the same set-up to make the rebates for the half-lap joints where the sides meet the front face of the drawers. Simply moving the stop-block to the edge of the groove that was cut in my mitre fence gave me the correct position for this.

So, another creative solution that will be quite useful in the future. 

I managed to complete one drawer before it was time for tea, so the others will have to wait until another day-off comes around. Hopefully I might even get them all done in the next couple of weeks. Provided the rain keeps off of course!  

Local Wildlife

So, what is a young lamb to do when someone points a camera at you?

Ribblehead Viaduct

It was raining and we just pulled off the road to take a quick photograph of this famous viaduct. I'd like to go back with my Sony Alpha and get closer, but this picture gives you a small sense of the bleakness of the landscape and the wonders of Victorian Civil Engineering (at least I'm assuming it was the Victorians who built this thing!)

The Old Mill?

Looks like and old mill to me!

Aysgarth Falls

They may not be big, they may not be spectacular, but they are a beautiful sight. 

These falls are fairly typical on many in the area. There are some taller ones, not far away I think there is the tallest waterfall in England at Gaping Hill, but these will do for a place to rest and listen to the sound of water falling over rocks.