Marathon time!

No, not running it, but volunteering again! I've long given up any pretensions of ever running a marathon, but like last year, I've volunteered to do post-event massage for those who are brave enough to take on the 26 mile challenge.

Turns out I'll be working for the same charity as last year Phab kids, and in the same place, so at least I should know where I'm going! I wonder how strange it will feel going as a qualified therapist rather than a student only 6 weeks into their course.

Anyway, if you see me dragging my massage couch up the stairs at Embankment station or trundling it along Horse Guards Parade, you'll know what I'm up to on that warm April Sunday that will hopefully materialise.

Older Brother?

“See both of the sons are trying to avoid coming to the Father; they’re both runners. The first son is running away from the Father, the other son is running for the Father. Some of you are running for the Father right now. You’re just tirelessly running, seeking His approval, desiring that He say ‘well done good and faithful servant. And you’ve forgotten that after Jesus came out the baptismal waters He already said it to His Son and if you’re life is hidden in Christ He said it to you. I don’t know if you believe it, but God doesn’t really care that much about what you do for Him. The doing comes out of knowing that you’re loved…That’s why we don’t love people. Because we don’t know the depth of love of which we’ve been loved.”

So reads the quote from Jeff Vanderstelt taken from a short video available here.

Four interesting principles for missional communities

From the blog of David Fitch comes an interesting piece about one particular missional community and the principles behind it. Here are the principles, (edited slightly):

• He got a job. Wayne Gordon came to Lawndale humbly, expecting nothing and got a job in the community. He said, “because I didn’t need money it gave us freedom to do things. We didn’t have to focus on getting people into church seats and tithing.” He was able to be “with” people on their terms not on terms dictated by needing to get a church going that was self-sustaining.

• He inhabited humbly incarnationally. He came to be “with” the community resisting any colonialist impulses. He came to listen to the community, hear the issues, and ask God how he could cooperate with His salvation in this neighbourhood.

• He gave it time: He said “the number one reason things don’t happen is we don’t give it enough time.” He said “if you would have come here when we were fifteen years into it, you would have said nothing is happening here.

• Money comes from God: Wayne talked about money as being a provision from God. For Wayne Gordon, faith does not mean we take crazy risks. Faith means we trust God that if we’re meant to do this we will wait long enough and God will provide the money. He said average time a project takes to go from initiation stage to completion is seven years. It takes perseverance.

When people ask us what we are doing or what we've done about planting a church in our community, we have very little to show them or to say at the moment. It can sound like we've done nothing. What we would say is that we believe that God wants us here, we believe that he is at work in our community, the thing is we just haven't worked out what he's doing at the moment. We've consistently said this is a long-term project, and we're not expecting an overnight success (no matter how nice it would be to be able to point to a flourishing community!) Time is really important in this process.

The other point that struck a chord with me comes in the first principle above. Succinctly it describes two of the big issues with legacy models of church planting. One is getting people into a building and the second is on who's terms do we do mission. So much of our historic mission has been done on the basis of inviting people into our controlled environment where we set the agenda. As the communities we try to reach continue to move further away from our the locus of our building-based activities we are faced with the stark choice of staying in our buildings and becoming increasingly irrelevant, or leaving the building and connecting with our communities.

You can read the whole post here.

Lessons from Luke 12

I've been mulling over Luke 12 for weeks now, ambling my way backwards and forwards through the text. I've long since set aside the practice of reading a few verses, learning a quick lesson and then moving on to tomorrows text. On the other hand, I'm guessing I've become somewhat undisciplined at the same time.

Anyway, this is my pattern for now, and it may very well change again.

What I've noticed in Luke 12, or rather what I've be mulling over, is the connection between the stories. What do they tell me individually and together as a narrative? What lessons can I learn, what might God be saying to me through this collection of stories as a whole?

There's a sort of work pattern, kingdom thing, priority theme going in it seems. The rich fool fails to take any counsel from anyone other than himself. Even if he ultimately rejects it, he never looks at the bigger picture or his wider opportunity to act less selfishly. Selfish too seems to be a concern of the second story where we are challenged to prioritise the kingdom over self-interest.

The third challenge comes in the call to be ready. Ready for what? Well in this case it's the return of the master, but it struck me that there was also the possibility of simply being prepared, being abut the daily business of the kingdom as preparation.

I don't want to push these things too far, after all these are my thoughts form my devotional reflections not a commentary on the text or an exegesis of the text for that matter. In fact, as I went to the text, my main question at that moment was about what we were doing and what we should do. I'd been for a walk, and as i looked at all the new build and recent build I wondered about the process of connecting with the people that would be living in those properties. wondering if any of them would share our vision for a missional community and how we would find them or they find us.

It was then that I read Jesus' words: “Be dressed for service and keep your lamps burning, 36 as though you were waiting for your master to return from the wedding feast. Then you will be ready to open the door and let him in the moment he arrives and knocks.

Rather than a challenge, these words came as a comfort. It was almost as if there were to simple questions to answer:

1. Are you being selfish?

2. Are you putting the kingdom first?

If the answer was yes to both, then you are "dressed and ready for service" for when the master arrives. There is no need to panic about what is not happening.

Time to remember that it's not about what I can do for the kingdom, but about Jesus is already doing and how I can become more involved in that. I've always had great plans about how useful I could be to God if only I was in the right setting with the right people, sharing the right vision. But my plans are not the point.

My dreams are not the issue here, for they the hammer holds

What have I done!

Oh no, in a moment of madness I've not only gone an entered a tennis tournament!

Last year I played in the club's Winter League and men's over 55's competitions, but this is the first competition beyond that. And it's indoors, something I'm not at all used to. Better get some practice somewhere!

So far I'm only the second entrant, so I'm either in the final or it will be cancelled. We shall have to wait and see.

Shameless self-promotion!

So, here we are. This is my new venture!

I have to say a big thank you to Ally, my daughter, who helped me create the logo. I still haven't got to grips with Illustrator, so her help was invaluable. She also came up with a few alternatives, which might appear later on the website once I get to grips with that!

Of course the most important thing is to get treating people, and that's a challenge. I'm planning to approach a number of sports clubs and I'm going to look for local events where I might be able to offer pre/post event treatment. Better, in my opinion, to build slowly with a good reputation than try to build too quickly without a clear plan. It's quite a scary thought, putting my new skills out to tender so-to-speak. Will anyone actually pay me to do this? I have dreams of a nice clinic somewhere, but that will have to in the future.

It has been quite a journey this far, as I've blogged already. We were with the church over the weekend, celebrating the vision and hearing stories about what God is up to through his people. For me it was a positive sense of God's affirmation that we're on the right journey even though we have very little to show for it at this time except a mortgage and three new certificates for me. But even as I write that, it seems to me that it is only part of the story. I've discovered that there is more to me than I ever imagined, that I'm not too old to learn something new and I am capable of being a good soft tissue specialist.

Apart from CPD courses, I do hope that I've finally sat my last exam. I'm not sure my blood pressure or emotions could face any more. But I've learnt not to say never again.

And yes, part of me wishes I'd done something like this a long time ago. I don't think Sports Therapy was an option in the 70's. If it was, I might have tried it.

Is it just a means to an end?

So, I'm now a qualified Sports and Remedial Massage Therapist. Still not quite sure I believe it, but it's true. Over the course of the last year I've been asked quite a lot about how I came to be doing sports massage and what I did before and what Im doing now. Trying to explain all of that while you have someone's leg over your shoulder stretching their hamstrings can be quite entertaining let alone a challenge to do in the 10 second cycle of stretch, relax and rest! I try to share a bit of the journey and the context of exploring how to do church without all the buildings, people or resources that normally go along with church and how being a therapist allows me to be self supporting and yet still with enough free time to find ways to be part of the community. I'm not sure I fully understand what \i mean all the time.

Anyway, now I'm qualified, I really need to work out how to build my practice and integrate that with becoming more intentional about missional community in our setting. I read Luke's account of Jesus talking about prioritising the kingdom this morning and glanced across the page at the story of the rich fool too. Two sobering narratives! I began to reflect upon the temptation that being self-employed as a therapist can bring. The "going rate" for therapy seems to be around £40 an hour. Do the maths and see what that means annually for a typical working week. Yes, that's what I thought. It's very easy to get dragged into to thinking about a villa in Portugal and a nice new car on the drive.

But I've always said that this is a bivocational thing. It's not about a change of career, it's about seeking the kingdom of God, serving him and being self-supporting so that others can share the leadership and without there being a professional paid leader above the unpaid, otherwise employed others who can abdicate responsibility for ministry to the paid pastor because it's their job.

On the other hand, being a therapist is not just a means to an end. It's not just about earning enough money to be able to pay bills, or to make a contribution to the household income, or even to secure a state pension whenever that becomes payable. I want to be the best therapist I can be just to be the best therapist I can be. It is an end in itself in that sense.

I've read too many articles that view bivocational ministry as a way of securing ministry for a congregation that can't afford a full-time stipend. The secular job, as it often is, is simply a way to put food on the table while the real work is the work of ministry. That is so wrong. What was it that Paul said to the Colossians? "Whatever you do, do it wholeheartedly, as if serving the Lord," or something like that.

The truth is, I wouldn't be a very good therapist if it was only about the £40 the client hands over at the end of a session. And I wouldn't be a very good bivocational leader if half my life was just a way to support the other half. Somehow it has to be integrated. I'm not half therapist, half church leader.

Perhaps, if we took such an approach to ministry, we could release more people into ministry, better deploy their gifts and widen leadership. More importantly, I think we could move away from what seems like an inexorable drive towards an increasingly professionalised ministry.

Done!

Well, thats' it. On Saturday 23rd February at approximately 10:45 I breathed an enormous sigh of relief as I heard the the words, "Congratulations, you've passed." For the last year I've been stuffing my head with information and details about anatomy, physiology, neuromuscular techniques and all sorts of other things in order to become a Sports and Remedial Massage Therapist. And I did it. At the tender age of 55 I've once again retrained.

Back in 1979, when I completed my first degree in Environmental Science and Chemistry, I said that that was the end of doing exams. Every summer since I was 1o years old had been about exams, and I thought that was quite long enough. Little did I know that i would turn out to be a perennial student.

In 1986 I returned to college to study theology, and face yet more summer exams with the added blessing of regular essays throughout the year. I'd never written an essay before, and the thought of writing even 1000 words on a single subject was a little daunting. Of course, but the end of the course I could hardly introduce a topic in less than 500 words, and my final essay ran to nearly 12,000 before it got edited down a little. Even then I didn't really do my chosen subject justice.

So you might think that would be the end of it. Having promised no more exams once, surely that would be the time to stop, but no, I carried on and did my Masters. THat was a significant point for me. I never felt comfortable about exams, and although there was only one exam for the MA, I knew I'd reached my emotional capacity to cope. Maybe it was just having done four years of study and I was drained, but I knew it was time for a rest.

So naturally, a year later I started a distance learning programme! This time I chose Clinical and Pastoral Counselling, and with real dedication and determination I managed to squeeze a two year course into five years, or something like that.

And that was it for a long time. I wondered about doing a DMin. (a professional doctoral programme), but apart from learning to swim and getting a 10m certificate for that (of which I remain very proud), I had no desire to add to my collection of certificates in the filing cabinet drawer. I toyed with the idea of doing an exercise qualification, mainly out of interest, but didn't follow it up.

Then came the events of three years ago, when I began to realise that my future lay outside of the mainstream of what I was doing in church life. I began to wonder about what avenues were open to me and my growing sense of the significance and importance of bivocational ministry and my interest in sport made me wonder what I could do.

So now I know. A diploma in Nutrition, a Certificate in Personal Training and the primary goal of a diploma in Sports and Remedial Massage have been achieved.

I dare not say, "No more exams," because you never know. I hope for no more!

Wanted: Worship Partners

In the 14 months since stepping out of legacy church leadership, I've picked up my guitar maybe three or four times. For someone who played most weeks, that's a dramatic change. I've simply not felt the need or the urge to do it. On the other hand, when we visit a church or a congregation, both Anne and I are reminded of what we used to do. Reminded about the importance and not just the rolling discipline and duty of leading worship.

So, my wonderful solid maple, custom made, left-handed Norman acoustic guitar lies silent in its case and the callouses on my fingers have softened. Like preaching, leading and playing for worship, things that occupied my life for over two decades, have quietly slipped from my agenda. Actually, playing the guitar for worship goes back even further to university days in the late 1970's.

Some might say that times change and needs change and circumstances change. It's time for a new thing and simply doing the same old things will only eve produce the same old results. But some of those results were good things. Like a deeper sense of the presence of God, a greater intimacy in worship, a powerful moment of celebration. Those were, and are, good things. There have been lots of debates about the state of worship in the church and the divide between styles and expectations. I'll nail my colours to the mast and say that there have been times when I've got frustrated with worship because it's been more about personal feelings than about encountering Almighty God. But the great blessing and challenge of the movement in worship through the 80's and 90's was for me seeing worship as more than a ritual built around 19th century lyrics and tunes. I learned a lot and I don't want to lose that.

So, as we continue our journey of discovery about the new thing that God has called us into, we need to remember the lessons learned and the value of the things we have learnt to do. We need to remember that we are not trying to plant a congregation in a building to sing songs. But we need to worship, and we need to do that with others. In our different ways, we were both good at leading worship. We weren't great, we're certainly not in the category of excellent musicians, but I think we had a skill, a gift that will one day be useful again.

How we take this forward, I don't know. But hopefully God will lead us to people or people to us with whom we can forge a worshipping community as one dimension of the new thing. Maybe I will start by getting Norman out of his case and allowing him to sing again.

It's all in our imagination

This thing about imagination and vision and mission statements is still wandering around my head. I had an interesting discussion with a few colleagues the other day about it. I'd just spoken at a local church a couple of days before about the journey we are and the topic of imagination came out of that. i remembered something I think Alan Roxburg said in his book about the imagination that exists in the people and the challenge to create an environment in which that imagination can flourish.

On Sunday, when I spoke, I posed the question: "If you had a blank piece of paper on which you could describe what church might look like if we started from scratch, what would you write? Many of the answers were predictable. Not because people lack imagination, but perhaps because their only frame of reference is what they've always known. In reality, thinking new thoughts is actually rather hard for most people. We  have to begin with what we know and move from there. The challenge is in teasing out the new from within the old framework.

We've been watching The Genius of Invention on the BBC, and it's fascinating. It actually gives me great hope for the future of the church in an odd sort of way. Why? Because the genius doesn't lie in the intelligence of the inventor as much as it lies in their ability to imagine something new. People like Marconi and Baird didn't actually invent much at all, they just assembles various bits of apparatus into something new. They imagined a new way of using what others had invented. Okay, so it still counts as invention, but the point is you don't always have to start from nothing. Baird is a great example, not only of the genius of invention, but the way invention moves things forward. Without his mechanical system, television might never have been born. The fact that it wasn't the future of television didn't matter and doesn't matter. He didn't fail just because we went electronic.

When it comes to church and where we find ourselves at this moment, I'm not sure what is going to happen. In fact I think it would be more honest to say I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. I have a dream, an imagined future. If it turns out differently, then I will not have failed, even if others think I have. Perhaps I have a greater capacity to imagine than some. Perhaps imagination is my greatest gift and others will need to pioneer what I imagine.

And yet, I can't believe that I am the only one with an imagination. Everyone has the capacity to imagine something. If everyone has a book in them, then everyone might just have a church in them too! Bring your imagination out to play, it's in there somewhere!

How much is enough?

A question was asked on the news this morning on the theme of executive pay. A certain large bank was reporting numbers, and the speculation concerned the pay of the CEO. One of the presenters suggested they ought to ask the public what they though was an acceptable salary for the post.

Well, a not too thorough search of the internet showed that in 2011 the CE of a certain bank earned £20.9 million in salary and bonuses. Apparently the starting salary at Barclays, according to UNITE is £13,500. That means that in 2011 the CE was paid 1,500 times the potential amount of the lowest paid worker.

Perhaps the question isn't about what is an appropriate salary but what is an appropriate gap. 1,500 does not seem to be the right answer as far as I am concerned.

Imagine that

My little post the other day about how we respond to the House of Commons vote coincided with a blog post I read from David Fitch about mission statements and shared imagination. The two are not directly linked in any except in the small chain of ideas that they set in motion in my head.

David's point was along the lines that a church needs a shared imagination maybe more than a mission statement, and it was that word imagination that stirred my thinking. As I reflected on the commons vote it was our imagination, or lack of it that that I think at times gets in the way of engaging with the real issues. It's a bit of a balancing act to get it right. It doesn't take much research to see that there have been times when our imagination has run away with poor theology and set up home in some distant land far from Biblical truth. But how far is far away? For some, one step from a literal interpretation of scripture is a step too far, for others nowhere far enough to engage with our ever changing society. It's a tough call.

And yet, without imagination, without thinking the odd, strange, wild thought, we might never make any progress. Continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results should not actually require the intellect of Einstein to highlight its absurdity. But isn't that exactly what life without imagination condemns us to do?

The danger in church life is that we take this further. First we sanctify what we do and then we justify it by building a scriptural base for it. Then we enshrine it as tradition and at some point it becomes the unchangeable pattern, the only pattern that reflects the truth. Then we keep doing it. Then, and this is where it gets absurd, we start to blame the unchurched for not doing this way too. We start to blame those who don't come to church for not coming, those who don't share our beliefs for not sharing them. We blame the darkness for being dark as if it had the power to become light all by itself.

The light still shines, but it no longer shines in the darkness. It shines among the safety of all the other lights. We preach the gospel to the converted because at least they appreciate and understand it. They know the language and the rules.

We need our imaginations if we are going to survive and flourish. We need our imaginations if we are going to engage with our ever changing culture in ways that offer redemption without marginalisation of the very people we know God wants to redeem. Without our imagination we may find it easy to stay faithful to the gospel, but we will fail to be able to engage meaningfully with our culture. We will miss generations and tribes because they don't fit our model and our model is so very precious.

I don't know what this model will look like. I wish I did. I wish I could describe to you how we are successfully planting a faith community where we live, seeing lives transformed as people encounter Jesus without the trappings of a church building or programme. But I can't because it hasn't happened yet. Maybe one day it will, maybe one day my imagination will finally bear fruit!

God's will be done

So parliament has voted and the Christian community was urged to pray, and now we have an outcome. I got the email sometime yesterday that asked me to join with Christians across the country to pray "The Lord's Prayer" and seek God's will for our country.

So what do we do now?

Do we assume that God's will wasn't done because the outcome wasn't to our general liking (not all Christians were opposed to the bill), or do we assume that it was, and we need to think differently about faith and culture? Do we repent that not enough Christians prayed hard enough, so God didn't do what we wanted, or do we assume that God's purpose is being worked out in ways we don't fully appreciate?

It's a complicated situation, and one we've faced many times before. Remember the Sunday trading laws? How about the equal opportunities employment bill that challenged using faith as a prerequisite for employment.

Sometimes these things that we feel are assaults on our rights are actually challenges to our narrow thinking and our ghettoised attitudes. Yes, I have my concerns that someday someone will bring a lawsuit against a church and a minister for refusing to provide a service. Although the law is supposed to protect us from that, no doubt it will be tested. But I'm also caught between wanting to protect everyone's rights to an equitable society that treats us all equally, and the freedom to dissent from the popular viewpoint.

I don't think same-sex marriage undermines the Christian value of marriage. I think infidelity, domestic violence, abuse, selfishness, greed and whole lot of other things do that. Perhaps the eventual passing of this bill will help us redefine marriage, not along sexual lines, but in terms of the virtues and values of long-term commitment, relational growth and stable partnerships. Those of who do so from a faith perspective can still raise the standard that marriage is something ordained by God between a man and a woman. But we need to remember that God is not honoured in our marriages simply because they are heterosexual. There is so much more to it than that.

Catching up, getting back on the horse and other wandering thoughts

It's been a while since I simply blogged about the state of life, the universe and everything around me. It's also been over a year now since we stepped out of local church leadership and into the unknown. I often look back and wonder how things might look now if I'd made a different decision 15 months ago or even three years ago when I sensed it was time to move on from a very settled life in Bedford. But I can't go back and change any of that, so there's little point dwelling on it all now.

So, what's been happening in our little corner of the universe? Well, I've been rather busy this month with funerals. I guess some folk will be surprised that I'm still actively involved in this, but  am and it's good for me and it's a really important ministry. I know there were some who thought I did too many funerals for people "outside the church", but let's face it, most people are "outside the church". And just to make matters worse, they not even looking in from the outside! Possibly the biggest shock to our collective evangelical systems is the realisation that the people we usually call lost don't actually feel lost and are not as unhappy and unfulfilled as we like them to be.

These are things that drew Anne and me out of our comfort zone of a nice tidy church life and into something altogether more unpredictable and less easily defined. We know that circumstances probably look very different to some, but the simple truth is that every day the fit was less and less comfortable. Right from the start of my church involvement I was awkward and uncomfortable with the prevailing culture of the church as I experienced it.

So here we are, and we're making this journey slowly. We've begun the pray for the community. Still a bit haphazard really, but we are developing a plan, and as soon as it warms up a bit I'm sure we'll be out on the streets praying blessing wherever we go. Okay, so we're not really just fair-weather folk, but it'a been busy and cold and horrible and we've just not really got stuck into it.

I've been busy with my coursework and I'm hoping to get finished next month if I book my final exams in time. As part of my course I've had this great opportunity to run a free sports massage clinic at a large media company in London. I've done almost five months there, and it will come to an end around March time. It has been a great learning experience, and I've met some interesting people with some challenging soft tissue issues. Fortunately I've some good successes sorting them out and today I was even told how highly recommended I've become! I also work with the physio at a local rugby club. That's been great too, for a whole different set of reasons. I hoping that I'll be able to stay on after my course finishes and I'm all diploma-ed up. I organised this one myself, so it's not really a placement and I seem to be appreciated there too.

My relationship with my denomination is becoming clearer. I won't say too much about it now, but I've decided that there are somethings that I need to control rather than allow others to make the decisions. Over the next few months I'll bring the process of reflecting on those things to a conclusion and make a decision about the future. I went through a phase of feeling rejected and cast aside like a puzzle piece that didn't fit, but I feel less like that now as I begin to see the place of some of the issues and some of the questions in a broader context.

We have some great friends that we don't see at all, but who respond to our Christmas news with encouragement and wisdom.

I keep wondering about trying to collate my wandering thoughts into something more book like. Not a print thing, maybe an e-book or something. It would be good to explore doing that somehow. It wouldn't be a book on a set theme, just a sort of journal of thoughts and reflections. There's also a couple of ideas I've had including writing a simple guide to planning a funeral. I've seen a few more substantial books, but nothing short and to the point.

Last thing in this ramble then is preaching. I've preached once since leaving legacy ministry and often wondered if I'd every preach again. Well, I've got one visit booked (to talk about our journey and what we're doing now), and I've had another invitation come through recently that I need to think about. Not sure I want to step back into the everyday stuff, but these will be interesting explorations of how I feel about getting behind a lectern again.

The positives about bi-vocational ministry

I've blogged before about bi-vocational ministry (6 posts apparently!) and why I think it's important and not just a way of fixing the budget in small churches. In fact I'd go so far as to say that I might just be approaching the conclusion that any minister that is solely focussed on the church is in danger of irrelevance in the bigger picture of the mission of God.

Anyway, that aside, I came across a really interesting article about being bi-vocational on the Leadershipnet website. Here's a summary of the article, it's well worth a closer look.

The author, Ben Connelly, cites 5 ways God can use a bi-vocational ministry:

1. Stewarding God's money

our church has been able to put money toward things that we couldn't otherwise. We send more to missions, we help hurting couples who can't afford professional counseling, we financially support other folks to use their gifts for the good of the body.

2. Making Disciples

I love the local church, but I know that there are always more people outside the church walls than inside...

Through my second job, I'm prayerfully pursuing the Great Commission on the campus that Playboy ranked 2012's number nine party school in the nation...  once in a while, I get a note from a student who finds him or herself in crisis that says—as one young man wrote—"I don't have anyone to turn to for advice, but I think you told us you were a priest or something." By God's grace, bi-vocationality opens doors to disciple-making.

3. Building credibility

My time is divided, and for ministry to happen, I have to pull late nights and have folks over for dinner—just like everyone else in my church. Living in the "real world" and finding points of connection have allowed me to become "all things to all people"—bi-vocationality has built my credibility with those inside and outside our church.

4. Equipping the saints

I used to get paid to do ministry work, so members had a hard time understanding why clergy didn't do all the ministry.

Bi-vocationality removes expectations and pressures from both our church and my family... In other words, bi-vocationality demands all God's people step up and live out Romans 12 and 1 Corinthians 12: everyone plays a part, according to their gifts and passions.

5. Tearing down idols

The the greatest benefit to bi-vocationality hit me somewhere I didn't expect: my soul. Most leaders I know are control freaks. I am, too. Bi-vocationality is one of the most sanctifying things I've experienced. By necessarily giving several hours of my week to work outside the institutional church, God reminds me daily that it's his church, not mine; they're his people, not mine. Jesus says, "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," (Matt. 16:18. Emphasis mine). I can't do that. As I put aside the common idea that every waking hour is given to "my" ministry, and that nothing can happen without "my" involvement, beautiful things have happened. 

I know that some of you are reading this and thinking, "I don't have enough hours in the week to do my one job of ministry let alone do something else." But be honest, how much work do you make for yourself to fill all those hours you feel you ought to work just to be worthy of your pay? Ministry is one of the easiest jobs, vocational or otherwise, in which it is possible to look busy and do little. It's also one of the most misunderstood roles in life you can have. I remember being asked how much of my daily prayer time was spent praying for myself and family and how much for the church, as if some of my prayer were legitimate working hours and some were not. If I play tennis for an hour with a church member am I doing pastoral work, if it's with a unchurch person is it mission, or are both just about me doing something I enjoy with people I know?

In the end, whether you're full-time paid or not, the point is surely the kingdom. I just wonder whether the kingdom would be better served and the church better equipped if our ministry budget was used to release ministry through more hands than those of a single leader.

The article, Five Perks to Being Bi-vocational,  is available here

Spiritual goal-setting

Okay, so January is fast closing in on it's last day. Snow is about to bring the UK to a grinding halt. Some people are really happy about the snow, school closures and days off, but give them a few days and they will be just as frustrated about it as the rest of us that don't mind snow, but don't embrace it in quite the same way.

But while you're buried under a blanket trying to keep warm without putting the heating in order to save on the gas bill, why not stop watching mindless TV or endless recorded films and TV series from your DVD/Blueray/digital library and give some though to some spiritual goals. You don't actually have to be religious to have spiritual goals, sometimes it can even get in the way!

From a Christian perspective let me offer a few suggestions now that you've probably let slip your New Year resolution to read the Bible four times this year, at least once in a original language. First of all, keep them simple and achievable. For example, why not join the growing group who choose to sat The Lord's Prayer everyday at 12:00 noon. I have a repeat alarm on my iPhone that goes off at 12:00. I don't always hear it if it's out of range of my hearing or in a bag, and I don't always get the chance to say the prayer if I'm in the middle of a funeral, a meeting or even a tennis match.

Or, if a daily event isn't your thing, what a simple commitment to prayer each week for your neighbours. I sometimes pray Aaron's blessing over the streets along which I walk on my training routes. As we work out how to pray down the streets of our community, we've applied the same principle. Rather than go out desperately seeking revelation about families and houses as we walk, we simply prayer prayers of blessing. If God reveals something, fine, if not we can still bless our neighbours as we go.

There are probably hundreds if not thousands of simple things that you can incorporate into your routine that will form good habits if you just sit down and think about it. Rather than setting out some grand plan, go simple, even easy. you can always build on it later once the habit has developed. For example, if you take up the Lord's prayer challenge, once a week you could take a little longer to apply the principles of the prayer. After all it's a pattern of prayer not just a prayer. Think about what it mans to cal God "Our Father, who is in heaven". And so on.

Go on, go on, as Mrs Doyle might say (meaningless if you haven't seen Father Ted), use your snow day to set some goals!

"What's that all about?"

I've been asked variations of this questions quite a lot recently, and in some interesting circumstances. As many of you know, I spend some of my time supporting families through times of loss as what you would probably call an independent funeral celebrant. I always take the time to introduce myself and explain briefly my background and current situation. I'm not trying to impress people, I just want them to understand as well as they can what I do and that I'm not currently "in charge of a church".

After the funeral, if I find myself with the family, there's usually someone who comes to speak to me about this rather strange notion of starting church from scratch. For some it's strange because church is an ancient building with long traditions and unfathomable rituals. For others, church planting is exciting but typically a matter of gathering a reasonably sized group in a borrowed building on a Sunday morning to "do" church where there either isn't a church at all or there isn't a particular brand of church.

Each time I have one of these conversations, and it doesn't just happen after funerals, but in lots of settings, I find myself struggling to describe anything recognisable to either group. not wanting to stick 30 people in a local hall seems odd to the churched, and smacks a little of being somewhat weird. To the unchurched it's hard to articulate the concept of trying to discover what the incarnated gospel looks like in a community without the trappings of "normal" church life. Remember that for some folk Songs of Praise is the only expression of church they come across.

But maybe I'm not the only person who should be answering such a question. Maybe everyone who is involved in kingdom stuff should be answering the very same question. Each time I'm faced with questions about what I'm doing, two things generally happen. I get excited about describing the vision while struggling to find an adequate vocabulary to make it accessible, and secondly I remember Craig Groeschel's Leadership Summit session from several years ago. The phrase that reverberates around my head is this:

If we are going to reach the people other people are not reaching, we are going to do things that other people are not doing.

It might no longer be a verbatim quote, but the message clear. Of course the flip side of this equation is that if we keep doing what we've always done, we will get the same results we've always got. A different result requires a different approach.

Sadly in church, as in so many institutions, we are stubborn enough enough to simply carry on doing what we've always done in the hope that the response will change. We presume our way of "doing church" is somehow ordained and therefore the problem doesn't lie with the pattern, it lies with the world outside that fails to engage. Yes, people love darkness because it covers up their fallenness, but that's not the reason we fail to reach them.

I have no idea whether what we are doing will be any more successful than anything else I've done over the last 30+ years of following Jesus. I just know it has to be different. Not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of the kingdom and the sake of the missing.

When I grow up...

If, at the age of 5 or 6, some had asked me what I wanted to be or do when I grew up, I'm not sure what I would have told them. I can't even remember if I actually had any ambitions at that age. If I had any ambitions it was probably to do with becoming a fireman or policeman or something similar.

As I grew up I became a little more academic and the pressure was on to choose something more challenging, but even through senior school I didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do beyond going to university. In many ways my first degree was more something to do because it was expected of me than a positive choice on my part. I did pick the course because I liked the outline. Actually it was quite strange. Initially I'd applied to do biology but as I did my A Levels I became more interested in chemistry. At my interview one of the lecturers mentioned a course in chemistry and environmental science that sounded perfect and I knew that's what I wanted to do but didn't know how to go about changing course. Anyway, I ended up on the course, so it worked out okay.

Throughout all of this two things remained true. First, I still had no idea what I wanted to do and second I could never have imagined that I would end up doing all the things I have done. If, even at university, you'd have told me that I would work in research, retrain twice and embark on launching myself into self-employment in my fifties, I would have thought you mad.

But here I sit, writing a case study, planning exams and thinking about life as a therapist. Part of me wishes I'd done this when I was a lot younger, but sports therapy wasn't on the agenda in the 70's and no one suggested becoming a physiotherapist to me at that time, so there's little point looking back and wondering.

Perhaps the motto for my life should be simply to keep exploring. Maybe I destined not to "grow up" and settle into one career. Maybe I'm just a maverick who actually needs to work for himself. I don't know. I'll find out. At least if you need an independent, ordained Christian minister who has worked in research, is a qualified counsellor, certified personal fitness trainer, first aider and soon to be sports and remedial massage therapist you will know who to call!

If we want the best people....

Can some one please help me understand why I heard the same old worn out argument about pay and quality, this time applied to MP's? Driving home last night from my 3 hour stint volunteering, ie working without okay, I heard a trailer on the radio for an item about MP's pay. Apparently most of them believe they ought to have a 32% pay increase and one argument in favour was, "If we want the best people to serve in public office then we need to pay them well." Apparently £65,000 is not enough to keep a family in the manner they would like to be kept.

Did we not hear the same thing about industry and banks and everywhere else? Strange how this same logic doesn't apply to nurses and bus drivers and factory workers. How come the best CEO deserves to be paid extremely well, but the best delivery driver or cleaner has to get by on tax credits? And if they were the best, how come the banks collapsed and the economy crashed?

This logic about pay has lead us into this financial crisis. Greed, not ability is the driving force. No CEO should be earning more than 100 times that of the lowest paid worker in their organisation, but in some instances I suspect 100 times is a conservative estimate, a very conservative estimate.

Perhaps £80,000+ is a more realistic salary for an MP, but don't keep telling me it's to get the best. That argument doesn't work anymore, and it's an insult to the best who are forced to settle for a lot less.

Dreams of fitness and running

Last summer I read Born to run. I came to the party quite late, given how many people had told me I should read it. I have not become a runner as a result. I have experimented with barefoot shoes and find them quite interesting to wear, especially the Vibram Five Finger variety, but I don't run much anymore. Age, fitness, weight and injury have all taken their toll!

My great sadness about not running is a mixture of time (I can't go as far walking in an hour than I could when I ran-obviously) and the sense of freedom that came with running that you don't quite get walking. I console myself with the fact that over the same distance, whether I run or walk, I use the same amount of energy. It's only the time element that changes. But it's not the same. If you've never been a regular runner I don't suppose you can get this. There's something about the rhythm of running that becomes almost soothing. Weird, I know.

So my question is: Can I get back to running, or is it just too much to ask of my somewhat worn joints? Studying gait and mechanics, posture and massage, has made me understand more deeply the functionality of my joints and muscles. But that can be somewhat depressing! I now, for instance, that I will probably never toe-off correctly anymore no matter how hard I try to fix it. The alignment of my big toe and the muscles of my feet simply won't let it happen. This in tun probably accounts for some of my knee issues, although not all of them. And so the chain of cause and effect work it way up through my body.

But I want to run. Even as I walk my 4-7Km that I do most days, something inside of me cries out to run. And occasionally I do. Well I break into a slow, lumbering jog to tell the truth. I wonder to myself whether I'd still be running had I managed to stay fit through my 20's, 30's and 40's. What if I'd stayed that fit 76Kg (168lb) squash playing, bike riding, lunch-time jogger? Would I still be running now? Maybe. Maybe not.

Given that it's not possible to live in the past, the best approach is surely to learn from the past but not dwell upon it. Not a bad lesson in life, let alone fitness. And I guess it ought to be said that while I was probably the fittest I've ever been during those brief years of my early 20's, I was probably fairly unhealthy. My diet was pretty poor, and eating patterns haphazard to say the least.

So, now I'm 55, what shall I do? The last couple of years has seen me get fitter and healthier, but there are a lot of things I'd like to do. I'd like to be able to run 5K in 30 minutes again, but to do that I think I need to take some pressure off my knees. That means losing some body fat, which naturally means losing some weight.

I think I could probably do with dropping to about 84Kg. That would be about 14% body fat and light enough to make running a more realistic possibility. That's quite a big ask, but not impossible. I know my current BF% is around 24, so there's room!

In case you're wondering how to do the calculation by the way, the most accurate is the get someone to do the skin fold measurements. The easy way is to use some body composition scales, but be aware that the reading will vary with hydration and other factors. Once you have the BF% it's easy maths to calculate what everything but fat weighs and from there to calculate your target weight based on your target BF%. Want to see and example?

If you weigh 90Kg and have a BF% of 25%, then everything else weighs in at 67.5Kg. If you want a BF% of 15, then your 67.5Kg has to be 85% of your body weight. This makes your target weight 79.4Kg. Okay, so most people when they lose weight don't just lose fat, they lose muscle too, but you get the idea. In an ideal world we'd even build some lean muscle along the way because that burns more calories etc etc.

Back to my dream. So, this year my goal is to get down to that 14% mark or as close as I can. It would be interesting to see if I can both do that and whether it makes running a possibility. I don't harbour any desire to do a marathon or even a half-marthon, just to be able to do that 30 minute run we used to do around the park at lunchtime back in the day. Maybe then I won't just feel like running, I'll actually be able to run!