80,000 guests on Back to Church Sunday

The CofE is reporting today that, based on returns from churches, around 80,000 people came back to church on BTCS this year, 53,000 to Anglican churches, but with more churches from other denominations getting on board.

Here's some of the blurb:

The Church of England’s Head of Research and Statistics, the Revd Lynda Barley, says: “If the returns we have received from almost one fifth of the participating parishes are representative, the scaled up figures would suggest that 53,000 extra people attended Church of England churches that Sunday, among 82,000 coming back across the UK once other denominations are included.

“We know from local research that new attenders and the churches enjoy the Back to Church experience of church. Not only has the number of participating churches increased between 2008 and 2009 so that approximately 20 per cent of Church of England churches are now taking part, but the average number of extra people per church has grown, with participating churches each having welcomed an average of 19 extra people compared to 14 last year.”

and there's this rather cheeky footnote
The number of people returning to the Church of England on 27 September 2009 alone could have filled the O2 arena in London twice over – and still left a queue of 7,000 (the highest quoted membership of the National Secular Society) outside without a seat;

Thoughts:
- are the churches which have sent data back in more likely to be those for whom it went well? After all, if nobody showed up, that might make you less likely to send the forms back in.

- More importantly, what was people's experience when they came? I don't know what qualifies as good 'repeat business' for shops, and I'm aware that the sizeable majority of readers of this blog never return for a second look. I'd be interested to see any feedback from the visitors who came on that day, what they thought, and how it measured up to expectations.

- It's a substantial rise on the 37,000 last year, and it probably still has plenty of potential. There are several million former churchgoers in the UK. But it's not going to appeal to the increasing majority who don't have any church background, and has to be part of a wider outreach strategy, rather than the cure for all ills.

- I also wonder what the pattern looks like in churches which have run BTCS for several years. We had fewer people this year than in the previous couple of years when we've run Back to Church Sunday, and there comes a point, unless a church is adding new members quite rapidly, when everyone has invited all the people they can think of, and they've either said yes or no.

The 5 statement Bible meme

Doug Chaplin kicked off the following challenge:

Here are the rules: Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

My stab
1. Good
2. Very Good
3. Not Very Good
4. Bad, But God's Good
5. Let's Get This Party Started

I tag the people reading this on Facebook. Wish there was a way to automatically cross post comments from there!

Multimedia Advent Resources from Proost

Recent email:

PROOST.CO.UK

Advent Extra
We usually send one e-mail a month from proost. But we're making an exception this month as we have had a late advent arrival. Lat year Beyond's beach hut advent calendar - opening a beach hut on the sea front in Brighton with an art installation inside really caught the public imagination. It's being repeated this year. But they have also produced a physical advent calendar with each door being one of the beach huts from last year. It's only £5. Get your order in quick and we'll post it to you straight away. If you are outside the UK it won't make it - sorry!

And just a reminder of the other advent reaources:
9lessons - a flash animation new this year with 9 loops realting to the traditional 9 lessons for christmas

nine - nine artists interpret the traditional nine readings with 6 movies and 3 songs.

25 - Si Smith's amazing cutout and make nativity characters and advent calendar and comic.

wait - Vaux's simple but powerful movie and liturgy on waiting in advent.

silent night - a movie that's ideal for pretty much any Christmas service

Greenbelt pocket liturgies book Standing In The Long Now. This is a compilation from various creative worship communities who took part in the Greenbelt festival this year and has some wonderful things in it.

Happy Advent and Christmas!
Jon, Jonny, Aad
http://www.proost.co.uk/

More Spiritual Songs from Simon Cowell

After hitting the Christmas No.1 last year with Hallelujah, another Cowell protegee is selling her CD faster than anyone else this year, and might even do better than Leona Lewis. Probably best to pause this when the music stops....



This isn't really my style of music, but heard it on Radio 2 the other day and thought it was beautiful. Strange to then discover that Wild Horses is a Rolling Stones song.

Christian Today have the track listing for Susan Boyles CD, with comments about what the songs mean to her, including several hymns. I think it's a shame that there's a different record company to deal with the 'Christian' market - come on folks, get out of your pigeon holes. Good music stands on its own two feet without needing some spurious label put on it. Crikey, I'm starting to sound like the British Humanist Association. Bye.

Memorable Musical Moments

Here goes with the memorable musical moments meme: (see Monday)

Think of eight memorable musical moments, not necessarily all time favourites, but those when, for example, you felt compelled to wait in the car when listening to this amazing song on the radio because you just had to know who it was by. Or the piece you heard on the tv in a drama that drove you straight onto iTunes to download... (remember once we spent the princely sum of 6s 8d on a vinyl single?!). Optional details for each song give where, why and Spotify or youtube links ...

Joe Walsh 'Life's been Good' remember hearing this on the transistor radio in our back room in Sheffield as a kid, and kept tuning in to see if they'd play it again. Silly lyrics, cracking guitar hook, somehow it stuck.

The Human League: 'Love Action' My brother, being an electronics whizz, built a radio, and I ended up with this bizarre hybrid thing on my bedside table. Most evenings would consist of me trying to listen to Radio Luxembourg or Radio Hallam (local commercial radio in Sheffield), and one night DJ Martin Kelner gave us an exclusive preview of the new Human League single. They were a Sheffield group, and that slightly alien-sounding intro was the start of chart dominance for a couple of years.

Black 'Wonderful Life' Brushfield St London. A beautifully bleak record, one of the last things I brought on vinyl. On my year out post-school, when I had the flat above Spitalfields market to myself this was one of my favourites. 'look at me standing here on my own again'. London is one of those places where being alone was somehow more significant for the fact you were surrounded by 7m people, none of whom knew you were there.

U2 Acrobat Somerset Levels. On the Clarks Shoes management training intake, me and Justin had a placement at Ilminster factory (long gone) during the winter. We were sharing digs at the time, and Justins car had a better sound system, and he'd just bought Achtung Baby. There's one particular stretch of road just outside Langport which, despite the land being completely flat, snakes around in a series of S-bends. They'd just lopped the trees back by the road, and with the mist rising off the levels, it all looked pretty spooky on a January morning. Through the mist soared Acrobat "I'd join the movement if there was a cause I could believe in/yeah I'd break bread and wine if there was a church I could recieve in/'cause I need it now..." Still makes my hair stand on end.

The Choir Consider live on stage at Greenbelt. First CD I ever bought was after hearing this on stage, and bidding for the Choir's Chase the Kangaroo in a tent somewhere near Corby. The Choir didn't do much on stage, but had an amazing atmospheric sound, and a guy playing a bizarre cross between a saxaphone and a portable keyboard. Sadly the Youtube clip linked doesn't do them justice, but there's some good stuff on Spotify.

The Smiths What Difference Does it Make? John Peel show some time in the early 80's. If there were too many ads on the commercial stations I'd occasionally venture over to John Peel, who seemed to play pretty much anything. Jonny Marr had already shown he could weave a web with the guitar on This Charming Man, but WDDIM is incredibly simple - just 3 notes repeated - and Morrisseys lyrics are brilliant, and spot on for any spotty youth who was fond of a girl but didn't know what to do about it.

Toy Dolls Fisticuffs in Frederick Street my brothers room, Sheffield. My brother's now a BBC radio sound engineer, and honed his skills by building a disco rig from scratch, and touring the local church halls for parties and Christmas. Fisticuffs was the B-Side to 'Nellie the Elephant', the Toy Dolls classic thrash nursery rhyme. It became the standard disco closer, after all the kids with nobody to smooch with had sat out the invetable Spandau Ballet snogathon. All that pent-up hormonal energy piled onto the dancefloor, and big bro would play 'Nellie' and then quickly flip the disc to finish on a riotous note. One evening he broke his ankle in the mosh pit to this song, but carried on regardless, loaded up the car with speaker bins and disco kit, and drove home. He only found out the next morning when mum sent him to hospital.

Evanescence Bring Me to Life Had heard there was some controversy about the group, a 'Christian' rock group who'd upset a few people by not fitting into the subculture. When our kids were very young, I didn't hear very much on the radio, so a couple of years of chart music passed me by completely. Eventually caught up Bring me to Life on Youtube (and the even more powerful Everybodys Fool, scream at the modelling industry). I think it was the first clip I ever watched on Youtube, in a the recently converted garage at the back of our vicarage in Darlington.
If people are slow out of bed at home this goes on and the volume cranks up 'WAKE ME UP!!!!' Love the energy. My kids know all the words to the chorus, even though they haven't got a clue what it's on about.

Oh yes, I'm supposed to tag people aren't I? Ok then, Clayboy, Mark Meynell (can he do it without mentioning U2?), The Vicars Wife, Gary Alderson, and Jon Birch - if he can do a cartoon of each one I'll be even more impressed than usual.

Advent & Doctor Who

So, there's this group of prophets, having dreams about the future. Bad dreams. Nightmares. And they've been waiting for the Doctor, the one who makes things better/heals/saves (delete where applicable). Except that instead of turning up when he should have, he's been off on a consumer binge. A very big binge - though I don't really understand how a Time Lord can possibly be late for anything.

Advent is a time of dreams, and of waiting to see whether the dream, or the nightmare, will come true. In CofE churches, the set readings focus on the future, on hope and expectancy, on where history and God's purposes are heading. Is it a dream or a nightmare? And when will the dream come true? Into this comes Jesus, welcomed by, for example, Simeon and Anna in the Temple as the sign that the good dream of God's people is becoming reality.

We've got a choice about how we wait for the future. We can wait passively, doing nothing. We can do the avoidance thing, diverting ourselves, consuming experiences and time and trying not to face the consequences - "you should not have delayed" "far too late, he has come". I don't know if that script was written with the Copenhagen conference in mind - a community growing far too fast? - but avoiding the future is a powerful theme, whether it's our own, or that of our community/nation (witness the scrabbling on pensions and power, because painful decisions have been delayed), or of the planet.

Or we can watch and pray. Most agents of change are motivated by a dream, some of those dreams are good (Martin Luther King) some are evil (9/11). Advent reminds us that our dreams of the future, and whether we embrace them or run from them, affect how we live in the present. How do we get dreams? The Ood have got community, and a splendidly low-tech little cave. In 21st century earth dreams have been colonised by the marketing industry and celebrity culture, there are 1000 people wanting us to have their dream, rather than letting us have our own. Dreams need detachment to give them a place to grow, and community to refine them and give them legs. A fellow vicar said that if he has a good idea for something new, he waits until at least 2 other people have the same idea before doing anything about it.

Yesterday on an clergy retreat day we were shown a clip from 'Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium', not a film I've ever considered crossing the street to see. But there's some good lines - the two main characters are waiting for a clock to chime 12. "So now we wait" "Now we breathe, we pulse, we regenerate, our hearts beat, our minds create, our souls enchant. 37 seconds well spent is a lifetime."

Waiting for the rest of that Doctor Who episode, for Christmas to begin, for Christmas to be over, to see whether the dreams or the nightmares are the ones which will come true - we can choose how we wait, and whether its time well spent, or foolishly spent. And there's the ultimate event too: the Doctor is going to die, and so are we. As Gandalf/Tolkien says, what we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us, what we do with the waiting.

Charity Begins at the Checkout

Update: different angle at RobinsonS, worth a look, and not so much to read!

By Saturday morning, Children in Need had raised over £20m from Friday night’s fundraising, with more to come from sales of the CiN single (great work by Peter Kay)



There were lots of donations from workplaces and high street stores, with a giant ASDA cheque seemingly in the background of every shot*. Plenty more will come from the merchandise, with Peter Kay appealing for the brilliant poster for the single above to be taken on by a high street name and distributed. The annual accounts for 2007-8 shows ‘corporate partnerships’ contributing nearly £5m to 2007’s total, whilst direct donations amount to £12m, and the rest is accounted for by fundraising (some of it organised and branded by corporates) and legacies.

Pudsey in Perspective
Children in Need, along with Comic Relief and the like, keeps the fun in fundraising, and it’s fantastic to see the generosity and compassion of thousands of people in action. At the same time I wonder what would happen if someone gatecrashed the stage and said ‘ladies and gentlemen, the war in Afghanistan is costing us £48m a week’. Raising over £500m over the last 20+ years is a wonderful achievement, but a few bonus-donating bankers would double that money.

That was Friday evening. Friday morning I was in a local shop buying Christmas cards, treading the line between staying within budget, and buying cards which gave more to charity. £4 for a pack which gives 25p per card sold, or £2.99 for a pack which ’supports the following charities’, but probably by not as much? Was I shopping, or giving to charity? Or both? Why was I finding 2 sets of values arguing with each other in my head over a few cartoon pictures of a stable?

The commercialisation of charity is an interesting one: ‘Give as You Spend’ is replacing Give as You Earn. For the businesses, it’s a chance to promote positive brand awareness (did you see those folks on CiN holding their jam up to the camera?) as well as raising money, for us it’s a chance to do what we like best – shop – and get a warm glow thrown in. From Fair Trade to charity Christmas cards, charities have worked out that we’re not going to start spending less and giving more, so it might just be easier to get us to spend differently. At the same time, the trend towards Gift Aiding entrance fees seems to have taken off – the chance to ‘donate’ your entrance fee (?) so that the National Trust, or whoever, can claim the tax back.

Homeopathic Giving
At the same time, the timing may be significant. We can now enter the Christmas shopping frenzy with a clear conscience: we’ve done our bit. Give the Children in Need CD to someone for Christmas, and everyone wins.

Perspective again: we’re forecast to spend an average of £358 each on presents this year. Even if Children in Need ends up with double last nights total, that will be roughly 65p per person in the UK. Of course, people will be giving in other ways too, not least through those Christmas cards, but there’s a sense of spiritual homeopathy: a small amount of giving diluted in a swimming pool of consumption equals ok.

The best solution, though it may disappoint the relatives, is Present Aid, where you send something useful to the developing world as a present, and your dearly beloved gets a card saying ‘you have sent a goat/toilet/water pump’, and is saved the bother of disposing of the wrapping paper, or working out where to put yet another ornament.

Giving Up?
Earlier this year, the Charities Aid Foundation reported that UK giving had fallen faster than the contraction in incomes – by 11% year on year. The number of people giving has stayed roughly the same – around 55% of the adult population – and on average they gave £31 each. Half of overall giving comes from just 2 million adults.

Even during a recession, most of the folk who still have jobs have got money to burn. If you can afford a Nintendo Wii, you’ve got money to burn. If you can afford a ticket to a Premiership match, or a bottle of wine with your meal out, or a Sky subscription, ditto. The charities folks calculate that £750m per year is lost to charity because taxpayers don’t Gift Aid all their donations. There is plenty of slack in the system. We have the weapons. We have motive. We have opportunity. So what’s missing?

*we used to live in an area where the ASDA Events Manager was the nearest thing we had to a community worker – she organised loads of events around the ASDA calendar (which was basically a series of opportunities to sell stuff to people, based on events like St. Patricks day, or a movie release), and in the absence of any community meeting space, helped to make the supermarket a good place for charitable work and a community focus.

This piece originally appeared on the Wardman Wire at the weekend. Recycling and all that.

Gearing up for Advent: 'Kneeling' by RS Thomas

Great poem about waiting.

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun’s light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great rôle. And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I,
For the message.

Prompt me, God;
But not yet. When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

quoted by theologian Paula Gooder today at our clergy retreat. Love the image of the sun, and pretty much everything else about this poem.

Doctor Who tomorrow, great Advent message in the trailer for the Christmas finale.

Memes: De-Christian, Deeply Troubling, and De-Dum De-Dum

Joe Haward has published a summary of the responses to his 'De-Christian Doctrine' meme which swam the oceans of the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago.

But he's now infected by the meme flu, so I've been tagged with this one
Here are some of the things that Jesus said that I find really hard to read. And thinking about it, I have never heard anyone speak or preach from these passages. This might be a good meme... what words from Jesus do you struggle with?

I'll have to decide whether it's the words I find hard to understand/agree with, or the ones I find hard to obey. As someone once said, it's not the bits of the Bible I don't understand that I struggle with, it's the bits I do understand.....More later.

At the same time the venerable Phil Ritchie has tagged me with the memorable musical moments meme:
Think of eight memorable musical moments, not necessarily all time favourites, but those when, for example, you felt compelled to wait in the car when listening to this amazing song on the radio because you just had to know who it was by. Or the piece you heard on the tv in a drama that drove you straight onto iTunes to download... (remember once we spent the princely sum of 6s 8d on a vinyl single?!). Optional details for each song give where, why and Spotify or youtube links ...

One or two come to mind, we'll see how busy this week gets first.....!! Earliest mmm is 'Life's been Good' by Joe Walsh on my parents tranny (= transistor radio, not transvestite), and a couple of very strange tracks on the John Peel show.

Teenagers and the 2 Minutes Silence

Young people today......

In a survey of over 1,000 adults conducted by ComRes, 93% of 18-24 year-olds said that when at school they had observed two minutes' silence on Remembrance Day, compared with only 73% of 45-55 year-olds. Eighty-six per cent of 18-24 year-olds said that they believed more should be done to encourage people to observe the two minutes' silence, compared with only 72% of 45-55 year-olds.

The poll was undertaken to explore public attitudes towards corporate acts of remembrance and grief. It found that 82% of Britons observed one or two minutes' silence on 11 November 2009. Sixty-three per cent watched the service at the Cenotaph on television or listened to it on the radio on Remembrance Sunday. Twenty-two per cent attended a church service. Ninety-six per cent said that they believed it was important to have a special day for everyone together in Britain to remember those who have died in war.

I helped out with an 11th Nov service in Yeovil College canteen, and it was packed. 200-300 students there, plus a healthy turnout from the staff. This doesn't surprise me, and is a shot across the bows of anyone who doubts the spiritual seriousness of younger people. It may look different, but it's there.

full report here.

Mission 21 notes 2 - Discipleship: are we actually doing what Jesus told us to do?

Spent most of Mission 21 in the '24/7 Discipleship' stream, where we explored issues around evangelism and discipleship, and the cultural reality that the vast majority of people now have no Christian/church background at all.

What struck me most powerfully was that my church may not actually be set up to do the main thing Jesus asked us to do. Matthew 28 'make disciples of all nations' - ok, it's a big ask, and the church has other tasks and responsibilities too, but are our churches set up to make disciples, or set up to do something else? It struck me that church attendance on a Sunday morning isn't always a very good 'delivery system' for growth in discipleship. And lets face it, Sunday morning is the engine room, so if it's not going on there....

There are a few people at the moment who are exploring Christian faith, or have recently made first-time commitments. And to be honest I'm not sure that simply encouraging them to regularly 'come to church', or even to be part of a small group in the church, will be enough. There's a lot to learn, questions to ask, changes to make, struggles to overcome, things to be prayed through, never mind getting stared with the Bible, prayer, working through lifestyle issues etc. etc. Jesus did this on a personal level, with only 12 people. The secular world knows that apprenticeship, coaching, mentoring, accountability etc. are all part of effective teaching and learning, and are the best ways to bring about change and development. The church is starting to catch up, having forgotten that this is just what Jesus did.

The two things I'm involved with in Yeovil which are bringing about the strongest growth in discipleship - Street Pastors and the Growing Leaders course - are not churches. They both involve a process of learning and action, practice and reflection. Our standard models of discipleship normally involve sending people on a nurture course and then slotting them into a small group: both of these are primarily intellectual rather than practical, but spiritual growth actually happens most powerfully when people have to give out, go beyond their comfort zones, and engage in learning experiences. Jesus discipled his followers by a combination of teaching, hanging out together, and getting them to do what they'd seen him doing. We do plenty of the first, but I'm not that sure about the rest.....

Questions:
1. Am I being too hard on 'normal' churches, just because I've been on a conference?
2. If you're part of a church, are people there growing as Christians and if so, what's the compost?
3. Do the mature Christians in our churches have time to disciple newer Christians, at a personal level, or are they too busy? Ditto church leaders? And if they did have time, would they know what to do?

It strikes me that the church faces a very new challenge: we've relied for most church growth in recent generations on people returning to the church after being brought up with the Christian faith. They therefore have some background in the Bible, prayer, worship, lifestyle, values etc., and it's primarily a question of reintegrating them. But that pool is drying up, and folk who've got no Christian background present a different challenge. When people have no Bible of their own and have never read it, but want to become Christians where do you start? And how? - it's not just the content, but the method too.

We need 2 things that we currently don't have: a more relational way of being the church, so that relationships of discipleship are natural to the community, and time. The only way of achieving the latter, is to find less labour-intensive ways of doing what we currently do - either that, or stopping some of them altogether.

some of these thoughts are still half-formed, or probably just plain wrong, so apologies if this seems a bit rambling.....


as an aside Christian Today has some good summaries of the keynote talks at mission 21:
Billy Kennedy
Martin Atkins
Emmanuel Ironguru
Graham Cray
interview with Martin Robinson done at the end of the event.

Meat and Potato in the Auditory Canal

Couple of great pioneer* stories from earlier this week:

1. The Guardian reports on a Christian family who've been inspired to set up a woodland commune in Somerset. Lots of really challenging stuff in Tobias Jones' account, for example:

it feels to me as if old-fashioned charity is at the far periphery of our
life. We have a few standing orders to worthy causes and put a small cheque in
the post, or do a soup run, once in a while. But that sort of charity seems
increasingly to me like carbon offsetting: a way to cleanse our conscience, to
make us feel better about the fact that actually we could keep living just the
way we want. It's a sop, nothing more. I want charity, in the old cliche, to
begin at home, to be an integral part of our lives – not just something we do
with loose change once in a while.

....The hope is that our children, too, will learn about vulnerability when they're still living in a warm, loving home; that they will, over the years, begin to learn about addiction, displacement, bereavement, poverty, prison and so on. That, to us, seems much more important than A-level results or a good degree.

...most of all we're taking our leap in the dark because we've belatedly realised that the sermon on the mount might actually be a manifesto for life, rather than a few nice ideals to take out for a spin on a Sunday morning. We've come to believe in the survival of the weakest, not just the fittest. William Vanstone once came out with the great line that the Church is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end. We felt called to the deep end, to the place where it's more quiet, more dangerous maybe, more radical.

Wow. I'm full of admiration for the guy and his family. They want the shelter to be a place where people can come for sanctuary and community, and have already started thinking about what kind of community rule of life they'll need. Suprisingly for a Guardian piece written by a Christian, the comments are almost 100% positive. Perhaps that's because this is faith lived, rather than faith preached, and faith lived is much more convincing. Jonny Baker has more reflections.

2. The first 'Pioneer Minister to the Business Community' was commissioned earlier this week in Yorkshire. Here's a bit of the press release from Ripon & Leeds diocese:

As ‘chaplain’ to the business community, Revd Rob Hinton’s will be based at
‘Club LS1’ in Leeds, a central hub for business people meeting in Leeds and also
the home to such institutions as Common Purpose and the Institute of Directors.
He said he was looking forward to the challenge of the new role: “While so much
of the church is denouncing the banking community, it is an important time to
come and be the new Chaplain to the second largest financial district outside of
London and to become part of a Diocese that is wanting to love those who are
both taking the flack and at the same time trying to put things right for the
industry and the rest of us.” He added, “This is a ministry not just to the
financial sector but all areas of the city’s business world.”

It's a diocese which seems to have more of a grip on mission issues than most, good to see that the mission section of their website has been revamped since my survey of diocesan sites earlier in the year. Some interesting links: highersports is a Christian run sports coaching programme, doing ministry through sports (just like the old days), and they have some vid clips of local fresh expressions, though oddly these aren't actually linked to from the mission section!

*I'm truly very sorry, but couldn't resist**

**I hope this doesn't need explaining.....

Wii Pray

my money's on a spoof. Ht Tech Central/Dave Walker. But if you disagree, you can pre-order from tomorrow.

Mission 21 quotes and notes, part 1

Just got back from the Mission 21 conference in Bath, failed miserably to make friends with the wifi provision, a problem fellow tweeters and bloggers don't seem to have had.

I'll probably blog about it later, once I've caught up with everything else which needs doing. In the meantime, the conference site has done a good job of staying up to date with things, there's a few video clips etc. on there, and the promise of some of the presentations being available on download.

In the meantime, a few quotes:
"It's more fun making babies than building coffins" (Martin Atkins, Methodis gen sec)

on the lack of growth in mainstream churches “the diet we’ve been expected to live on week by week has not been sufficient to keep us alive.” (Atkins)

"we live in a little Christian gekko" (I'm not going to name names for this one!!)

“No matter how good church is, it’s still a bridge too far to invite most of my friends to it.” (Steve Hollinghurst, I think)

“too many people are sold Chrsitianity as a trip on a cruise liner, and then are horrified when at the docks they find they’re boarding a battleship”. (John Wimber)

“What does God want to say to me through the person who I’m about to disagree with?” (Graham Horsley)

"The gospel is the seed which contains the church" (Graham Cray)

“one of the loneliest places in England is the church” (Pastor Emmanuel, Nigerian church planter)

“one of the big enemies of discipleship is fast church growth, maybe we should grow slower.” (Steve Hollinghurst)

'How to Do Mission Action Planning'

There are roughly 20 CofE Dioceses now doing some form of Mission Action Planning, an approach to mission strategy pioneered by York and London under David Hope's leadership. But it's quite a faff wading through 20 sets of Diocesan documents, all of them different, to work out what MAPping is really about, how it works, and how to do it.

Good news then: 'How To Do Mission Action Planning' has just been published by SPCK. It's written by Mike Chew and Mark Ireland, and there's a bit more blurb here, along with a list of the Dioceses known to be doing Mission Action Planning. There's quite a handy dedicated website, which explains more about it, who's doing it, and has various examples from different churches, which is a good starter for 10.

Interestingly, our Archdeacon recently asked all her churches whether they'd be interested in developing some kind of parish action plan. Quite a few said yes. So this might be quite timely.

Survival of the frailest: what will my community look like in 2020?

Via Christian Research. Something useful from the government!!!

The government has provided researchers with a very useful online tool for calculating the UK population for any year between 1992 and 2031. The website provides an interactive map that graphically illustrates the extent to which age profile of the UK will change over the next few years. The mapping tool allows the user to select criteria for studying various age groups from UK level down to every local authority. So, if you’d like to see what the age profile of your locality will look like in ten years’ time, this site will help you plan ahead.

To find out more, use this link
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ageingintheuk/agemap.html

It's actually quite striking. If you set the age range to the 0-15's, it's like watching pools of water dry up on a sunny day, as the drought of young people spreads across the country. Or watch the progress of the over-65s (which I join just after the end of the period) as the map gradually darkens. This raises massive questions about who can support an increasingly dependent population, and throws into stark relief Jonathan Sacks comments a couple of weeks ago about the 'selfishness' of a secular Europe which, through choosing to have fewer children, is sowing trouble for the future.

I'd be interested to see whether the data shows that it's secularism, or economic development, which has the strongest influence on the birthrate. If the former, then that's a challenging correlation for a Darwinian atheist to grapple with. If the evidence shows that, the more secular a society, the lower the birthrate, then in terms of 'survival of the fittest', this is rather interesting. To caricature, the only way a secular society can survive is by importing people from more religious countries to do the jobs.

On the other hand, you could say that giving birth to a child in the West is an act of selfishness, as they are likely to have a much bigger carbon footprint than a child anywhere else in the world. For the moment, falling birthrates in the richest countries are good news for the globe, as they apply a certain restraint to global warming. Not enough mind you.

(housekeeping note: I'm at the Mission 21 Conference in Bath for the next couple of days, so if comments take time to appear, it's because I've not sussed out the wifi provision.)

Technorati top Religious Blogs (if anyone still cares?)

For some time now, Technorati has been a bit of a byword among blog ranking services: slow, erratic, past its best etc., with the only possible advantage being that it shows who's linked to your blog in the last 90 days or so (contrast with Alexa, which purports to show 'links in' but may as well show the recipe for Crab and Toenail soup for all the accuracy this has).

(Update: judging by the comments, the days of being a byword are far from over!)

In October '09, they did a big reorganisation: gone went the old 'authority' (= the total number of sites linking to you in the last 90 days), there's now a new ranking out of 1000, a bit like the cricket international player stats, based on number and relevance of links in.

Even cuter, you get a different 'authority' within any subcategories your blog falls into. I'm enjoying the moment of being in the top 35 'Religion' blogs, which probably won't last, as they continue to update the lists and include more of the many blogs which really should be in this category but haven't found their way there yet.

For the record, the current top 10*, which will certainly broaden my reading, is:
1. What does the prayer really say? Catholic priest, prolific - does he do this full time?
2. Tim Challies
3. Jesus Creed (Scot McKnight at Beliefnet)
4. Catholic Exchange which looks more like an online magazine than a blog, but plenty there.
5. Albert Mohler
6. The Catholic Key which has a fascinating post on the RC proposal to admit disaffected Anglicans. The gap between Rome's "Here is what you requested" and Anglicanism's "Is this what I was asking for?" is huge. The gap is between Rome's offer of an Anglican expression of Catholicism and Anglicanism's hope for a Catholic blessing of Anglicanism.
7. The Resurgence looks to be lots of good stuff there.
8. Against Heresies the spirit of Irenaeus (it was him, wasn't it?) lives on in Martin Downes blog. Lots of theology.
9. Pyromaniacs espresso evangelicalism. No, make that Turkish. Love the graphics.
10. TitusOneNine.

All US and Catholic blogs, as far as I can tell. I imagine there may be a lot of flux as things settle down.

*the listing seems to be quite dynamic - I drafted this on Sunday evening, and by Monday morning it had changed, so the top 10 might be quite different once you read this!

Christmas Services

This is currently how the Christmas calendar is shaping up

28th Nov Christmas Dinner, St. Peters

6th Dec (Sun) Christingle 3.30pm, St. James
Weds 9th Dec 12.30 Yeovil College Carol Service
Thu 10th Dec 2pm Nativity, Westfield Infant School
Fri 11th 9.30am, 11am, 2pm Preston Primary Carols, St. James Church (done in 3 shifts as the church is too small to fit the children in all at the same time)
Sat 12th Wedding blessing

Sun 13th Cafe service Christmas celebration
Mon 14th Preschool carols, St. James
Tues 15th Nursery Christmas service, St. James
Weds 16th Parent and Toddlers Christmas party (am)
6.30pm Scout Carols, Abbey Community Centre.
Thurs 17th Abbey Pre-school nativity (am)
6pm Christingle, Brimsmore Garden Centre
Sat 19th 4pm Christingle, St. Peters

Sun 20th 6.30pm Carols by Candlelight, St. James
Mon 21 Westfield 'Stay and Play' Christmas story & prayers (am)
Christmas Eve 3pm & 5pm Nativity service, St. James (2 shifts for space reasons, see Fri 11th)
11pm Communion, St. Peters
Christmas Day 10.30m Family Communion, St. James

Just 20, plus normal services on Sundays on top of that. The next job is to work out how many Christmas talks I need to cover the above: there's unlikely to be too much overlap between, say, Yeovil College and the Scouts, but that will need to be different from the school talks as some of them will be in the Beaver and Cub groups.

Now is also a good time of year to wander round the local joke shop, scanning the shelves and muttering under my breath 'the Kingdom of God is like............' until something grabs me. In the days of Christmas Harry Potter movies it was easy, everyone had a common reference point. X Factor is a bit old hat now, and Doctor Who seems to be going for 'dark' in a big way, more Maunday Thursday than Christmas Eve.

PS thanks Phil, not quite sure what happened there!!

National Secular Society to Disband?

"We shouldn't have unelected people influencing decision making." (Terry Sanderson, NSS)

which kind of undermines the whole rationale of lobby groups like the National Secular Society, who are, by definition, unelected. A large part of their work is making submissions to government to try to influence decision making.

Compare and contrast Boris Johnson yesterday (see previous post) and John Denham in the story linked above: "I don't like the strand of secularism that says that faith is inherently a bad thing to have and should be kept out of public life," Mr Denham said. From what I can see Mr Denham is setting up a panel of faith group representatives to encourage them to do their bit in building a good society.

At the same time, he's quite open about the fact that, to be part of this process, faith groups need to be open to critique. That seems much healthier than shutting people out of the democractic process altogether - I'm not sure that's what the NSS are advocating, but that's what it sounds like.

Update: Church Mouse has a bit of background, and isn't that taken either with John Denhams proposal, or the NSS response.

Cameron "I believe in God and I'm a Christian" Songs of Praise interview

Following his evening standard interview a couple of weeks back, David Cameron will be talking about his faith on Songs of Praise this afternoon.

He said: "I believe in God and I'm a Christian and I worship - not as regularly as I should - but I go to church.
"Do I drop to my knees and ask for guidance whenever an issue comes up? No, I don't. But it's part of who I am.
"For me, and I suspect for lots of other people too, bad things actually sometimes make you think more about faith and the fact that you're not facing these things on your own."

full report on the Beeb here.