Lets Go Buy A Pipe

If you've ever looked at a metal organ pipe and thought 'you know what, I would just love to have one of those in my house', then now's your chance. Our creaky church organ has drawn its last breath, and we're looking forward to its digital replacement arriving next month.

One or two Tweeters expressed an interest in these, so here's a picture, drop me a line if you'd like one, reasonable offers all accepted. I must stress that the organ is now in pieces, so it's individual pipes we're selling.

And yes, here I am on my pionnering, ground-breaking mission blog with a picture of a church organ. It's so humiliating I feel like a Libdem leader giving a public apology.

Though (tenuous mission link) clearing out the organ loft will, in the longer term, give us room for an extra 20 people, and a possible meeting room. In a church that only seats 90 before it gets uncomfy, that'll be quite a help.

A Town Called Mercy: Atonement 101

Catching up with the latest Doctor Who on Iplayer, and what a brilliant episode. Cowboys versus Aliens, but done well. And at the heart of it, a superb meditation on violence, revenge, redemption, atonement and justice.

Part of my staple childhood diet was Westerns, I would go round chewing spent matchsticks pretending to be Clint Eastwood (and fail just as badly as the Doctor does in Mercy). The plot was always the same: baddies do something bad, ride around scowling and looking swarthy. Good guy (usually Lone Good Guy) has showdown with bad guys and shoots them dead. Justice = revenge.

So Doctor Who plunged straight into this moral maze and asked a lot of questions of it. At the centre of the plot is Jex, an alien doctor, a war criminal, who has landed in a Western town, saved it from a cholera epidemic and introduced it to electricity. He saved the town. But now he is being hunted down by a cyborg gunslinger, who wants to bring him to justice for his past crimes, i.e. shoot him. The Doctor ends up embroiled in all of this, and is pulled in all directions:

First, he looks to hand doctor Jex over to the cyborg, one man dying to save the village: 'When did killing someone become an option?' asks Amy, not unreasonably. The Doctor replies with an outburst that might become one of this generation's 'do you remember?' moments in years to come: 'Every time I negotiate, I try to understand. Not today. No, today, I honour the victims. His, The Masters', The Daleks'. All the people who died because of my mercy.'

then later tries to save him, and eventually Jex takes his fate into his own hands. Along the way are several nods to faith: the village gathers to pray whilst the Doctor tries to save them from the cyborg, and Jex speaks of what he expects after he dies, that he will have to climb a mountain, carrying the souls of all the people that he's killed. In a nice contrast to the usual run of things, his faith and religious worldview is part of the plot, rather than seen as a mania.

There are longer and more thoughtful reviews at:
Shadowlocked
From the North
Exploring our Matrix

and A Town Called Mercy leaves lots of questions hanging:
 - is revenge justice?
 - is it possible to atone for past wrongs, and who gets to decide when you've managed it?
 - is justice done to us after death, and does this make a difference to the justice we mete out to the living?
 - are there different moral rules in war?
 - if mercy results in more people dying, because you were compassionate to someone who went on to do more evil, then is it better to be ruthless?
 - (at a wider level) how far has the Western/American view of justice been drip-fed into our culture via film and media, and how far does it inform US views of justice and foreign policy, and by extension our own? Do we base decisions on a robust morality of justice, or a more emotive desire to avenge?
 - Can you run a society purely on mercy?
 - (from the last couple of minutes of the episode) how do you decomission people? The Gunslinger, built to be a weapon of war, can't see a purpose to his life beyond killing. The Doctor recommissions him to be an 'angel' of peace, watching over the town and protecting it. I once had a conversation with a former soldier, who remarked that life post-army was a struggle, compared to the level of camaraderie and intensity of life in the battlefield. There didn't seem to be a peacetime purpose which made him feel alive in the same way.

Great stuff.

How to Encourage Your Congregation

Two of our church members told me today they were encouraged by something I'd said in my sermon yesterday. My ears pricked up, my encouragement-o-meter revved into gear, I prepared myself for the life-changing revelation that my inspired words had brought about.

It turned out that the most encouraging part of yesterday morning was the bit where I talked about my struggles to pray: my prayer routines falling apart during the summer holidays, and that often I couldn't remember what I'd been reading in the Bible within 5 minutes of putting the book down.

Many years ago I heard someone preaching on 'fellowship in weakness', and he observed that it's very hard to get close to someone who's good at everything. It's actually our weaknesses that open us up to each other, make us human and approachable. Sometimes our best role models are people who fail well.

topless royals

I really can't see what all the fuss is about












now ask yourself, why did you click on this link?

SPCK vs Society of St Stephen the Great: the end.

Phil Groom reports the closing of the book on the sorry case of the Society of St. Stephen the Great, and their destruction of what used to be SPCK bookshops. Full background at the SPCK/SSG blog, (and an update based on the SPCK statement) for those who remember this ongoing campaign. SPCK statement here.

Nativity Factor promo

Odd Silences

Odd Silence 1: there is normally a rapid response unit at WATCH and Reform (CofE lobby groups) to any statement on women bishops by the Men in Purple. At the time of writing, despite a meeting and press release yesterday there are no press statements by either group. I must say I'm delighted, well done everyone, I've wondered aloud before whether the debate was being taken over by the lobby groups, and whether it might be better if they went quiet and just let people pray and listen to each other. Could this actually be happening? Or is it that, like me, they don't actually know what the latest amendment really means?

(Update: it couldn't last, there is now a statement from WATCH, oddly it's on their Facebook page, though still no sign of it on their website. But nobody should read it, you can make up your own mind without someone else doing it for you)

Odd Silence 2: having kept Gordon Browns 'bigots' comment hanging over his head for the rest of the election campaign, the BBC have gone strangely quiet on Nick Clegg. Not a peep in the Politics section of their website since Tuesdays row, despite a letter of apology to church leaders in the meantime. Ok, he didn't actually say the word, but it could easily have been made into a running story, a 'beleaguered Clegg' ahead of the party conference.

Pitching a script for the next series of Rev.

Spotted in Salisbury today: a couple of vicars searching in vain around the Park and Ride for the car they'd arrived in earlier that day, whilst at the same time wondering why it was so hard to get their bearings. Followed 5 minutes later by the realisation that they'd caught the wrong bus and were at the wrong Park and Ride. Then having to explain all this to the bus driver who'd been watching them with increasing amusement, and again to the driver when they finally took the right bus, since the ticket had already been punched. "I'll believe you" he said "after all, nobody would admit to that if it wasn't true."

Cut to the 2nd Park and Ride 15 minutes later, and both vicars emerging from the car, locking it, waiting for 30 seconds, unlocking it, and getting back in again. Several buttons are pushed in different orders to try to get the electronic starter to work, until they give up and consult the object of ultimate masculine failure, the Instruction Sheet. What kind of car needs an A4 instruction sheet on how to start the engine? What kind of driver needs an A4...... as training ministers for 2 future CofE clergy, it's good to know that the future of Anglicanism is safe in our hands. I mean, their hands.