10 Clicks for £10k

At 9am today you can start voting for the New Westfield Community Centre in Yeovil to get £10,000 of funding from Aviva.

Use this link, every person gets 10 votes, and if you can use them all for our project then that would be brilliant, thankyou! Have a look at this video if you want to know what we're doing, or just read the blurb on the Aviva site.

We've raised £820,000 towards a £920,000 target, the Aviva funds will give us the money we need to kit the Community Centre out with kitchen, seating, pop up library and toys etc., so that it can be used by 5,000 local people in Yeovil, and help bring hope, life, fun and support to a whole community.

We reckon we'll need over 5000 votes to be in with a chance, which means over 500 people voting for us. Please be one of them!

Just a little project

Here's a little project I've been involved in for the last 3-4 years. It doesn't completely explain the absence of regular blogging since 2016, but its my best excuse for the moment. It's made for a Gift Day this Sunday, and hopefully by the time you watch this, the funding summary will already be out of date.

New Westfield Community Centre on Facebook

Or if you're really feeling inspired, give online here.

Amazon: Time for the Welby Effect?

If you earn money from a community, you should pay your share of tax to that community. I was in business, and I know that, within limits, its right and proper for people to arrange their tax affairs, and for companies to do so. But when vast companies like Amazon, and other online traders, the new industries, can get away with paying almost nothing in tax, there is something wrong with the tax system. They don’t pay a real living wage, so the tax payer must support their workers with benefits. And having leached off the tax payer once they don’t pay for our defence, for security, for stability, for justice, for health, for equality, for education. Then they complain of an undertrained work force, from the education they have not paid for, and pay almost nothing for apprenticeships. Those are only a fraction of the costs of aggressive tax management.

Mary spoke of the God who gave us Jesus as the one who “has shown strength with his arm;

He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,

And lifted up the lowly;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

And sent the rich away empty”.  

From Justin Welbys speech at the TUC conference yesterday. (Btw, he very cleverly tackled the anti-Semitism debate within Labour too, see if you can spot it)  Welby's comment about doing Wonga out of business in 2013 was followed by a series of revelations and disasters at the company. Amidst an avalanche of complaints, Wonga went into administration a few days ago. 

Biblical prophecy operates on the basis that as the prophet speaks God's message and God's verdict on human institutions, the act of speaking it out helps to bring that verdict into being. It may be my fevered imagination, but it has been downhill for Wonga ever since Welby publicly took them on. 

Amazon has so far remained untouched by every criticism and every revelation about its appalling record in paying tax. Will we see the Welby Effect on Amazon? Lets hope so. 

'Come over to Yeovil and help us'

We're advertising for a new Associate Vicar, 0.8 in the parish and 0.2 working across the Deanery to encourage mission and development of lay ministry. It's an exciting job, and all the details are here.

If you want to find out more, please get in touch via our website, or message me on Facebook.

If you don't want to find out more, please pray for God to send us the right person for this next chapter in our life and mission.

'my secret is that I need God'

This is not to say my life is bad. I know it isn't...but my life is not what I expected it might have been when I was younger. Maybe you yourself deal with this issue better than me. Maybe you have been lucky enough to never have inner voices question you about your own path--or maybe you answered the questioning and came out on the other side. I don't feel sorry for myself in any way. I am merely coming to grips with what I know the world is truly like.

Sometimes I want to go to sleep and merge with the foggy world of dreams and not return to this, our real world. Sometimes I look back on my life and am surprised at the lack of kind things I have done. Sometimes I just feel that there must be another road that can be walked--away from this became--either against my will or by default.

Now--here is my secret:

I tell it to you with the openness of heart that I doubt I shall ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words. My secret is that I need God--that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. (Douglas Coupland 'Life after God')

Fruit and Veg Christmas

Draft script for a Christmas talk involving 30 separate items of fruit and veg. If you have any other suggestions or suggested edits then please pop them in the comments, this is a work in progress!

Fruit and veg Christmas story

Do you eat healthily at Christmas? Yes me too. (not!)

But Christmas really is good for you.

So here’s a healthy Christmas message.

The bible starts with a garden full of good things. And just one fruit that the man and the woman weren’t supposed to eat. One apple, one small thing, but they thought they knew better than God and took it. Then they hid. Where did the woman go? Where did the Mango? And we’ve been hiding from God ever since

So God came to seek us. It starts with Mary, a young woman who loved God, meeting a messenger. An angel. It’s an amazing thing to meet an angel

Mary was a bit worried – well you would be - but the angel said Peas be with you. God has chosen you, you’re to have a child, the promised saviour. God is coming to find you.

Cool as a cucumber, Mary said ‘yes’ to God’s will, because she trusted God.

Now Mary was engaged to Joseph, and God had bean speaking to him too. In a dream he was told that this child was Gods, and that he was to look after Mary and the baby.

Soon after, everyone had to go to their home town to pay a tax. Joseph wasn’t very wealthy, he didn’t have a big celery, but the pear of them set off for Bethlehem. A journey of 80 miles or so. They didn’t avocado (have a car though), maybe not even a donkey – the bible doesn’t mention one. So just imagine on foot, Mary pregnant, walking at 1 melon hour, maybe two. A long, tough journey, it took plenty of thyme to get there.

They got to Bethlehem, but it was full. It was a really bad time to turnip. There wasn't mushroom at the inn. People used to keep their animals indoors in winter, in a section of the house, so maybe instead of staying in a guestroom, the innkeeper actually had Mary and Joseph into his own home. And there Jesus was born, and placed in a feeding trough, with animals around him, some sat, suma asleep. They were too poor to have a blanket, so they wrapped Jesus in strips of cloth to stop him getting chilli.

On the hillside outside Bethelehem were shepherds, night security guarding the flocks. Suddenly, more angels! “Peas be with you. To you the saviour is born at last, down there, in Bethlehem”. When the angels had gone the shepherds said to each other: Lettuce go and see this thing the angels have told us about. So they left the sheep and sprinted down to Bethelehem. It must have been a bit of a squash when they all arrived

The Bible also tells of Sages from the East, who followed signs in the sky to find a newborn king, bringing herbs and spices. They first came to the king in Jerusalem, Herod, who was a bit of a bad apple. Herod had a complete ban on another person taking over from him. When Herod heard of the newborn king, he had a bad case of sour grapes, and turned orange, or maybe peach, or even radish (reddish) with rage. Go and find him, then come back and tell me where he is.

The wise men weren’t called wise men for nothing. They went straight to see Jesus to offer their gifts: incense, myrrh, 24 carrot gold – gifts to Jesus for a true king. But they didn’t want the news to Leek out back to Herod, Butternut tell him, so they took another route home.

Mary, Joseph, shepherds, innkeeper, kings, wise men. But the main person in this story is Jesus.

However you slice it, at the core of all this, is God in human skin, a segment of heaven come down to earth, God’s appeal to everyone, Whether you’re a kiwi, a mandarin or made in Britain, Jesus was born for you. Jesus pips every other Christmas present going. Jesus loves me from my head to-ma-toes, and he loves you too.

The only person who comes out of this story the same as they went in is Herod: he is angry, violent, proud and scary before Jesus is born, and he’s angry, violent, proud and scary after. Everyone else is changed – Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the wise men. God even changes, becoming one of us, becoming human, to sow a seed of new life into your heart and mine.

God made us to bear fruit, not to be a vegetable. We can be a couch potato, taking life in like we take in all the presents and the food and the tinsel and everything else, but never changing, never growing, never going deeper into love and joy and why we’re here. Or we can let this Christmas, this child, this God, sows a seed in my heart that will bear fruit.

So make Jesus one of your 5 a day, every day, and have a happy, healthy and joyful Christmas. 

Barbarian Government

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the dark ages which are already upon us. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

(Alastair MacIntyre 'After Virtue')

Written 26 years ago, this seems truer than ever, 

Church of England Attendance Change by Diocese, 2011-16

The latest Church of England attendance figures are out, and full marks to the CofE for producing them in Excel format as well as the usual pdfs. So much easier to play about with.

The good news, however, ends there.

You can always tell if it's been an iffy year, because the press release accompanying the stats is on something other than whats happening in a normal church on a normal Sunday. This year it's the social media profile.

I've been blogging for years on what's happening in the Dioceses, and whether we are, at last turning the corner. Sad to report that the answer is no: at least, not based on the official stats. If anything, it's getting worse

In the last 5 years, only two dioceses have seen adult Sunday attendance grow - London continues to be the engine room of the CofE, but many of the Dioceses that were doing well last time round have seen a sharp drop in numbers. For numbers, read people (see Acts in the New Testament, does it all the time). The rate of decline across the CofE has increased, and to have 12 dioceses recording losses in double figures compares with 5 for 2009-14. 

Maybe the next generation will save us? Maybe not. Again, London is growing, again, nobody else is, and the figures towards the bottom of the table are catastrophic.

Perhaps the hope lies in non-Sunday worship? After all, millions of people now work on a Sunday, and the competition with leisure activities etc. is intense. Adult attendance Mon-Sat has risen from 112,000 to 122,000, so it is both growing, and a higher proportion of overall CofE attendance. However childrens midweek attendance has dropped like a stone - I'm hoping that's to do with a different recording system, but fear that it might not be.

There is wider cultural change too, away from Christendom and the culture that supported an established church. Baptisms, weddings and funerals taken by the CofE have dropped by 15, 21 and 28% respectively in the last 10 years. This in turn reduces the pool of community contacts and means local churches have to work harder to engage with the community, and move beyond dependence on the 'occasional offices' as a way of connecting with people.

One glimmer of hope in the figures is on p10 of the full report. Churches were asked to report on 'joiners' and 'leavers' during the year, and 80,000 people were reported as joining CofE churches. 32% of the adults and 58% of the children had never been church members before. That's encouraging, or does it just mean that we notice more when people join than when they leave?

There is probably a lot more to say in the detail, but I hope these stats are actually used for mission - I blogged on a previous occasion how the only people who paid any attention to membership figures were the finance department. A vicar who's seen their attendance drop by 15% in a year is more likely to get a call questioning whether they've under-reported to save on parish share (contributions to the Diocese) than whether they are ok and if they need any support.

Many Dioceses now have a mission strategy, including even Bath and Wells (I know, it's hard to believe at times), and it looks like we need it more than ever. But it shouldn't be a preservation strategy, even though God has probably used the ghastly stats above to kick the recalcitrant CofE out of its sniffiness about evangelism. We now need to get over our complacency about prayer.

Update: final thoughts - the 4,000 smallest churches have an average weekly attendance of 12, i.e. small enough to fit into a decent size front room. On average, CofE churches have a worshipping community of 75, with 54 of those present on any normal Sunday.  This means that on a normal Sunday 1/3 of the congregation is absent. How does a church work and thrive and grow in relationships with this dynamic?

Also, each vicar costs roughly twice the average salary (due to housing, training, pension costs), so 40 people giving the 'Anglican tithe' of 5% to their church could support one. Bump that up to 50 for other central costs (our Diocese has over 50 support staff, sorting out things like training, finance, safeguarding, schools). Then you've got to find money to run the church - resources, building costs, etc. If some of those church members are fairly new, it's not long before you get to the point that the average local church only works if it's overseen by a part-time vicar. Either that or it loses the building (the other major cost centre). We have roughly 7,000 vicars to 16,000 churches, so it has to be that way anyway. Despite no longer being able to sustain the '1 parish 1 vicar' model, CofE structures and expectations are still largely based on it. We're like a fat man after a successful diet still trying to wear the same clothes. Buildings, parish boundaries, the expectation (indeed the law of the land) of weekly communion, committee structures, recognition of lay ministry (Lay Readers are the main accredited role alongside clergy, following 2 years theological training, Deacons get lip service and little more) etc.remain largely untouched from 20, 50, 100 years ago. And every few years, your parish gets blessed with an enforced vacancy, just to stifle any growth you might have managed to muster.

Either the system will collapse under its own wait (scroll up - maybe we're witnessing that already), or we need a decisive shift away from ancient buildings, paid clergy, or an over-clericalised theology and practice of church that stifles lay leadership. Or there'll be a miracle. I'd argue we need both.

update: a few more links at Thinking Anglicans.

PS if you're sharing this on Facebook, please could you tag me in, would be good to see the debate on FB as well as on the blogs.

update 2: At over 7000 views this is now the third-most read post on this blog (out of nearly 2600 posts). That is already more than the average Adult attendance in 2 Dioceses (Sodor and Man and, ironically, Hereford), and also exceeds the number of men confirmed in the CofE last year (6581). As a sign of the times, Facebook is the source for nearly 2/3 of the visits here, comfortably outstripping Twitter and other blogs. 9.50pm make that 9500 views, why so many visitors?

Update 3 Jeremy Marshall has some very perceptive analysis on his blog, worth a read if you are more interested in how we respond to all this.