It was fun to watch the England rugby team finally playing something like decent rugby last night, to beat Tonga (population 100,000, so it was more like watching England v Darlington) to get through to the quarter finals of the world cup. Some parts of it were wince-worthy in the extreme, as grown men with a combined weight of 40 stones collided with each other at full speed.
Rugby's not really my game. I'm trying to find a sports team to join at the moment, and was quite attracted by the new Mudford football team, who went down 27-0 to Westlands last Saturday, and even had the grace to let their photo go into the local paper. They only managed to field 9 players, I'm about 20 years younger than the oldest player, so maybe it's a team where there might be a place for me.
And maybe that's what people want from the church. Folk who aren't afraid to lose heavily in public and still smile about it. A team which has a place for people who aren't perfect, a team which plays for fun, a team with room for the old and the young.
On the train back from consuming lots of chocolate cake at a conference in Salisbury, I started reading 'The Provocative Church' by Graham Tomlin. It raises the vital question of why, with so many Alpha courses and evangelistic stuff going on, that most people aren't interested in what Christians have got to say. His thesis is that there isn't enough distinctive and different about the lives of Christians. If there were, people would be interested in what makes us tick. The church should be the kind of team that people want to join, just like the community of Acts 2, whose community life was so vibrant that God added to their number on a daily basis. So as we think in Yeovil about how to enable a missionary Christian presence in new (and existing) housing estates, this question of the quality of Christian community keeps coming back again and again. It's not enough to have a shared vision, shared mission, shared theology. It's the quality of our love, unity and community life - those things which Jesus prays for in John 17 - which are at the core of how we do God's mission in the world.
Tony Campolo (go to about 17 mins 30 sec in this vid and watch the story about Honolulu) talks about a Christian community that "...throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3.30 in the morning', (to which the Honolulu barman responds) 'no you don't! no you don't! I would join a church like that!' wouldn't we all join a church like that? I got news for you, that is the kind of church that Jesus came to create, I don't know where we got this other one."
What kind of church am I part of? Who would want to join it? Would Jesus?
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Back to Hype Sunday
According to the CofE media centre (it used to be called 'news'), 20,000 people will be coming back to church this Sunday, in response to 'Back to Church Sunday'. If true, that's an impressive statistic, but how do they know? There's clearly an effort to create a sense of momentum and of something important happening, but I'm always a bit ambivalent about these things, because if the promise isn't realised then it all goes strangely quiet, and the media centre turns to other things, rather than looking at why the event didn't live up to the hype.
The story is at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr8607.html and at the end of a list of attention-grabbing things that bishops are doing is by far the most significant paragraph:
Canon Paul Bayes, the Church of England’s National Mission and Evangelism Adviser, believes the event is a key opportunity for churches: “The most important thing about Back to Church Sunday is ensuring that those returning to church get a truly warm welcome. Things like the length of services, the hymns and songs we sing and even the way we give out notices can all have an impact on the welcome people feel. It’s also critical that churches think though what they can offer people who have made that brave step to come back. I hope many churches will be setting up an informal course explaining the Christian faith, or perhaps holding special lunches over the next weeks for returning worshippers to meet each other.”
The thing is that if we gave a warm welcome to the folk who just dropped in on an ordinary week, and treated our worship as the 'shop window' it actually is to enquirers, that those 20,000 would turn up without any great advertising push, and they'd have a positive experience of the church. It's a marketeers way of talking about love, but 'customer service' is what people pay attention to. We love the newcomer by welcoming them, giving up the best pew for them, letting them to the front of the coffee queue, and forgoing our weekly chat with our best chums in order to spend time with them. That should be normal.
The story is at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/pr8607.html and at the end of a list of attention-grabbing things that bishops are doing is by far the most significant paragraph:
Canon Paul Bayes, the Church of England’s National Mission and Evangelism Adviser, believes the event is a key opportunity for churches: “The most important thing about Back to Church Sunday is ensuring that those returning to church get a truly warm welcome. Things like the length of services, the hymns and songs we sing and even the way we give out notices can all have an impact on the welcome people feel. It’s also critical that churches think though what they can offer people who have made that brave step to come back. I hope many churches will be setting up an informal course explaining the Christian faith, or perhaps holding special lunches over the next weeks for returning worshippers to meet each other.”
The thing is that if we gave a warm welcome to the folk who just dropped in on an ordinary week, and treated our worship as the 'shop window' it actually is to enquirers, that those 20,000 would turn up without any great advertising push, and they'd have a positive experience of the church. It's a marketeers way of talking about love, but 'customer service' is what people pay attention to. We love the newcomer by welcoming them, giving up the best pew for them, letting them to the front of the coffee queue, and forgoing our weekly chat with our best chums in order to spend time with them. That should be normal.
Christian Blog Awards
Dave Walker has the full run-down of winners at the recent Christian Blog awards, so rather than me putting all the links here, go and see his site instead.
Besides, I'm too busy listening to Gordon Browns speech to the Labour conference and totting up the number of Bible references: suffer the children to come to me (slightly scary thought!!), and the parable of the talents are the main ones so far. 'No injustice can last forever' (he's just said that, in a section on human rights) is a profoundly Biblical thought. However, as with many politicians, and in fact plenty of preachers too, there's a question of whether Brown is expounding the meaning of the texts, or just using them as pegs to hang his ideas on. Probably both.
Besides, I'm too busy listening to Gordon Browns speech to the Labour conference and totting up the number of Bible references: suffer the children to come to me (slightly scary thought!!), and the parable of the talents are the main ones so far. 'No injustice can last forever' (he's just said that, in a section on human rights) is a profoundly Biblical thought. However, as with many politicians, and in fact plenty of preachers too, there's a question of whether Brown is expounding the meaning of the texts, or just using them as pegs to hang his ideas on. Probably both.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Connecting Harvest to real life
Ben Witherington's blog quotes at length a brilliant poem by Studdert Kennedy, here's the first few stanzas
Yes I used to believe in Jesus Christ
And I used to go to church.
But since I left home and came to France,
I've been clean knocked off my perch.
For it seemed alright at home it did,
To believe in a God above
And in Jesus Christ his only Son
What died on the cross through Love.
When I went for a walk of a Sunday morn
On a nice fine day in the spring
I could see the proof of the living God
In every living thing.
For how could the grass and the trees grow up,
All alone of their bloomin' selves?
Ye might as well believe in fairy tales,
And think they were made by elves.
So I thought that that long haired atheist
Was nothing but a silly sod
For how did he account for my Brussel sprouts,
If he didn't believe in God?
But it ain't the same out here,
you knowIt's as different as chalk and cheese,
For half of its blood and the other half mud,
And I'm darned if I really see
How the God who has made such a cruel cruel world
Can have love in his heart for men,
And be deaf to the cries of the men as dies
And never comes home again.
With a series of harvest talks, where I'm called to account for Brussel sprouts (are they evidence for or against the existence of God?), it's easy to fall in with English romanticism about the countryside and just spout warm thoughts. But the poem, narrated by a soldier in the trenches, questions whether the God of the vegetable garden cuts any kind of ice at all in the grim realities of a suffering world. We serve people poorly if we let harvest become a day when we romanticise nature and God's place in it. All this does is give anyone with a brain the message that God is irrelevant, a warm thought for people who can't cope with messy reality.
Harvest connects to all sorts of things: climate change, foot and mouth, the struggles of the farming community, the toxic dominance of the supermarkets over food producers, these are all things which come naturally from talking about vegetables. You can even connect it to the Iraq war, because oil is part of the harvest of the earth. In fact, most wars are, in some part, to do with resources (water, oil, land, rivers, people) and who gets to control them. And we also need to remember that God didn't finish creation on the 5th day. People are part of it, the best part of it. Incredible but true.
But if that's all too much for you, just scroll down a bit more on his blog and there's lots of cute pictures of dogs and cats.
Yes I used to believe in Jesus Christ
And I used to go to church.
But since I left home and came to France,
I've been clean knocked off my perch.
For it seemed alright at home it did,
To believe in a God above
And in Jesus Christ his only Son
What died on the cross through Love.
When I went for a walk of a Sunday morn
On a nice fine day in the spring
I could see the proof of the living God
In every living thing.
For how could the grass and the trees grow up,
All alone of their bloomin' selves?
Ye might as well believe in fairy tales,
And think they were made by elves.
So I thought that that long haired atheist
Was nothing but a silly sod
For how did he account for my Brussel sprouts,
If he didn't believe in God?
But it ain't the same out here,
you knowIt's as different as chalk and cheese,
For half of its blood and the other half mud,
And I'm darned if I really see
How the God who has made such a cruel cruel world
Can have love in his heart for men,
And be deaf to the cries of the men as dies
And never comes home again.
With a series of harvest talks, where I'm called to account for Brussel sprouts (are they evidence for or against the existence of God?), it's easy to fall in with English romanticism about the countryside and just spout warm thoughts. But the poem, narrated by a soldier in the trenches, questions whether the God of the vegetable garden cuts any kind of ice at all in the grim realities of a suffering world. We serve people poorly if we let harvest become a day when we romanticise nature and God's place in it. All this does is give anyone with a brain the message that God is irrelevant, a warm thought for people who can't cope with messy reality.
Harvest connects to all sorts of things: climate change, foot and mouth, the struggles of the farming community, the toxic dominance of the supermarkets over food producers, these are all things which come naturally from talking about vegetables. You can even connect it to the Iraq war, because oil is part of the harvest of the earth. In fact, most wars are, in some part, to do with resources (water, oil, land, rivers, people) and who gets to control them. And we also need to remember that God didn't finish creation on the 5th day. People are part of it, the best part of it. Incredible but true.
But if that's all too much for you, just scroll down a bit more on his blog and there's lots of cute pictures of dogs and cats.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Toil and Trouble
I normally avoid blogging on issues affecting worldwide Anglicanism, partly because it's all become too complex to follow what's happening (just try to follow the Thinking Anglicans blog for more than 7 days and you'll see what I mean.), and partly because the online community has helped to make things worse. Writing a letter, then getting round to posting it, makes you take time to think. Ringing someone up or meeting face to face helps you to remember that you're dealing with real people, not abstract ideas. But blogging means that a word in secret one day by the next can be all over the internet, with thousands of people having their say. One thing that has prevented the various parties in the Anglican church from having a proper debate is that for the entire process there has been one eye on the media and the online community. Rowan Williams seems to be one of the few people immune to the need to provide soundbites and press releases on a daily basis, and he's then villified for not communicating.
In the midst of all this, and the almost weekly claims to 'defining moments' in the ongoing debate, it's hard to know where to start. Archbishop Rowan is in the US over the next few days, in advance of a 30th September deadline for the North American churches to respond to the Windsor Report. (The Windsor Report was the official Anglican response to the decisino by the US church to ordain a non-celibate gay man as bishop, and the Canadian church to begin blessing same-sex relationships). The reports has asked for a moratorium on these practices, and for discussion rather than churches taking unilateral actions.
Trouble is, part of the evangelical wing of the church has taken its own unilateral action. I've long since lost count of the number of bishops 'ordained' by African churches to oversee congregations in the US. The argument is that the US Episcopal church hierarchy has abandoned the historic Christian creeds and scriptures, and an alternative set of bishops is needed to provide godly and scriptural oversight. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how this could be extended to the UK, all it needs is one controversial decision by the Anglican hierachy and the Nigerian or Ugandan hierarchy will be over laying hands on a prominent evangelical Brit to ordain them as an alternative bishop.
Not much of this finds its way down to Yeovil, but if you read this and you pray, please can you pray for the Anglican church, that we seek first to glorify God, and second to love one another. Please pray for the politiking to stop so that we can get on with the mission we've been given.
In the midst of all this, and the almost weekly claims to 'defining moments' in the ongoing debate, it's hard to know where to start. Archbishop Rowan is in the US over the next few days, in advance of a 30th September deadline for the North American churches to respond to the Windsor Report. (The Windsor Report was the official Anglican response to the decisino by the US church to ordain a non-celibate gay man as bishop, and the Canadian church to begin blessing same-sex relationships). The reports has asked for a moratorium on these practices, and for discussion rather than churches taking unilateral actions.
Trouble is, part of the evangelical wing of the church has taken its own unilateral action. I've long since lost count of the number of bishops 'ordained' by African churches to oversee congregations in the US. The argument is that the US Episcopal church hierarchy has abandoned the historic Christian creeds and scriptures, and an alternative set of bishops is needed to provide godly and scriptural oversight. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how this could be extended to the UK, all it needs is one controversial decision by the Anglican hierachy and the Nigerian or Ugandan hierarchy will be over laying hands on a prominent evangelical Brit to ordain them as an alternative bishop.
Not much of this finds its way down to Yeovil, but if you read this and you pray, please can you pray for the Anglican church, that we seek first to glorify God, and second to love one another. Please pray for the politiking to stop so that we can get on with the mission we've been given.
1-2-3 Push!
The headline in the local free paper:
Pressure Builds for New Toilets
could get messy......
Pressure Builds for New Toilets
could get messy......
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Just arrived....
an information/taster event for the
CHANGING LIVES FOR MISSION ‘Mission Shaped Ministry Course’
at St James Church, St James Street, Taunton, TA1 1JS
Monday 5th November at 7.30 till 9.00 pm
or
Tuesday 6th November at 2.30 till 4.00 pm
A one year course over 4 Saturdays and 9 evenings
Specially designed for all those in any way involved in the mission of the church and how we may prepare for the future.
There will be lively presentations from:
Canon Roger Medley – Bath & Wells Diocesan Missioner
Rev Dave Martin - Methodist District Evangelism Enabler
and The Archbishop of Canterbury's Missioner, Rev Dr Steven Croft, will be present to contribute and answer questions about ‘Fresh Expressions’
- what more could you want?
Send a brief e-mail to say you will be attending, or just come.
cfm@bathwells.anglican.org
comment: I'm hoping to take a group from Yeovil to this, the training will probably run from February next year, and if we've started to identify people interested in being on the mission teams to the new housing estates, this would be an ideal form of preparation. More information about the full course can be found here. There's also a leaflet on the Taunton course - email to the above link or post a comment here and you'll be sent one.
an information/taster event for the
CHANGING LIVES FOR MISSION ‘Mission Shaped Ministry Course’
at St James Church, St James Street, Taunton, TA1 1JS
Monday 5th November at 7.30 till 9.00 pm
or
Tuesday 6th November at 2.30 till 4.00 pm
A one year course over 4 Saturdays and 9 evenings
Specially designed for all those in any way involved in the mission of the church and how we may prepare for the future.
There will be lively presentations from:
Canon Roger Medley – Bath & Wells Diocesan Missioner
Rev Dave Martin - Methodist District Evangelism Enabler
and The Archbishop of Canterbury's Missioner, Rev Dr Steven Croft, will be present to contribute and answer questions about ‘Fresh Expressions’
- what more could you want?
Send a brief e-mail to say you will be attending, or just come.
cfm@bathwells.anglican.org
comment: I'm hoping to take a group from Yeovil to this, the training will probably run from February next year, and if we've started to identify people interested in being on the mission teams to the new housing estates, this would be an ideal form of preparation. More information about the full course can be found here. There's also a leaflet on the Taunton course - email to the above link or post a comment here and you'll be sent one.
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