Cerne Abbas Homer

Just down the road from Yeovil, the Cerne Abbas Giant has acquired a new friend. Homer Simpson, brandishing a doughnut, (or donut if you can't spell), has appeared, allegedly as a marketing ploy for the new Simpsons movie.

Interestingly, the Pagan Federation are rather upset, and are going to do a rain dance so that the biodegradable paint washes away sooner rather than later. Read the story here, or go and see for yourself. And no, I'm not running a caption competition.

Sunday-Monday disconnect

found a great thread on The Forgotten Ways blog which explores the idea of Sunday-Monday disconnect. It's something that goes by lots of other names: dualism, sacred vs secular etc. Here's what blogger and emerging church thinker Alan Hirsch has to say:

This dualistic spirituality has been called a number of things, but perhaps the idea of the Sunday-Monday disconnect brings the experience to the fore. We experience a certain type of God on Sunday, but Monday is another matter—“this is ‘the real world’ and things work differently here.” How many times have we ‘professional’ ministers heard variations of that phrase? “You don’t really understand. It’s just not as easy for me as it is for you. You work in the church with Christians”, etc. The two ‘spheres of life,’ the sacred and the secular, are conceived as being infinitely different and heading in opposite directions. It is left to the believer to live one way in the sacred sphere and have to another in the secular. It is the actual way we do church that communicates this non-verbal message of dualism. The medium is the message after all. And it sets people up to see things in an essentially distorted way where God is limited to the religious sphere. This creates a vacuum that is filled by idols and false, or incomplete, worship.

here's a couple of helpful pictures from that blog entry,

but rather than plagiarise any more, go and read it yourself. It's interesting how this picks up on the discussion we had last night about where our Cafe Service was going, and how what we've decided to do in the autumn is thinking very much along these lines, so that's a nice confirmation!

On a related topic, the After Sunday Project is a Christian initiative looking specifically at the relationship between faith and work. It's a good resource for people trying to relate faith and work, and the website looks well put together. It's based in Durham diocese, but is relevant everywhere.

Sing something sinful

During Sunday's talk I encouraged folk in the church to argue with the preacher, and one or two took me at my word, I'm glad to say. At the church door I was challenged about one of the songs we'd sung, and the fact that what we were singing simply wasn't true. The service had closed with the song 'These are the days of Elijah', which has the following line:

"these are the days of Your servant David
rebuilding the temple of praise"

which, of course, David didn't do first time round - the inference from the song is that David built the original Temple for people to praise God, and he didn't. So the song is incorrect.

The dominoes started to topple. A song which has fallen out of use, but which also sprang to mind, is 'Jesus we celebrate your victory', which has the line

"and in His presence our problems disappear"

which is wrong in a different way - our problems don't disappear in God's presence, though we may get a new perspective on them, or new grace to bear them.

The next domino was the Vineyard song, 'Hungry', one of a quite large group of songs which describes what we (the singers) are doing as we sing it....

"I'm falling on my knees
offering all of me"

be honest now, if you've ever sung that song, do you bend your legs at 90 degrees at that point? Thought not. And that's not to mention songs which speak of lifting hands, opening eyes, closing eyes, falling face down, running, dancing, and all the other language - a lot of it found in the Psalms - which talks about how we worship God with our bodies at the same time as we are offering songs and prayers.

'Ah yes, but I'm falling on my knees on the inside', hmmm, a good English cop-out?

Tricky one this: part of the way songs work is that they express aspirations, or reinforce truths, which we haven't quite reached yet but the songs help get us closer. We sing 'my chains fell off, my heart was free' and the words and the tune themselves make us feel free-er: the song itself can take us to a place that we weren't at before we started singing.

But there's a fine line between the song as a vehicle and a moulder of our spirits, and singing things we don't believe just because they're set to a good tune and we're not really using our brains. The spiritual danger is that we get used to being insincere, to declaring things we don't really believe, making promises to God we haven't thought through and don't intend to keep, and describing actions which we've no intention of taking. I'm sure this must come across as pretty strange to people who are new to our churches as well.

The story goes that the 'Soul Survivor' church in Watford stopped singing for the best part of a year because their worship itself was becoming an object of worship - people were more keen on singing along with a great band than they were on God himself. I admire that courage. I'm also keenly aware that I approve songs on the nod for use in church without really thinking enough about what they say, or the theology they communicate, or how they are moulding and shaping the spiritual life of worshippers.

Enquirers websites

Had an email whist on hol about a new 'virtual church' website, and thought I'd put up some links for sites aimed specifically at enquirers to the Christian faith.

http://www.church-on-the-net.com/ is said website, it has a weekly article (= sermon equivalent?), blogs, forums etc., but the standout is the Reference section, where I nearly got sidetracked by for several hours. It has a series of short articles about most of the major things - God, Jesus, prayer, suffering etc., and at the end of each has several web links to other helpful stuff on the topic, whether it's music videos, poems, clips from TV programmes, etc. So the section on Jesus links to bits of artwork, and the bit on 'church' directs you to a clip from the cartoon 'King of the Hill'. It really is very good.

http://www.rejesus.co.uk/expressions/index.html has been around for a few years, it's a good place to dig around, good quality stuff everywhere on the life and teaching of Jesus, and whilst you're looking you might stumble across an interesting meditation, bits of art, poetry, or a very well put together daily prayer.

The Church of England website has a small faith section at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/faith/ with some stories of people coming to faith, a brief definition of what a Christian is, but then signposts to the rejesus site above.

The Methodist church site has an exploring Christianity section, but again signposts rejesus. In fact, most of the main UK denominations send you to rejesus rather than having a major section on Christian life and faith on their own websites.

http://www.explorefaith.org/questions.html#faith is a site based on listing lots of questions that you might be asking yourself, then responding to the questions. The answers aren't cut and dried, which is a plus, and it's a very text-based site, which will be a plus to some and a minus to others.

A Google on Christianity throws up 'christianity.com', which I would have thought is a contradiction in terms. The '.com' means you get lots of adverts for stuff, which put me off reading anything they had to say.

Finally http://www.shipoffools.com/ , the granddaddy of decent Christian websites, doesn't set out to to answer any questions at all, but for anyone with a sense of humour who wants a more oblique approach to the Christian faith, it's a good place to start.

Meanwhile there is a discussion thread on the Cartoon Church website on whether evangelistic blogs actually work at all!

....and then after far too long foraging around the net, I couldn't find anything else worth linking to. What am I missing?

'Breakthrough Britain' - the Tory report on social breakdown

The Conservatives 'Social Justice Policy Group', chaired by Ian Duncan Smith, has just published an enormous report into social breakdown, with 190 recommendations for the Conservative party to debate and turn into policy in the next few months. The report homepage is here , and it splits into 6 sections, Family Breakdown, poverty, education, addiction, debt and the 'third sector' (charities and faith organisations). The BBC summary of the key recommendations is here

On an initial scan it's very promising. At last a politician with the guts to say that marriage is the best family structure, and to offer the staggering price tag of £102bn which family breakdown carries in UK society. It would be very easy to dismiss it all as 'nanny state telling us how to live our lives', but to be honest many of us aren't doing that good a job of living our lives.

The phrase 'breakdown society' is one used in the report and the accompanying publicity. It's something that many Christians have been going on about for years. Pray God that we now have a proper debate, and a new political consensus to do something about it.

1 day later: Gordon Brown scraps the plan for the Manchester supercasino. Yes! Maybe this is how a government of all the talents works - the Tories produce a report identifying a problem, and the PM announces to Parliament the following day what he's going to do about it. There are various whinings about the 'loss' of 2700 jobs - jobs which currently don't exist anyway - more important are the individuals and families who are going to be saved from debt, family breakdown and addiction. There's no point having a job if you blow all the money on slot machines.

youth cafe pix

Jeff Jacobson has updated his blog with some great 'before' and 'after' pictures of the Youth Cafe at St. Peters hall. Here's one of them, the rest are on his site.

Christian Blog Awards

Dave Walker notes that there is a Christian Blog Awards being organised by Premier. I've linked to his site rather than the awards site itself because Dave's is much easier to understand, and the relevant Premier website looks like an illustrated block graph of the quarterly trade deficit.

The whole thing is a bit evolutionary, so they are adding new categories as people come up with them. Trouble is that so many blogs are a bit of a hotch-potch, like this one, that they could end up with something hopelessly complex. The other drawback is that you have to nominate your own site, rather than let other people decide it's worth nominating. Even if I did think my site was worth nominating, hopefully I'd still have the humility not to nominate it. Does that make sense?

The only thing that can be nominated without blowing your own cyber-trumpet is the best church website. I've tried to find a list of the nominees so far but can't, which is a shame as it would be good to see what they look like. It's all being judged in-house, rather than voted for by the blogging community. Not sure what I think about that either!

Atlantic thought

At Duckpool on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall, and probably in several other bays as well, is a sign warning potential bathers of three hazards:

Strong waves

Tides

Undercurrents.

Walking up the coast from the bay, I started musing on whether life (in that very overused phrase which crops up on a daily basis in the papers and magazines at this time of year) is in fact a beach, and how our walk with God, and the whole of our inner life, is at threat from the same three things:

Strong waves - big things which knock us off our feet - bereavement, a new child, being sacked, moving house, major illness. We cope either by having a firm enough place to stand that we don't get swamped, or if we do get swamped, by knowing which way is up, so that we can find air again.

Tides - the things which happen again and again. Just up the coast one little cove has had most of its sand dragged out to sea by the tides, leaving it much stonier and less hospitable. The tides aren't an obvious threat, but habits and repeated things can erode our walk with God, drag the energy out of us. They are also opportunities: low tide exposes things which are covered up the rest of the time, and low tide in our own energy levels or spiritual life can uncover things which, when we're stronger, we're good at hiding. On the 1st week of holiday I was very grumpy and short tempered, low tide showed this up, and the challenge is to deal with it now I'm feeling a bit more rested.

Undercurrents - things we can't see but which can drag us way off course. The way to cope with them is either stay away, or have a good anchor which keeps you in place. Without a strong life of prayer, the spiritual disciplines, the scriptures, we're dragged off course by the undercurrents of a culture which is in constant drift away from God.

I get the feeling there's a lot more mileage in this metaphor, perhaps I need another fortnight in Cornwall.