The conventional wisdom, or maybe I just read it somewhere, is that if you're a church there's very little point shoving leaflets through people's letter boxes. If you really have to, make sure they're well produced, quality things, rather than just photocopied black and white thingy's about bell ringers and the flower group.
Well, being the cutting edge people we are, we're printing off a bout 3,000 black and white photocopied cards to shove through people's letter boxes. Worse, the shade of blue I ordered from the stationers turns out to be slightly darker than I'd pictured. I know that yellow is the best background colour for readability (and dyslexia apparently), but fancied a change from the colour of our Easter card. When I popped down to Yeovil Community Church to copy them last week I forgot to take both boxes of card, so we only had the first 1500 ready to go on Sunday.
So what do you know, I get a phone call from a couple in the church to say they're a few cards short for the (newly built) street they were covering. Later the same afternoon I get a call from someone on that street wanting to know more about the church, delighted to find we've got a Sunday school (though we call it something different), and saying she'll be along in the next week or two.
The only excuse the conventional wisdom might have is that, with lots of newer housing around, there's a chance that some people in those houses might want to find out about the local church as part of their process of settling in. Or maybe somebody prayed.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
The Worldometer
can be found here. Literally up to the minute info about the world - how many people were born today, how many died today, how much CO2 we churned out, very eye-opening.
Initially found it through a v nice site with lots of prayer ideas: http://www.youthideas.co.uk/yw/blog/labels/Prayer.html don't let the 'youth' put you off, there are plenty of creative prayer exercises that could be done with all ages.
Whilst I'm on the subject http://www.crusaders.org.uk/praycreate.html has more creative prayer ideas, and links to good resource sites on the web.
http://www.prayerrequests.co.uk/CreativeArchive1.html is even better, some of the classic creative prayer methods (e.g. using the fingers as a cue for prayer), and more aimed at an all-age audience. They add a new creative prayer idea every week, which is quite handy.
Initially found it through a v nice site with lots of prayer ideas: http://www.youthideas.co.uk/yw/blog/labels/Prayer.html don't let the 'youth' put you off, there are plenty of creative prayer exercises that could be done with all ages.
Whilst I'm on the subject http://www.crusaders.org.uk/praycreate.html has more creative prayer ideas, and links to good resource sites on the web.
http://www.prayerrequests.co.uk/CreativeArchive1.html is even better, some of the classic creative prayer methods (e.g. using the fingers as a cue for prayer), and more aimed at an all-age audience. They add a new creative prayer idea every week, which is quite handy.
Back to Church Sunday
Coming soon. Not to be confused with.......
a campaign launched today by Dave Walker. Aren't most Sundays like this?
a campaign launched today by Dave Walker. Aren't most Sundays like this?Monday, September 03, 2007
Random links
Did my infrequent trawl of blogland this afternoon, and found:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2367028.ece article by John Humphry's on agnosticism, there seem to be a lot of people lining up to talk about God in public, Humphry's approach seems slightly more balanced than those of Dawkins, Hitchens etc.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=439315&in_page_id=1811 a series of maps which show the 'shape' of the world according to different stats. The picture above is world military spending.
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/212177.aspx is the text and video from a Christian broadcaster in the US about Muslims turning to Christ. Exciting stuff. Love the Coptic guy.
Proost, one of the first sources of resources for alternative worship/emerging church has relaunched their website at http://www.proost.co.uk/ - has books, movies, worship resources, music etc., and if you subscribe for £60 you can download pretty much everything on the site for free. I'm going to wait a few months, as they promise to upload new things pretty regularly.
Church Weddings
Some very interesting research, signposted from Start the Week on current attitudes to marriage and committed relationships, and their reasons for wanting to be married, and for wanting, or not wanting, a church wedding.
The full document is at
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/weddingresearch.rtf
and if you've time, it's a very interesting read, especially the breakdown of the research into what reasons carry most weight in people's minds, and the differing reasons for marriage given by men and women.
In the final part of the document, the researchers identify 3 distinct groups of people who might want a church wedding:
1. couples who need most help and need to be given permission: who want a 'traditional wedding', are favourable to the church, but think that somehow they need to earn the right to be married in church because they aren't regulars or because their family arrangements don't match church teaching. They need the church to give them permission, without diminishing their sense of reverence for God or for what they are doing.
2. the 'don't want to get too involved' couple, who see their relationship as transactional, and don't want to engage with the church beyond getting the ceremony done. (In my limited experience, there seem to be less of these in Yeovil than in Darlington, but my research sample is smaller than the 1000 or so in the survey!)
3. a group which values flexibility and the chance to personalise. They relate well to the church, but are less interested in being 'conventional'.
The reports concludes that the church needs to communicate in different ways to each sort of couple. 1 and 3 will value more personal time with the minister, 3's will be put off by communication portraying the church as more traditional, 2's will be put off by the opposite.
There is an issue for me here about how far you meet people's expectations. We might think that no 2's have most right to have their expectations challenged, but the Church of England is particularly caught here, as they all have the 'right' to be married in the CofE (remarriage is also possible, but under conditions).
The other caution is not to categorise people too easily. Most of the couples I've married this year have a bit of 1 and 3, and many have come to church regularly, or come along to marriage preparation, far more than I would have expected. Maybe that reflects living in a more fluid community, rather than one where community and clan relationships are more settled and strong - in somewhere more rootless, people welcome the opportunity to meet with others and to feel like part of a community as they prepare for marriage.
The full document is at
http://www.cofe.anglican.org/about/gensynod/agendas/weddingresearch.rtf
and if you've time, it's a very interesting read, especially the breakdown of the research into what reasons carry most weight in people's minds, and the differing reasons for marriage given by men and women.
In the final part of the document, the researchers identify 3 distinct groups of people who might want a church wedding:
1. couples who need most help and need to be given permission: who want a 'traditional wedding', are favourable to the church, but think that somehow they need to earn the right to be married in church because they aren't regulars or because their family arrangements don't match church teaching. They need the church to give them permission, without diminishing their sense of reverence for God or for what they are doing.
2. the 'don't want to get too involved' couple, who see their relationship as transactional, and don't want to engage with the church beyond getting the ceremony done. (In my limited experience, there seem to be less of these in Yeovil than in Darlington, but my research sample is smaller than the 1000 or so in the survey!)
3. a group which values flexibility and the chance to personalise. They relate well to the church, but are less interested in being 'conventional'.
The reports concludes that the church needs to communicate in different ways to each sort of couple. 1 and 3 will value more personal time with the minister, 3's will be put off by communication portraying the church as more traditional, 2's will be put off by the opposite.
There is an issue for me here about how far you meet people's expectations. We might think that no 2's have most right to have their expectations challenged, but the Church of England is particularly caught here, as they all have the 'right' to be married in the CofE (remarriage is also possible, but under conditions).
The other caution is not to categorise people too easily. Most of the couples I've married this year have a bit of 1 and 3, and many have come to church regularly, or come along to marriage preparation, far more than I would have expected. Maybe that reflects living in a more fluid community, rather than one where community and clan relationships are more settled and strong - in somewhere more rootless, people welcome the opportunity to meet with others and to feel like part of a community as they prepare for marriage.
Some quotes
On retreat a few weeks ago I read 'Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places', another excellent book from the pen, or perhaps the laptop, of Eugene Peterson. Here are some bits from it:
“We do not know God by defining him, but by being loved by him and loving in return”
“ ‘spirituality’ is a net that, when thrown into the sea of contemporary culture, pulls in a vast quantity of spiritual fish, rivalling the resurrection catch of 153.” ....but..“By accepting Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God, the Christian church makes it impossible for us to make up our own customised variations of the spiritual life and get away with it, not that we don’t try.”
“We know from long experience how easy it is to get interested in ideas of God and projects for God and gradually lose interest in God alive, deadening our lives with the ideas and the projects. This happens a lot. Because the ideas and projects have the name of God attached to them, it’s easy to assume that we are involved with God. It is the devils work to get us worked up thinking and acting for God and then subtly detach us from a relational aobedience and adoration of God, substituting our selves, our godlike egos, in the place originally occupied by God.”
“The fundamental inadequacy of codes of conduct for giving direction in how to live the spiritual life is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge of us); God is moved off the field of action to the judges stand where he grades our performance. The moment that we take charge ‘knowing good and evil’, we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people into trouble too.”
“If you want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, you look at a person… the faddish preference for appreciating creation in a bouquet of flowers over a baby, or a day on the beach rather than rubbing shoulders with uncongenial neighbours in a cold church… is understandable, but is not creation in the terms it has been revealed to us.”
the book is about how to live the Christian life in the way that God sets it out: in creation, in history, and in community, against a tendency in Christians to avoid all three. We are tempted to exchange the God-given settings of place, time and people for an individualist spiritual bubble detached in time and space from daily life and from others, and are also tempted by our pragmatic society to turn the spiritual life, and God, into something useful, predictable and practical (hence '7 ways to....' type books, and the obese spiritual market in 'buy this book, borrow this technique and your life/church/ministry will be sorted' kind of things.) But worship begins with a God we can't control - think of Peter's desperate attempts to domesticate glory at the Transfiguration - with awe, fear, wonder and humility.
As a pragmatist by nature, I've found the book immensely challenging, and therefore helpful. What, after all, is the point of reading a book where you agree with everything in it?
if you want to know a bit more about the book there are reviews at:
http://www.geocities.com/developingtheology/ReviewChristPlays.html
http://ai.clm.org/reviews/christ_ten_thousand.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/march/26.42.html is an interview with Peterson at the time of the books publication in 2005.
“We do not know God by defining him, but by being loved by him and loving in return”
“ ‘spirituality’ is a net that, when thrown into the sea of contemporary culture, pulls in a vast quantity of spiritual fish, rivalling the resurrection catch of 153.” ....but..“By accepting Jesus as the final and definitive revelation of God, the Christian church makes it impossible for us to make up our own customised variations of the spiritual life and get away with it, not that we don’t try.”
“We know from long experience how easy it is to get interested in ideas of God and projects for God and gradually lose interest in God alive, deadening our lives with the ideas and the projects. This happens a lot. Because the ideas and projects have the name of God attached to them, it’s easy to assume that we are involved with God. It is the devils work to get us worked up thinking and acting for God and then subtly detach us from a relational aobedience and adoration of God, substituting our selves, our godlike egos, in the place originally occupied by God.”
“The fundamental inadequacy of codes of conduct for giving direction in how to live the spiritual life is that they put us in charge (or, which is just as bad, put someone else in charge of us); God is moved off the field of action to the judges stand where he grades our performance. The moment that we take charge ‘knowing good and evil’, we are in trouble and almost immediately start getting other people into trouble too.”
“If you want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, you look at a person… the faddish preference for appreciating creation in a bouquet of flowers over a baby, or a day on the beach rather than rubbing shoulders with uncongenial neighbours in a cold church… is understandable, but is not creation in the terms it has been revealed to us.”
the book is about how to live the Christian life in the way that God sets it out: in creation, in history, and in community, against a tendency in Christians to avoid all three. We are tempted to exchange the God-given settings of place, time and people for an individualist spiritual bubble detached in time and space from daily life and from others, and are also tempted by our pragmatic society to turn the spiritual life, and God, into something useful, predictable and practical (hence '7 ways to....' type books, and the obese spiritual market in 'buy this book, borrow this technique and your life/church/ministry will be sorted' kind of things.) But worship begins with a God we can't control - think of Peter's desperate attempts to domesticate glory at the Transfiguration - with awe, fear, wonder and humility.
As a pragmatist by nature, I've found the book immensely challenging, and therefore helpful. What, after all, is the point of reading a book where you agree with everything in it?
if you want to know a bit more about the book there are reviews at:
http://www.geocities.com/developingtheology/ReviewChristPlays.html
http://ai.clm.org/reviews/christ_ten_thousand.html
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/march/26.42.html is an interview with Peterson at the time of the books publication in 2005.
Health Warning
I've been trying today to remove the 'next blog' link at the top of this page. Sometimes you get linked to a good blog, often it's someone who's after your money or something worse. Trouble is, it's against the Blogger (the host for this site) terms and conditions for me to get rid of the link, so I have to work out whether to stay with them and put up with it or find another blog provider which doesn't link to potentially unsuitable content. If you're a regular visitor here and have a view on this, I'd be grateful to hear it.
Saturday, September 01, 2007
Finding out what's going on
Whilst I celebrate the end of the cricket season (our club, Tintinhull, have succesfully avoided the drop, you can see the final tables here), and try desperately to remember if I'm at church to do a wedding, a baptism, or both in the same service (I've come close...), here are a couple of links I go to to find out what's going on, one newer than the other but both are handy sites:
http://evangelismuk.typepad.com/evangelismuknet/ seems to get updated whenever there's any new information about mission conferences and events and that sort of stuff
http://starttheweek.typepad.com/stw/ returns from it's summer break on Monday, they update weekly with a whole host of helpful links, including events, research, online resources, jobs advertised etc.
when things calm down a bit, I'll get back to blogging more regularly. I had thought of something really good to say, but I've now forgotten it.
http://evangelismuk.typepad.com/evangelismuknet/ seems to get updated whenever there's any new information about mission conferences and events and that sort of stuff
http://starttheweek.typepad.com/stw/ returns from it's summer break on Monday, they update weekly with a whole host of helpful links, including events, research, online resources, jobs advertised etc.
when things calm down a bit, I'll get back to blogging more regularly. I had thought of something really good to say, but I've now forgotten it.
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