From Worship to Willpower

Views from elsewhere:

A superb series on worship by Sam Norton, scroll back to Monday for the first one. Particularly like this observation:
Worship can be oriented correctly to God, yet not engage the worshipping community - then it is no longer worship but performance. On the other hand, worship can engage the community but not be oriented to God - that is simply self-congratulation.

The blogging Bishops are getting stuck into financial/political issues, Bishop Alan blogs on dogs, vomit and microcredit, and Nick Baines wonders how posh Tories can say 'we're all in this together'.

Church Mouse reveals that most people want Christmas to stay Christmas, according to Theos.

MadPriest reveals what goes on after the Pet Blessing service.

Cranmers Curate is inspired by Matt Redman

Following vandalism to Alpha Course posters, the Beaker Folk have an alternative.

In the week where everyone's talking about retirement, Mike Collyer asks if the church has a blind spot when it comes to older people and mission.

Want to be a free thinker but still a nice person looks at some research on willpower, and what helps and hinders it. After completing tasks that required self-control, study subjects had less physical stamina and impulse control and increased difficulty with problem-solving activities. In particular, resisting temptation consumed an important resource that was then less available to help the person persist in the face of failure on subsequent tests. But you can work on your willpower. "Willpower is like a muscle: it needs to be challenged to build itself,"

That Theos Research on Social Class and Faith/Atheism

Since Church Mouse noted the latest Theos press release on social class and atheism, some other people have been picking up on it. Hold on a sec'.

The full research is here - it's actually a subset of their bigger piece of work on Faith and Darwin earlier this year. The figures on atheism and education are....

(first number is the count, percentage is the proportion of people with that qualification level)
"I believe in God but have not always done so"
Graduate degree or above 43 (10%)
Bachelors degree 14 (7%)
AS/A level 28 (9%)
GCSE or equiv. 30 (6%)
BTEC 2 (6%)
NVQ 9 (7%)
No quals 12 (5%)

"I used to believe in God but no longer do so"
graduate degree or above 34 (8%)
Bachelors degree 25 (12%)
AS/A level 21 (6%)
GCSE or equiv. 37 (8%)
BTEC 1 (3%)
NVQ 14 (11%)
No quals 25 (9%)

here was the Theos conclusion
converts to atheism are disproportionately drawn from groups with no educational qualifications whereas converts to theism are disproportionately drawn from higher socio-economic grades and from people with a masters degree or higher.

now I've got into trouble before on this blog for talking about stats as though I was an expert, and getting it wrong (ish). But I'm not really sure you can draw any firm conclusions from numbers this small. And if you take Bachelors degrees along with graduate degrees, there's actually no difference between the 2 questions at all for the 'most educated'.

Here are the findings on class:

I believe in God now but have not always done so
AB 44 (8%)
C1 49 (8%)
C2 28 (7%)
DE 36 (7%)

I used to believe in God but no longer do so
AB 42 (8%)
C1 49 (8%)
C2 32 (7%)
DE 49 (10%)

The only significant difference here is in the DE grouping, but I'd be reluctant to based headlines and detailed analysis on the results of 13 people. My feeling is that the press release over-eggs the findings, but I'm happy to be corrected by people who know what they're talking about. If your sample size is roughly 400, what's the margin of error?

Markets need Morals: Case Study 1, 'Young Writers' by Forward Press

'Markets need Morals', says Gordon Brown. I agree.




Last week our daughter came home with a letter (addressed directly to her, c/o the school) and a certificate telling her she'd won a poetry competition, and that her poem had been specially selected to be published in a special book. £13 to you the proud parents for a softback A5 book with the poem in, and bulk offers if you want to place orders for Christmas for the in-laws.

We were thrilled, and very proud. But something didn't seem quite right. We didn't recall, at the time she entered this competition, there being anything about buying a book.

The following day, we discover that lots of other people in her class have 'won'. It turned out to be every single one of them. This has happened before: another school known to us whose children entered the 'Young Writers' competition, and all 'won'. The book, when it arrived, was a huge disappointment in terms of the quality of the product, and the poems didn't seem to have been 'selected' on merit at all.

There are various things about this I'm not happy with:

- The misleading letter from Young Writers, claiming my daughters poem had been specially selected, when it wasn't.

- The letter addressed directly to our child, basically using the school to distribute a piece of marketing. Any communication through the school should be subject to the schools vetting, but it puts schools in a difficult place if the letters are addressed directly to the children.

- Taking something our child has done and selling it back to us is a particularly grubby bit of marketing. I thought marketing via children was illegal, and if it isn't, it should be. It's particularly cynical to play on parents and childrens feelings of pride - 'our child is in print!' just to make money. Some things are too precious to be traded in.

- The disappointment of the children, when they realise that they haven't 'won', and that everyone seems to have got the same prize.

It looks pretty lucrative: one selection of 'winners' is here - if each person on that list represents a print run of A5 booklets at £13+ a throw, then they must be doing quite well out of it. I tried and failed to find a place on the site which previews the books. No previews or reviews on Amazon either, where they come in at £19.99 a throw.

Forward Press, who have been publishing poetry from the general public for years, and they seem to be quite well thought of by the poetry-writing public. I hope this is an aberration. However, this thread on mumsnet suggests they've been doing it for a while, this thread mentions a similar tactic back in 2005, and this thread raises some important data protection issues concerning information about children held by the school.

What do people think?

Church Signs

Good post at Swiss Toni about church signs, and the rights and wrongs of proclaiming your beliefs as if they were hard fact. Ht the Britblog roundup, hosted by Amused Cynicism. Above is one of my favourites, but there are some truly dreadful ones here. Like this:

this is slightly better, though they probably cribbed the joke from Bruce Almighty


If all this makes you despair a Christendom's ability to come up with anything funny, then fear not. The Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley have put up an advert for a new druid.

We are a group of 12 Beaker communities scattered across the hamlets to the east of Spalding.
Well, when we say communities, strictly speaking four of these communities have only one member each and there's only twenty-three of us in total. But we are dedicated to keeping true to our roots. Which is why we insist on worshipping only each within our our own Moot Houses, coming together only for the annual Falling Out ceremony where we remember why we don't get together any more often.

There's more, much more, and I'm overjoyed to discover that Ruth Gledhill has spotted this as well. Much deserved recognition for 'Archdruid Eileen', whoever he may be.

Tweaks

Took the chance of a sleep disturbed Monday morning to update the links here, after Blogger swallowed them during it's 'upgrade' a few months ago. (Ok, to be honest, I wasn't savvy enough to save the template before doing the upgrade).

So there's a lot more stuff in the sidebar - including a selection of links to Fresh Expressions, Mission resources, and local churches here in Yeovil. And that fossilised technorati widget has gone. I hope. If the site starts taking longer to load, let me know, as the idea is to make it more worth looking at rather than less!

Blessed: Preparing for Worship

Found this on FrSimon, I've been looking for some videos/meditations for a while to use before worship, which aren't the US-style 'countdown' version which you can buy from Sermon Central for $20, or whatever.



Simon has also uploaded stacks of vids onto Youtube, I particularly like this renewal of baptism vows, but there's plenty of other ones to browse. Probably not the sort of thing to use at Book of Common Prayer Evensong. Though you never know.

Wikio top religious blogs for October

The Wikio 'top blogs' for October (which actually means September) were published this morning. Here are the blogs in the top 250 which deal wholly or partly with religious/faith themes. In case any of us are tempted to take ourselves too seriously, all but one of these are outranked by a blog on cupcakes.

16 Archbishop Cranmer
67 Heresy Corner
97 The hermeneutic of continuity (worth a look at this post as an alternative to some of recieved wisdom about the papacy)
123 Gates of Vienna, but I'm not going to link to it.
126 What does the prayer really say?
130 Thinking Anglicans
136 Bartholemew's Notes on Religion
137 St. Aidan to Abbey Manor
162 Anglican Mainstream (for the 50th time, it's not a blog!)
178 Catholic and Loving it! that's their '!', not mine.
200 John Smeaton, SPUC director
202 Islam in Europe
222 The Ugley Vicar
229 Virtue Online (not a UK blog, so still not sure what it's doing here)
240 Of Course I Could be Wrong,

the Wikio blurb says: The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles. I still can't work out why blogs with twice my readership and links in, like Church Mouse, Clayboy, and Bishop Alan, aren't on this list.

The main trends seem to be a general falling off in blogs which focus wholly or partly on Anglican infighting, and the discovery of wikio by parts of the Roman Catholic blogosphere. Some of the first trend could be explained by a good month for cupcakes and home crafts, who could soon be challenging Dale and Guido for the top spots.

in other ranking news......
Church Mouse has his latest list of top twitterers in the CofE, so if you're trying to find out if your vicar is tweeting their sermons, that's the place to go.

Peter Ould has compiled the a list based on the slightly odd Alexa rankings, which has evolved into a top 40, and gives some indication of the breadth of Anglican blogging. Some of the juxtapositions are quite amusing: MadPriest is new into the chart, 1 place above Rowan Williams, or the 'Grand Tufti' as MP likes to call him. He's currently on a recruitment drive amongst Roman Catholics. Don't blame him: see above.

Unlike the two chaps above, I don't bother doing original research, I just crib from someone elses!!

The Thankful Blogger

This blog turns 3 this week, and I'd like to mark the occasion by saying thankyou to three people.

Steve Tilley's Mustard Seed Shavings was what inspired me to start blogging in the first place. Steve started in this Diocese about the same time as me, doing a similar job, so I Googled him to find out a few things, and ended up on his blog. The rest is recent history. Steve was also my first ever commenter. Thankyou Steve for inspiration and encouragement.

Ruth Gledhill took pity on me a couple of months later, discovering this measly little blog with its 20 visitors a week and deciding to send a bit of traffic my way. I've tried, and sometimes failed, to be nice to her ever since! Thankyou Ruth for encouraging a newbie blogger - to have a journalist for the Times complement me on my blog has given me an enduring warm and fuzzy feeling, and is another great lesson in the power of encouragement. Thankyou also for your courage in keeping your head above the Anglican parapet in your coverage of church affairs. We sometimes give you a lot of stick, but we should give you a lot of credit too.

After referencing Matt Wardmans digging on National Secular Society membership figures, Matt got in touch and asked if I'd like to do some articles for his Wardman Wire. So Touching Base started, a weekly column on Matt's site, and it's helped in all sorts of ways. Writing for a 'secular' audience from a spiritual perspective forces me to think about communication, and Matt has been an excellent coach in the art of blogging, as well as the technical side. Once the Dave Walker business kicked off last year, Matt did most of the behind-the-scenes work in co-ordinating the bloggers campaign, and making sure it had maximum impact. Thankyou Matt for your mentoring, trust, and encouragement.

And thankyou everyone else for reading, commenting, linking, arguing, and making this such a creative place to be. My first ever post is here, in case you're interested. What started out as a blog on mission and leadership has suffered from quite a bit of mission creep in 3 years!!

Actually, I think I'll turn this into a meme, a sort of blogging 'Pay it Forward'. Steve, Ruth, and Matt, over to you to thank 3 people in the blogosphere who've helped or inspired you, and to encourage them to thank 3 more people each, and so on. Lets see if this baby floats.