Resurrection: Rob Bell from The Work of Rob Bell on Vimeo.
Happy Easter everyone! Jesus Christ is risen!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 2.0 License.
Resurrection
04-Apr-10Thoughts on Good Friday
02-Apr-10
As has been my wont in recent years, I am posting another piece of graffiti on Good Friday. Thankfully those renegade creative types around the world continue to find the crucifixion a story for inspiration and criticism on our streets.
It’s with the latter in mind, that I post this image from Matthew Gidley on Flickr. It isn’t clear where it is from and who it is by.
This year I have been thinking a great deal about Paul’s words in both 1 Corinthians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15.
In regard to the later chapter, Paul says that if Christ was not raised from the dead, the Christian faith is utterly pointless. More…
I occasionally get asked about the Café Church congregation that meets once a month at Pip & Jims. I also know how hard it is to find decent resources and ideas for prayer stations for things like Café Church or Liquid Worship.
So, I thought I would start to share some of the things that I put together.
This month I was responsible for just one prayer station which was in three parts: Speaking dirt, Removing dirt and Free of dirt. You can download the details as a pdf file.
We’ve been looking at some Christian basics over this ‘year’ More…
Cross Purposes
10-Mar-10
Painting for the East Window, All Saints' Tudeley, (Chagall)
Having grown up in Paddock Wood, I was for the most part unaware that just up the road at the tiny, rural All Saints’ Church in Tudeley I would have found the only church in the world to have all its twelve windows decorated by the Russian artist Marc Chagall.
When I became a Christian in my late teens, All Saints’ became a regular place for me to pray. It is, quite simply, one of my favourite places to sit and be in the whole wide world.
The windows are just beautiful and deeply enchanting. Commissioned as a memorial tribute to Sarah d’Avigdor-Goldsmid who died aged just 21 in a sailing accident off Rye, the main East window shows Sarah drowning in the sea while Christ crucified looks down. I don’t know much about art (or anything really) but I love the combination of honest brutality in showing Sarah’s plight in the midst of such beautiful stained glass. Sanitised Christianity this is not.
I write about this now because I had a chance this week to visit a special exhibition called Cross Purposes. Much kudos to my old mother church, St. Andrew’s Paddock Wood, who have combined with my old school and their art gallery, Mascalls Gallery, to put on a special exhibition.
In the Gallery, Cross Purposes has brought together powerful images of the crucifixion from some of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st Centuries. I was astounded to see the list of names – Stanley Spencer, Tracey Emin, Eric Gill, Maggi Hambling, Emmanuel Levy and (of course) Marc Chagall.
Shown for the first time in this country, Chagall’s original drawings and paintings for the Tudeley windows are on display. They are fascinating to see the development of More…
is the iPad a liturgical game-changer?
23-Feb-10
Nearly a year ago, I finally made a move to the dark side (or the light depending on your perspective) and bought an Apple Macintosh computer.
After years and years and years of being a Windows user, I basically got fed up with the viruses, the clunky way Windows operated. I needed a new machine and I knew that if I bought a PC that meant Vista (at the time) and I had heard so much negative stuff about that.
So I bought a Mac. I also signed up for an iPhone and I have been loving my conversion ever since.
Now this post is not about my Mac conversion. This post is about the new iPad which is shortly to make its way into shops.
As a relatively new Mac convert, I was interested More…
Book of Eli
02-Feb-10
Late last week, I visited our local cinema with a small but growing group of men from our church to check out one of the latest releases. In this instance, we found ourselves watching The Book of Eli starring Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman, written by Gary Whitta and directed by the Hughes brothers (who have been a bit MIA since Dead Presidents in 1995).
I was quietly impressed by this movie and would encourage you to go and see it.
Denzel is the eponymous Eli, a traveller walking across a post-apocalyptic America, trying to survive and (as we learn) carrying a rather special book. With, no doubt, a nod to one of the names of God in Hebrew (El or Eli), Eli is carrying the last known copy of the Bible.
We are not given a totally worked out back history (which I liked). We are told there was a war, a ‘big flash’ some thirty odd years ago, and nobody seems to know very much of what actually happened. The younger characters born post-flash are intrigued by Denzel’s knowledge, as an older man, of the world before it turned into the hell-hole that they know. Their world is one where barren roads are patrolled by gangs of killers who will More…
I received a call the other day from a colleague who is doing some research work on clergy well-being and asked me for my top ten tips on how to stay healthy as a Curate in a Vacancy. I’ve given it some thought and produced my list which, with his permission, I reproduce below. Oh, and by the way, that really is a screengrab from Google – I didn’t mock that up.
The early ones in this list are general tips for ordained life rather than specifically about a vacancy or being a curate. The later ones are more specific to the kind of situation I’m in now.
I have to say too, as something of a disclaimer, that some of these are more aspirational in my life right now than reality before anyone who knows me cries ‘hypocrite’!!! I do know that I need to work harder at More…
CofE falls foul of digital switchover
19-Jan-10
You know how you sometimes bookmark news stories and websites that you think ‘I must blog about that’ and then never get round to it? No, may just be me then.
Anyway, here is my oldest ‘must blog about this’ story that I never got around to that stems from 2007. The BBC ran a story in February that year about the Government’s plans to auction off the spectrum of frequencies controlled by Ofcom. They noted that the auction could threaten the use of radio mics in theatres, festivals, concerts and other special events because they were not being ring-fenced in the proposals. Use of such frequencies could either get more expensive (much more expensive), they might cease to function entirely, or, at the very least, if they did work, interference could be a real issue.
I took note of the story because the obvious thing to say from a church perspective is that a lot of churches would be affected as well. I can’t remember a time when I visited a church (even fairly high, traditional churches) where the leader of the service and/or the preacher was not mic’d up. Indeed, more often than not the microphones were radio mics. Churches, in that sense, are obvious users of such technology since as a president of a Holy Communion service or a preacher, you’re going to need a fair bit of freedom of movement that a static microphone is going to find much harder to accomodate.
Atheist Delusions
16-Jan-10
As a Curate, along with the rest of my mentor group of Curates, I’ve just finished reading David Bentley Hart’s 2009 book Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies.
I must admit that it’s not the sort of book that I would have naturally chosen to read if my mentor group had not made me. However, I’m glad that I did take the time with this American Eastern Orthodox theologian, philosopher, writer, and cultural commentator.
The book is pure polemic in which Bentley Hart takes on the so-called “New Atheists” of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and even Philip Pullman. I think it’s more than fair to say that he doesn’t have very much that’s good to say about them. One of the real marks of this book is how incredibly and deliciously rude he can be about his opponents. Check this out from p220:
‘The best we can hope for [in the contemporary debate] are arguments pursued at only the most vulgar of intellectual levels, couched in an infantile and carpingly pompous tone, and lacking but the meagerest traces of historical erudition or syllogistic rigor [sic]: Richard Dawkins triumphantly adducing “philosophical” arguments that a college freshman midway through his first logic course could dismantle in a trice, Daniel Dennett insulting the intelligence of his readers with proposals for the invention of a silly pseudo-science of “religion”, Sam Harris shrieking More…
Our shame adds to Egypt’s shame
13-Jan-10
David Keen has been highlighting the activities of the UK Border Agency today and, in particular, a story written by Paul Vallely writing in the Independent about the detention of children by that agency and the impact on their mental health. 1300 children were held in immigration centres in 2008-9 here in the UK. Moreover, the Royal College of Paediatrics and the Royal College of Psychiatry’s study into the mental health of children in such centres showed that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the children displayed some signs of distress and 73% had developed significant emotional and behavioural problems since being detained. Not one of them had previously had such problems. Paul Vallely writes:
All the children seen by clinical psychologists presented as being disorientated, confused and frightened. More than half, who had previously been well behaved at home and in school, had developed conduct problems.
It is nothing short of shameful that this kind of treatment of families and children should be happening in the UK.
However, I want to focus on another aspect of Paul’s story. I want to focus on the Egyptian Coptic Christians, Hany and Samah Mansour, and their five kids under ten who fled to the UK More…