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Paul writes… even though I believe in the importance of a regular physical gathering of the Christian community I still struggle with it. Like my aching shins and knees after a run I have some problems that only come out in me when I do church. My running aches and grumbles reflect the symptoms of my condition rather than the condition itself (my basic unfitness). I wonder if if it is the same with my church pains?
So what are my symptoms/diagnosis and suggested cure when it comes to my struggles with church? I’ve set out 5 below that affect me. I’ve tried to write what my symptoms are, what i diagnose from that and possible treatment and side effects of still involving myself in church.
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Paul writes…I got some +ive feedback from someone who read this site last week which was good to hear. The only slight problem, my encourager suggested, was that this site is deep in the sense of being hard to understand and made him feel a bit on the thick side. I agree, sometimes I have no clue what that Clark is going on about, lol. Sometimes this site will err on the technical theological/sociological/any-other-”ical” but the deep in deep church is not meant to be dense. The deep is meant to be about connecting us into the wider traditions of the universal catholic church, appreciating 2,000+ yrs of thinking and practice and letting that inform our own today. We all draw from a deep well that is the source of our faith as well as inspiration for us practicing following Jesus today. Or, perhaps, as T.S. Elliot put it:
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.”So that’s the deep part but what about the church part of deep church? Well it’s our belief that the church is the community/family/people of God that gathers together and then disperses, gathers and disperses. Like breathing in or out. Like blood being pumped through the heart. Like waves lapping on the shore.
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I hope your enjoying the new Deep Church site, and design. J D Hollis, has been superb in rolling this out for me, I can’t recommend him more highly.If any of you have made your way to the web site for my church community, you may have noticed it has had a major facelift. BTW we had several hundred downloads just last weekend of the presentation about our new short term catechism at the site. Also we get hundreds of monthly podcast downloads too.
Anyhow the site has a had a major overhaul by our in house web guru, Dave Sztypuljak. Dave has been in our church community for so many years I’ve lost count. A man of great character, and technical genius, he has been making all our community online aspirations become reality, from blogs, to podcasts, to content management, to our main web site, not to mention the online videos, and DVD’s from events.
In addition to our stuff Dave has been doing some work on the side, but has gone public with a new site, www.websztes.co.uk.
Dave will be offering, to ’specialize in creating websites for charities, churches and small businesses.’ So if you need some help in this area, from someone technically able, but who also understands deeply the nature of online community formation, do contact him. You won’t be disappointed.
And Dave, thanks for all you do to bring our church community into it’s online formation.
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Paul writes… one of the ambitions for this site is to make it practical/practitioner based, in other words to offer examples for you to engage with of how we are doing/exploring deep church in our own local faith community. We are not saying we are the way to do deep church but we are trying to find a way and value being able to share it with you and to hear your experiences as well.
Church calendar: ordering our time around our faith
One of the ways that we do this in practice is follow the church/liturgical calender. We draw on the traditions of the wider church liturgical year and retell the key elements of the christian story within our church service across the year. Our re-ordering of our year around the story and celebration of our common traditions and faith as christians acts as an alternative basis of formation for our time (the ordering of our lives) and a basis for our reality, than say, the marketing consumer calender of the west (christmas -presents; valentines tacky love, easter - chocolate, summer - holidays and then halloween more tacky merchandising opportunities!).Within our community we have a small team of people that help facilitate this retelling by using creative, artistic, imaginative ways to help challenge us by connecting the traditions into our lives and communicate it in the idioms and rhytms of our every day life. Encouraging and leading our wider community in awareness, participation, practice, pause, remembrance, reflection and re-orientation of our lives around the story of our faith.
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In light of my last post, this one is related.
Famous Scottish composer James McMillan, delivered the Sandford St Martin Lecture on BBC radio 4 last night. It was mesmerizing.
The Telegraph newspaper wrote this piece in advance of the lecture.
You can catch it again this sunday night on Radio 4 BBC online, or download with iPlayer (this might not work outside the USA sorry).
My takeaways from the lecture were:
1. The most succinct overview of secularism’s narrow, ignorant hostility to religion
2. How religion may offer the only genuine openess to ‘others’ in society
3. How music is at the centre of this project
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The BBC news site have posted today and article about how the British Humanist Society (BHA), have with the support of Professor Richard Dawkins, paid for adverts to be placed on buses that say ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’
Two inevitable quotes from Dawkins and the BHA:
Professor Dawkins said: “Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride - automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think - and thinking is anathema to religion”
Hanne Stinson, Chief Executive of the BHA, said: “We see so many posters advertising salvation through Jesus or threatening us with eternal damnation, that I feel sure that a bus advert like this will be welcomed as a breath of fresh air. If it raises a smile as well as making people think, so much the better.”
It bugs the heck out of me, and I usually just sigh an move on, but today offer some thoughts:
1. Ignorant: It’s so utterly ignorant of Christianity, let alone other religions, with ongoing crude stereotypes, that seek the worst of religion and put that against what they see is their best, which seems so pathetic and anaemic.
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Andrew Jones (aka Tall Skinny Kiwi), posted a qoute from a blog, that got a flea/bug in my ear.Andrew’s blog post title, ‘Why I don’t go to church’ with a qoute from another blog on how churches spend more money on watering lawns than the needs of the poor in the world, with no comment by him was a little vexing, but that might have been his plan all along
And he succeeded with me.The full article (which is very good), makes clearer that when asked, the author says he doesn’t go to church, he understands that he is the church. And the qoute on watering lawns is ameliorated in it’s larger context.
Whilst the placing of the qoute with that title, made it look like an absurd reductionism, I do increasingly find myself irked by such reductionisms.
1. True: Is this quote true, where are the stats that prove, ‘most parts of the church in the West spend as much money watering the grass at the building… than the entire annual economic needs of other parts of the church in the poorer places on the planet’? It’s so easy to throw out claims like this about the church collectively compared to a situation in the world, but how about some evidence to support it?
2. So What?:Take enough people collectively, from any grouping and you can make similar assertions. Emerging Church christians spend more on apple laptops/ipods, or books on missional/emerging church, than than the entire annual economic needs of other parts of the church in the poorer places on the planet.
And people who don’t go to church spend more money on crisps (potato chips), than the entire annual economic needs of other parts of the church in the poorer places on the planet.
I’m not arguing for the watering of lawns of church buildings, and I am not justifying how churches do get consumed with their own maintentance, and don’t resource mission, which should be their primary identity. I do want to question the ’straw man’ of reductionisms like this, that avoid the log in our own eyes, by making ‘church’ the resource boogeyman.
And there are plenty of churches with lawns to water that do a great deal in their community.
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Our youngest daughter has special education needs, and has undergone a battery of assessments by all kinds of specialists over the past few years.
Now we are in a face off with our local education authority. They are in an impossible situation and with supreme conflict of interest. They have a limited pot of money, and have to make all the kids who need help fit that pot rather than impartial assessment then funding by another government agency.
I’m sure they are good people in an impossible situation.
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I’ve arrived back at my desk, to find that SurvivingMeetings have sent me their new Paper Show bluetooth pen to review.
First impressions, it comes in a very cool box, is PC only but will hopefully run in windows on my mac, and they have some some videos on their site about the Pen (that are worth watching, and may remind you more about office life than the need for a new computer gadget) that make something very clear.
This is not a gadget, and whist it looks like funky pen from Shaper Image it is actually a trans-dimensional gateway device that allows entry into the time space nexus of The Office (But judging from the videos the NBC one and not the UK version with Ricky Gervais).
I’ll let you know how it goes in there, and if I make it back. I will of course be emailing feedback today, asking for a Mac and Ricky Gervais portal/version.
Now I wonder what it will open up at the theology seminar I am going to later today?…….
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I’ve just finished 2.5 days of teaching at George Fox Seminary, a module on the nature and purpose of Church, for the Masters of Arts in Missional Leadership (MAML). I’ll post my notes, power-points and bibliographies later. Meantime some highlights.Students
Again I was struck by the quality of the students. Bright, thoughtful church leaders, so open and engaging, and a privilege to teach and interact with.Blogs & Twitter
We had a great time in class using twitter and group tweet, to facilitate Q&A, and interact during the teaching with tweets to resources, articles, blogs and related discussions. It added a whole extra layer to the participations.In particular Elizabeth Chapin, resourced us all so much with Twitter, and she has as great blog. Seriously if your looking for new blog to read, take a trip to hers here.
Talking of blogs, Petey Crowder entertained us from another classroom with his great tweets, and that reminds me you must check out his blog too, he’s an great blogger. Then there was Joshua Rhone, who tweeted me so prolifically during the teaching times, that I wish I could employ him as a research assistant. He’s destined to do a PhD and teach at a great university.
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