New Kid on the Blog

Conversations had in various Social Media forums (or forae) as well as some very good blog posts have got me a-thinking. That along with the tremendous amount of work that I seem to have set about in the past few weeks have had me considering ministry 'from the ground up' it seems! My creative and forceful (in a good way) Curate has been driving some of the processes that our Mission Community has needed for some time.  My tendency is to let things happen as they happen, she has inspired me by saying (in action rather than criticism) that this isn't enough and we need to consider the purpose and plans for Five Alive Mission Community and where exactly our Churhes, and indeed the Church at large, are/is going. So in the past few weeks we have had, run by our Curate, a course called 'everybody welcome' which has considered not just the act of welcoming people when they come through our doors but about being Churches with an attitude of welcome, and Churches willin...

Love this video - and I say this as one who at one time was very much at home in the culture it parodies!   I like being an Anglican too, a very different way of expressing worship open to a whole raft of parodies too, ... though there is a long and very funny history of that, the Vicar of Dibley, for instance, or Alan Bennet's excellent Beyond the Fringe 'Take a Pew' skit...      John Betjeman had lots of things to say about Church culture, often gently satirising, such as ' Diary of a Church Mous e' or this one:  Blame the Vicar  When things go wrong it's rather tame   To find we are ourselves to blame,   It gets the trouble over quicker   To go and blame things on the Vicar.   The Vicar, after all, is paid   To keep us bright and undismayed.   The Vicar is more virtuous too   Than lay folks such as me and you. He never swears, he never drinks,   He never should say what he thinks.   His collar is ...

Spent today at Ely Cathedral - about once a month I get the chance to go and be a ‘Day Chaplain’, which means saying prayers on the hour over the Cathedral PA and being available to anyone who might want to chat, about pretty much anything. It was raining and grey, so I didn’t manage to get any outside pictures, but I did get some of the inside of the Cathedral - they were only taken on my pda, so no great works of Art, I’m afraid…The Space at the Cathedral is awesome, and for a thousand year old building is light and airy. The stonework is incredible and the attention to detail in the stone carving is amazing. It is a Cathedral that needs lots of superlatives! This is the Nave, and at the far end is the great West Door, you get something of the height of the main part of the building in my fuzzy photo… This is the view the other way from where the last photo was taken, with light coming down from the Octagon/lantern tower above. Behind the screen in the middle of the picture are the...

...that I've not mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury and the recent ridiculous furore over the speech that he gave to the law society as part of a series entitled 'Islam and the Law' for which he has been criticised for talking about 'Sharia law'? Just thought I'd mention it. Now I wonder if I should file this under 'stupid people who don't know what they are talking about'? Or whether that might sound a bit judgemental....?