New Kid on the Blog

So, I'm not a theological conservative.  That probably comes across in pretty much everything I write, but I thought I should say it.  I believe myself to be orthodox, however, and hold to those things which the Church expresses in the catholic creeds.  I also have a relatively 'high' theology regarding the inspiration of Scripture. But I am not a Biblical literalist, nor do I hold to a doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture. I can't.  The Bible is too rich, too deep, too difficult, too flawed for that.  And by flawed I mean I understand it to be the record of human beings trying to make sense of God at work.  It has the breath of the Spirit blowing through it's words and on every page, but when we try and make sense of God there is a chance we will go awry.... 'Hey lets condemn (and or murder) pretty much everyone who isn't in our tribe, that's obviously what God wants' kind of awry.  And if we study this book carefully then we see that ideas ...

The title of this post is quite a lot to do with what's been going on since I last posted! I've not really been up to ambling around the blogsphere, mainly because I have not had much time when I've not been occupied and when I have had time I have taken it to think, chill, pray, read and be with family. Not a bad use of my spare minutes! But blogging and most other things online have been rather neglected. Over the past few weeks I have been finding the same question come up again - why do we do this? By which I mean "why do we do x or y in the church?", "why are things the way they are?", particularly with regards to structures and traditions within the church. As part of this I have been putting together some articles for the Parish Mag (called the Parishes Paper, which goes out to the Five Alive Mission Community villages), the first of which can be found here , I have also found myself in various situations discussing the reasons we do things i...

Last Sunday of the Easter Season... Time for another sermon, this one is a rewrite of a previously preached sermon (something I rarely do, but i wanted to ground the opening in my own experience!). In its preached form is contained a fair amount of ad lib around the script - particularly around the fact that Jesus was so difficult to pin down when people asked questions he tended to respond with another question, or a parable, or a challenge. Anyway, here's the introduction, with more at New Kid Deep Stuff (click on [more]) Oh, and one of the hearers said that they liked this, worth noting because that's something like a 100% improval rate in terms of how many usually comment on sermons after the service... That might not be strictly true, but I sometimes wonder if people listen to sermons in the same way that I do - not very well :-) Easter 6 (2008) Year A RCL Euch Acts 17.22-31 John 14.15-21 Keep my commandments One of my favourite cities is York, we have great friends t...