New Kid on the Blog

Here's my Parish Mag ' View from the Vicarage ' for October explaining why we're embarking on this Big Bible week that's got me all agitated and enthusiastic... If someone offered you a gift that promised eternal life, that unfolded the deepest truth and that shared the wisdom and love of the creator of the universe with you, would you want it?   If you were freely given something that could change your life, and change the world around you for the better would you accept something like that? Well, we do have something like that – we have our Scriptures, the Holy Bible.   The Bible is God’s direct communication with us, it is source of our faith, our life, our hope, our truth and it within it’s covers, as the Thirty-Nine articles of the Church of Englad say, it “containeth all things necessary to salvation.” It takes some work, though.   There are ‘strings attached’.   Our Bibles need to be read, to be thought about, to be wrestled with. ...

Oy vey, again with the long gaps - yep, despite my very best intentions, blogging seems to have slipped of the radar for some time again.  I have been brought back to it by some level of excitement over a forthcoming set of events happening in our Mission Community which make up our 'Mission Week' - our Big Bible Celebration . For a bit more detail here's some of a publicity email I put out earlier in the week that sums it up as well as I could as if I tried to write it all out again.... We want our 'Big Bible Week' to be a time of building up disciples as well as attracting people to hear the message who might not normally come. As such we have used the 'hook' of the 400th Anniversary of the publishing of the AV but we are celebrating the gift of Scripture as a whole, and particularly the Bible in readable, accessible form for us.  We are calling this the 'Big Bible' week - Attached is a pdf poster of all that's going on, ...

The longer one leaves something the harder it seems to be to get back to it - that certainly is the way things feel with this blog! I often think to myself 'oh, I should blog about that' but then think to myself - how would I introduce that? How do I make up for all those weeks with nothing said? Do I have to try and fill in all the gaps and explain exactly why it is that things have been so gappy? So I decided I would open with a statement about it being difficult to get back into blogging, and then just carry on and see whether or not any/some/all of the thoughts that have bobbed up and waved a bit turn up in blog posts over the next days or weeks. But without any more ado Alleluia - Christ is risen! It's that statement that makes us what we are - as Christians, I mean... So our celebrations of Easter and the lead up to it over Lent have been at the forefront of all I have done over the past six or so weeks. In fact our Lent course (which I wrote using material from ...