New Kid on the Blog

I did get a sermon written, thanks for your help and suggestions folks! And thanks to Quilly for being very helpful with her 'build a Quilly sermon v.1.0' feature that may find itself in use sometime soon! So, I preached on the Bible, though not 'from' the Bible, normally I am careful to link what I say with the Lections for the Day, but this time I let them speak for themselves and did a little bit about how we approach scripture. I think many of us have a very limited approach to scripture and just see it all as one big lump of inspired 'stuff' without thinking or learning about what actually makes up our Bibles. But rather than launch into sermon mark II I will do my usual of giving you the opening bit and then letting you follow that up at New Kid Deep Stuff by clicking on the [more] at the end. As for how I ended up with this sermon, I actually used the basis of an old sermon and extensively rewrote and added to it! For those who are used to the 40 mi...

It's Bible Sunday tomorrow and I thought I should preach on the Bible... Pretty simple, you might think, but thirty years of being in the Church (yes I was eight when I started) and twenty years of more formal study make it a huge subject and I am having real problems narrowing it down. What makes it more difficult is that the theme given by the Bible Society is 'a feast of God's word' which is essentially what I have been saying over the past few weeks as we have been studying the Bible at our teaching evenings. I know that most of the people who will be coming to my main service tomorrow haven't been at our evening sessions, but some have, and i wonder whether I am selling them short, as it were, by re-using material I've used before. Some Clergy reuse sermons all the time, we have a three year cycle of readings, so three years down the road it is possible to pretty much preach the same thing - I know of one minister in a University who did exactly that, bec...

Shouldn't make statements like 'I might not leave it a week before I post again' when I'm going away for five days with no internet access! Will post more later... Maybe that wasn't such a smart thing to write

Might be shooting myself in the foot by putting off all those of you who are kind enough to pop by here on a relatively regular basis, but i've not been blogging because I plan to do lots of it in November! With all the usual busy-ness of life it seemed easier to let the blog slide for a bit before the mad spate of writing in a couple of weeks. It's been a very good few weeks. I'm in the midst of taking stock of where I am and what I'm doing here... The kind of thing a minister should do on an almost daily basis, but we often career headlong through life trying to keep up with ourselves and don't reflect and contemplate anything like as much as we should. There is an Irony in this, because I seem to spend so much time telling people to chill out - encouraging prayerful reflection on life, whilst at the same time finding myself living at high speed. The circumstances of the last year or so haven't helped, with one colleague on long term sick leave and another ...

I've done it again, I've signed up again with NaNoWriMo in an effort to kickstart my writing by trying to put together a novel in a month, now how that fits with everything else is a bit of a mystery to me at the moment, but it might happen! Alongside that, as November is obviously going to be some kind of miraculous time-stretching kind of month I've also committed to post daily in November. NaBloPoMo is the name of this new experiment I've been daft enough to sign up to...click on the button on the right hand side to see what that's about... And in December I plan to have a nice lie down, though something tells me it might not be the quietest month to try that.... Oh, having messed up the Cindra competition I have submitted another entry - though I'm not going to say which one this time! They're all here , read through and vote for one, go on, you know you want to... And now for one last set of full stops...

This week's blog talkers question Tell us: List three things you did this past week. Out of those three: what was the most fun? What made it fun? Well, this week has been slightly overshadowed with me feeling muzzy headed and grim with a cold, and unusually I had to spend an afternoon in bed (on my day off! Why can't I feel ill on a work day?) so that's one of three. Yesterday we had our annual 'safari supper' in one of the villages I serve - you know the form, starter in one house, main course in another, pudding in another, coffee another. It's one of the highlights of the year, which reading again looks like we have very empty lives - not so! It's a time when lots of people who don't necessarily join in other stuff, and rarely join in Church events, come and socialise, laugh, consume a fair amount of wine and generally have a good time. The hosts work incredibly hard to provide good nosh and the company is excellent. Definitely the best of my th...

Most of these online tests that are available are pretty useless, but this one seemed to make some sense. I did wonder whether I really do have 'slightly low masculinity' and 'slightly high femininity' - or rather, I wonder what that means. If being sensitive and trying to think of others are feminine qualities, then i have no worries about being like that! It was an interesting bit of self reflection going through the test, though Scroll over the colours to see some detail, and see if my blog reflects what's said here....

Didn't really grasp the concept of anonymous entry into Cindra's competition , not to be plugged into blog until after the competition in order that it doesn't become a popularity contest!!! I was meant to submit my (ahem) work of creative genius to Cindra by email and then it would be judged through the votes of various visitors to her blog and then prize awarded, then I guess we would be free to share it... eejit that I am, this concept hadn't sunk into my brain... ah well, it was fun to practise and I got the chance to tell you all a bit about my little girl... Thanks to Cindra for being so gracious in her response to my erroneous entry!

Perhaps time to try my hand at something different! A quick trip via Dr John to Cindra's newly revitalised and renewed, re-invigorated and not particularly re-invented competition to get 18 words of her choosing into a post . So here goes: Take up thy quill and walk An exciting part of our family life is the new experience of having our baby girl (baby no longer, aged six) learning to write. I am amazed at the speed with which her letters and numbers have come along since she started year 1 of school last month. She's been in reception for a year and got the basics of word sounds and reading, now comes the hard work of learning to create, compose s and generally get up to spec on the whole writing gig. It's a real learning process for us oldies too! Moments ago, it feels, we were up to our elbows in goo , poo and various bodily substances as nappies were changed, sick cleared up, creams and potions were applied (all eco and child-friendly we're led to believe)....

I didn't get around to posting this on Sunday, so here's some thoughts from last week... As always, taster here, full text on my 'New Kid Deep Stuff' blog, follow the link to see more! Year C Proper 21 (2007) RCL Principal Luke 16.19-end 1 Timothy 6.6-19 Psalm 91 Jeremiah 32.1-3a, 6-15 Nervous Church.. In reports in the news media, from comments I hear at Church meetings and around the place I get the feeling that we are a very nervous Church at the moment. We are told our congregations are dwindling, there are competing ‘entertainments’ which distract people from involving themselves in Church life, people are interested in ‘spirituality’ (whatever that means) but not in ‘institutional religion’ – except, it seems, for various forms of fundamentalism which offers a safe haven in a rapidly changing world. Within the Church ongoing rows bubble away over the ordination of women, now concerned with consecrating women as Bishops, and over the ordination of openly gay bishop...

Thanks to Tomas and Dr John for your comments on what was quite a personal post - having read the comments I went, as I often do, off to Dr John's site and enjoyed his wry observations on life and the surreal yet addictive stories of Pigeon Falls then I visited Tomas' art site - a riot of colour and feeling, I loved the pictures and found much of it truly moving. I love abstract art that communications with form, shape and colour, and Tomas site does that. If you prefer pictures of landscapes or dogs playing poker, this isn't the site for you, otherwise check it out.

Bit of a high fallutin' title to this post, but a discussion this evening with the couple of lads that turned up to my youth group made me think a bit more about how I got caught up in this Christianity business and why, coming from a non-believing background in many respects, i ended up here, serving the Church and my local community as a Clergyperson. The easy, and perhaps way too pat, answer would be 'God' - somehow God sorted all this out so I am doing what I am doing here, there's a plan etc etc etc. This may well be the case, but I think that 'God is in the detail' (rather than the Devil!) so its worth a bit of reflection... I grew up in a little town in Devon, nothing spectacular, i felt loved and affirmed by my family (though it's a hugely complicated story) and I did quite well at school, which I loved. My father, by upbringing and conviction in early life, was a Roman Catholic who had left the Church behind when his first wife died. My mum was, ...