So far I have only seen two of the Nooma DVD’s, the first one ‘Rain’, about a year ago and the second one ‘Rich’ last night, both with my youth group. I have been very impressed with both and last nights was very challenging. If you haven’t seen or used any of them yet then I highly recommend them, I am going to try and use them a little more regularly than once a year I think now. They are superbly done and really do make you think, even though Rich was very American in some respects it still translated and although we don’t have the ‘God Bless America’ bumper stickers (although one girl in the group is now trying to convince her parents to get one!) it still translated really easily.
The only down side is the cost, they have come down since I brought the first one when most of them were around £12 now you can get the for about £9.50 but for a small group that is quite a lot of money especially when you consider in the US they are $10 which is about £5. The discs are multi region so it’s not like they have to be repressed for over here or anything it’s just part of the whole rip off Britain that we live in, I was reading about a piece of software the other day that was $180 in America or £185 over here for exactly the same box, it’s bad enough when secular society wants to rip us off like that but why the difference within the Christian community?
Email this postWent over to the bus this morning to go and fill it up with diesel ready for going out tonight and it was a non starter. (non technical technical bit) Turn on the ignition and the alarm goes off for the air pressure, press start button and nothing, not even a click, so now I have to get the mechanics out again and see how long it takes to get it back on the road again. Hey ho!
You learn something new everyday, or at least so they say, well yesterday I learnt about Fathers Day, of course I knew of Fathers Day but I didn’t know as much as I do now.
It started with being asked if I was going to mention it during the service at which I was leading and preaching yesterday and I said “no, it doesn’t really fit” so I was then asked “well why are you not including it? Why doesn’t the church celebrate Fathers Day?” I replied “because we don’t” The argument that we celebrate mother’s day is that it has a tradition behind it where as Fathers Day, to my understanding, was about greetings company’s making a bit more money, apparently I am wrong, the story is this:-
The idea came from a town called Spokane, in Washington, America. A woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was sitting in church listening to the sermon on Mother’s day 1909. Sonora’s mother had died in child birth with her 6th child and so Sonora had not really known her mother but had been raised by her Farther, Henry Jackson Smart. Sonora saw that her father had made all the sacrifices most mothers do, in her eyes he was a courageous, selfless and loving man and she wanted an opportunity to let him know how special he was to her. Her fathers birthday was in June and so she decided to hold the first fathers day on July 19th 1910. In 1924 President Calvin Coolidge supported the idea of a national Fathers day and in 1966 President Lyndon B Johnson signed a proclamation making the 3rd Sunday in June the official Fathers day.
I don’t know when the celebration hit these shores, and I suspect it may have been the greetings companies who brought it over, but the question perhaps should stand, should we in the church be celebrating Fathers, as we do mothers? Could this be a great opportunity to reach out to some of the men who are on the edges of our churches? Whatever the means of it getting to the UK, the roots of the celebration are good, and maybe it is something we should take on board and include in our church calendar?
I have added an events page to the site to advertise a few of the things that are going on, some of these are fun things you might want to know about, maybe even come along to! Others are things you might like to pray for! We’ll see how it develops, let me have any comments etc or suggestions as to what else you think could be on the events page or added to the site.
Cheers
An update on Fat and Frantic for you, they are now on Myspace! Well not any of the actual band members YET but a few people who want to hold their memory dear and continue to spread the word and about the worlds best Goffle band! You can find them at http://www.myspace.com/revsoftly.
P.S. Don’t forget to check out the rest of the FAF discussions.
Update: Thought I should flag this up as well as it has only come up in comments on an early post before, the website http://www.fatandfrantic.co.uk is now up and running, lots of info about the band and looking for more. I have some stuff I need to submit when I have got the time to scan, well done to Jez for all the work though.
Got woken up at 6:15 this morning, not good, I’m not a morning person, but to make it worse rolled over I got severe cramp in my left leg to the extant that now 4 hours later I am still hobbling around in pain from it, I have had this a few times before but only once when it left me hobbling, that time it was 3 days before I could walk properly again. Not good!
Friday afternoon was the new Bishop of Oxford’s (The Right Reverend John Lawrence Pritchard) Inauguration to which I had been invited to be one of three representing Licensed Youth Ministers in the diocese. It was a great service and a real privilege to be invited to such an event, the processing as mentioned over on Youthblog (where you will also find a bit of a write up here) was not as bad as first thought. The biggest problem actually came with getting in as I had forgotten to take the letter with me! Once in and processed we were in a side chapel which meant we had a wide screen monitor to watch most of the service on (and very little space) but the bishop did come round to the chapel to be anointed with oil so I suppose that made us feel a bit more a part of it.
I suppose the question it leaves in my mind is to do with how much say a new Bishop gets in his Inauguration service, there was a lot of Choral stuff, all very good quality but I just wonder how much of the service is put together in consultation with the Bishop (or whoever is being whatevered) and how much is because this is the cathedral and this is what we do? Did the service reflect something of the Bishops spirituality or more of the cathedrals churchmanship? I’m not trying to dis it, it’s not my kind of thing but I know for others it is and that is great, the church is made richer by it’s diversity and I think it is good to be challenged by going to services that are not of the style we would personally chose and I find often causes me to reflect somewhat on what I do and why, it’s just something I was wondering.
Typical isn’t it, Just like buses to, you wait for a post to come along for ages and then three turn up all at once!
Just found out this morning from Youthblog (that’s reading his blog he didn’t actually tell me or anything!), that my invite to the Bishops inauguration tomorrow afternoon includes being in the procession, scary (not the Bishop, although I haven’t met him yet so I can’t say for sure but I get the impression he’s not!) don’t really know what than means, the suggestions in response to Ian’s asking aren’t really much help either (including my own). Obviously we can work out the basics, it will involve some kind of walking in a line! Oh well I guess I’d better not go in too scruffy a T’shirt then!
Maybe Dave can draw us some kind of cartoon to help?
A couple of days ago was our termly Youth Worker Network meeting organised by Ian (Youthblog). This time we were at Oakwood Youth Challenge, a fantastic facility with accommodation for residentials for about 80 people (I think that was what they said!) with loads of outdoor activities and a farm all part of the experience. The aim of the centre is to reach out to young people in the local area as well as being a great Christian residential facility. There was only one thing I really wasn’t impressed with and that was being given 10 press-ups for a comment I made on the low ropes at the time I only had a half formed argument but I now have a fuller thought on what I said. First to give the context, we were doing a low ropes course and as part of it we had to retrieve a ball (dinosaur egg) as well as getting the team across each stage. As we moved around things were being made more difficult and at this stage we were given 1 minute to think up a plan then 2 minutes to exorcise it. We had already had one attempt and failed, I made the suggestion that maybe if we were trying to over complicate things maybe the simple answer was to leave the egg. I was told off and given 10 press ups for ‘bottling out’ the argument was that often we are faced with challenges and we cant get out. Here however is my thinking, we had two challenges, too get the egg and to get the team across in 2 minutes, sometimes we can have a situation like this in our ministry and we have to chose which is more important, my thinking was if we were given a time limit surly the team was more important than the egg. Therefore my comment was not defeatist as suggested but one of thinking of the team, given a situation where you know you cant do everything (and we couldn’t in the time available) my comment was suggesting that the priority should be to keep the team together at the cost of failing one part of the task. So anyway now for my confession I only did 8 press-ups, I don’t have enough upper body strength to do them (despite 3 years driving a 4 tonne bus without power steering) but hey I don’t feel guilty, I perhaps feel a little guilty about getting Ian 10 press-ups though sorry mate!
After the low ropes came another challenge, the high ropes! I like the irony of being a stilt walker afraid of heights and just looking up at the high ropes terrified me but in the end I decided to have a go and below is the evidence of that (thanks to Ian for the photo) I would guess this course was 30 – 40 feet off the ground and yes I was scared but enjoyed it and even stopped shaking an hour or so after getting off it. The thing I found most difficult was where there was something to balance on (like the log in the photo) but also something to hold onto about chest height. I have a reasonable sense of balance (stilts and unicycling etc) and had the opportunity a few years ago to learn the tight rope, I didn’t master it but I had almost (probably another ½ hour or so and I would have been fine) therefore I found it easier to balance than to rely on holding on to something, but hey there we go, I did it and I’m glad I did and I probably would again, after all it is only by facing our fears we can overcome them!
Last week we went away for a few days up to Norfolk to stay with friends in Mulbarton (where I grew up) it’s amazing how having really left 12 years ago it still feels like going home, I just feel like I belong, not that I don’t feel that in Faringdon that is obviously home at the moment but I can go to Mulbarton and just fit back in with friends and the church as if I’ve hardly been away and I always enjoy worshiping in the church community there it is also always great to see so many new faces in a small rural church!
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