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 postYou 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?
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.
It struck me the other day as we were in the car and had the radio on and listening to the news and the very sad story that has dominated the news headlines for the last couple of weeks (although seems to have now even more sadly taken a back seat) of Maddie McCann. I realised that as parents we often get comments from our children about monsters, sometimes playing monsters, sometimes saying they can’t sleep because they are scared of the monsters, the response often given is there is no such thing as monsters but how wrong we are. The fact is there are monsters in this world, the really scary thing is, they look like the rest of us, like you and me and often we have no way of knowing until it is too late and we find ourselves in a position when someone or a group of people chose to hurt others (in whatever form that may take).
I remember as a child on holiday in the Isle of White going to the zoo there, there was a wall with a door on it with a sign that read something like “behind this door is the most dangerous creature ever to have walked this earth”, when you opened the door you were faced with a mirror.
It is a sad state and most of us can not understand how anyone can be so evil as to take a child. Monsters are very real and something we should be afraid of.
As the news seems to have pushed the story out a bit now (I actually couldn’t find an easy link to it on the BBC news site just now) we still remember Maddie and our prayers are still with Her and her family and we continue to pray for a miracle and that she might be found safe and well.
This morning I had an important meeting as I begin to think about my future and where it lies (not that I am thinking of moving on in the immediate or near future for anyone reading this locally). I have been in my current post for almost 3 years, in full time youth/youth and children’s work for almost 8 years and involved in youth work on some level since I was a youth myself of 15. I feel very strongly called to youth work, evangelism and to the rural church, an area so often neglected in so many respects. So this morning I was meeting with someone to discus my vision and ideas, beginning the process of trying to establish in my own mind where and how I feel the Lord is calling me to continue in His service. It is so great to be able to meet with people and just thrash some of these things out, the meeting has given me a lot of food for thought and several people to make contact with as I continue to explore and seek Gods guidance. It is a very exciting time but also a worrying one as it is not just about me and my ministry but about my family the people that God has given me to journey through life with and support and how I do that but also how as a family we seek to follow Him and His call. Things are all very much in the early stages but I would ask that you pray for me and for us as we look to God and His guidance and I will endeavour to keep you informed of the things that are going on and give you more details when the timing is right.
God bless you and have a good weekend.
I still like to consider myself fairly young, I know that for some who read this I maybe respectively young, for others and for many of those I work with I am considered quite old but on the whole I still think of myself as reasonably young, in terms of lifespan. I still (hopefully) have a considerable amount more life ahead of me than behind. But what has this got to do with Easter you ask yourself, well it was on Good Friday, at the end of the service that it stuck me although I consider myself still in the early part of my life it was at the same age as I am now that Jesus went to the cross. It just got me thinking about how much more of life I still see before me, the things I want to do, and I have already done more than some people of my age in terms of having a family etc that I want to enjoy as I watch and take part in their growing up. And yet for Jesus in terms of his human experience it was now at an end, most people of my age would feel the same about their future, for most of us the end is a long way off, were still in that stage of life when we don’t even really think about it and yet Christ gave it all up, still a young man, still from the human perspective with so much ahead of him, yet he was prepared to give that up for like likes of me!
I was preaching yesterday on John 14, I thought seeing as I rarely have anything particularly spiritual on here and I would share with you the key point I was getting at.
Looking at verse 7 Jesus says “If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well” Philip hasn’t quite got the grasp of things and asks (Verse 8 ) “Lord, show us the Father”. In answering Philip Jesus says to the disciples (Verse 10) “I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you are not just my own. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.” The point here is that those who follow Jesus will know the Father because of the likeness between them, in the same way that you can spot that some people are related because of the likeness, although that is often a physical likeness here it is talking more about a personal likeness, the thing Jesus does and the way he does them are like his Father.
Going on then to look at Verse 20 “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” If we would recognise the Father because of the likeness of him we see in Jesus because Jesus is in the Father and the Father is in him. Then we read about us being in Jesus and him being in us then surely our lives should lead people to know something of the person of Christ. In other words the way we live our lives, the way we treat others, the way we talk to others we should be reflecting Christ, it should be Jesus working through us that speaks the words, we should be doing what, we see Christ doing, we should be concerned about the things Christ is concerned about. So the conclusion then is that when people look at us and our lives who do they see? Yes they see us for who we are but if they saw Jesus would they recognise that likeness between us and what we do and what he does?
(all quotes taken from the NIV via the BibleGateway.com)
Just been reading through a drama script one of my volunteers has written for our pathfinder led service on Sunday, we are doing the story of Lazarus and retelling the story through 4 short dramas. The dramas have been written in a modern context and it just struck me and made me laugh when I got to the bit that read
Do you have any spades? Let’s dig him up.
But I suppose that is the equivalent of what Jesus was saying when he asked them to ‘roll the stone away’. I don’t know why but I had never thought of it like that before, it never seamed that bad Jesus asking them to roll the stone away but how would we react if we had just buried a relative a few days ago and then Jesus comes along and says “get the spades lets dig them up? Would we have the faith to do it?
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