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If your visiting having read ground level, the profile page in Youthwork Magazine then a very big welcome to you.
Regular readers may remember that a while ago I talked about putting up a video tour of the bus, well I have finally done it, as part of the preparations to put it on the market, so if you want to see it inside and out please click below.
Well I had a meeting with the DDO (Diocesan Director of Ordinands) this morning as I continue to explore where God is calling me in my future ministry. It seemed to go well, some though provoking questions and quite a bit of reading to do now but I think it was positive, I now need to get on and do some reading before seeing her again in July. Thanks to all of you that were praying and I will keep you updated.
I would be very interested in borrowing them.
Cheers
well almost… I have been asked to write a case study on the bus project for Youthwork Magazine and submitted my article at the beginning of this week. I think it should be in the next issue (which I guess is due out in three weeks or so guessing from when I got my last issue). Although mostly focused on the bus and only short I have tried to relate it to rural youth ministry as much as I can as well. I am looking forward to having a copy in my hands and I’m sure I’ll put a note up here when I finally see it in print.
Last week we had the APCM at church, I had been waiting for this before I felt I could say too much about my thinking on the blog, but now the info is out with that annual report it all become a little easer as it is out there in the public domain anyway.
When I first arrived in Faringdon I was on a three year contract which was then extended for a further two years, this takes my contract until end of July 2009 but for the last year or so I have started thinking about what is next for me. Come that date next year I will have been in full time Church based Youth Ministry for 10 years (all bar a month) and I feel that perhaps I should be heading in a slightly different direction. As many of you probably know I feel passionately about Youth Work in rural churches, I have been frustrated by the focus on Urban Priority areas, not because I begrudge a focus on them but because I have been aware of a need in rural areas that seams to have been overlooked. (There is also a slight sense of irony here as the rural population of Britain is growing faster that any other!)
So I have had this vision for several years to set up a charity (called Not Ashamed, based on Romans 1:16 (I love that verse!) hence my owning the domain notashamed.co.uk) to ‘encourage, enable and equip good quality Youth Work in and through rural Churches’.
At Soul Survivor last year I went to a seminar by Bishop Graham & Jackie Cray called Getting Collard, obviously about ordination, this is again an idea that has been with me for quite some time, and something that had been suggested when thinking and talking about my vision as well. This has started much thinking and praying and as a result I feel I am being called to ordained ministry and that somehow this fits with the Vision, I don’t know how it all fits together, but I truly believe this is where God is calling me at the moment. As a part of this process I have an appointment with the DDO (Diocesan Director of Ordinands) on the 23rd May to help start the process of exploring this calling.
At the same time as all this I am also looking around at what other jobs are around, I don’t know about you but it seams to me there is no one place to look for jobs in youth ministry, there seam to be several and not one that has all
I thought it might be helpful to have a list of places to look for ministry jobs and so at the bottom of this post is what I have got so far and I am sure there are several I have missed, especially any outside of the Anglican church, if you know of others please let me know and I’ll add them.
In the mean time I would appreciate your thoughts and prayers as I look to what the future holds for me and my family.
Having started a sermon series at church toward the end of last year, we were looking at ways of making them available for people that missed the service or were out leading a group. We came to the conclusion that the easiest way to do this now was to record and put them online, thus was born www.allsaintsfaringdon.co.uk. As was inevitable with this situation eventually one of my sermons was going to appear and that has happened today (it’s taken me a while to get it sorted this week). So if your interested in hearing what I had to say on the subject of calling click here and download.
This year I did my tax return ages ago, about May time, one of the advantages of this I discovered is that you can chose to pay your bill through your tax code which I thought would be good. Shortly afterwards I received a new tax code which has since been used. It was therefore a surprise when last week I got a bill through telling me I had to pay by today! I phoned the tax office who didn’t really seam to know what was going on but assured me I didn’t need to pay the bill as the money had been collected through my tax code. I’m now thinking I should have asked for this in writing, there is this little voice at the back of my head that is saying if they told me wrong I am going to be fined for late payment, although I don’t owe them any money, it should be fine, stop worrying! Â
Thanks to those of you that made the call, I have just heard that Project Inspire won it’s bid , although the info I gave before was not quite correct, they have won a grant of £90,000 and this will enable them to get going with the project and will make a huge difference to both the village community and those around the area, well done to Fernaham and Project Inspire, I look forward to visiting St John’s and seeing what it’s like after the work has been done.
Project inspire (click to find out more) is a project in a local Village of Fernham to help convert the church into a dual purpose building, both church and community centre, it is a village with very few facilities and a church that needed much work doing on it and it was felt that it would be good to make it a building that could be used for the whole community, it will be a place of Christian worship but also a place where young can have a youth club, the elderly can do what they do? This is a very important project and is really about putting the church back at the centre of the community, it being a place that can be used as it would have been when it was first built hundreds of years ago. Of course a project like this costs thousands of pounds, but you can help make a significant difference for just 10p! Today on the Peoples Millions Project Inspire is up for a grant of around £80,000 but they only get it if people vote for it. The phone lines are open this evening although specific times won’t be announced until the 6 o’clock local ITV news. Please, please, please would you call
Many thanks,
I am preparing a sermon for this coming Sunday and I need your help with the answer to a simple question, if you could leave a comment or email me with your answers it would be very useful, the question is ‘Why do you do what you do?’ I’m thinking about the main activity you do, it might be your job, it might be being a parent it might be something else but if you could just give me one or two sentences that state why you do what you do it would be great. Thank you in advance.
PS. If you want to hear the results the sermon will be available as an MP3 download sometime next Monday from www.allsaintsfaringdon.org just click on the link for sermons.
Just set up a new website for the church, it’s in very early stages at the moment but uses wordpress to make it all work. The reason for doing this is we wanted to be able to record our current sermon series and have found tapes to be a problem now as very few can copy them when needed not to mention the fact that a lot of people don’t have facilities to listen to them at all now. So today I have just uploaded the first sermon from the series, check it all out at www.allsaintsfaringdon.co.uk.
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