knock knock, who’s there?

I have moved on http://elvagabondo.wordpress.com/

This really really is the last one here, promise.

Bye

Just tell you this and then I’ll go

Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye.

This is it then. The last one.

We set out to try to create an experience for us all on a Sunday morning that meant something to us. Something that affected us and changed us. We didn’t know what it would be like, whether people would get it. They did and continue to do so.

As of yesterday BCLC is no more.

We started the new ‘InaSpace’ session and, whilst it needs a little tweaking here and there, I felt it went about as well as it could have done.

We will be publicising stuff that we do but not in the way that I have done this blog. I have used this to develop a lot of my own thinking in the past 18 months as well as informing you about the development of BCLC. This has meant that neither has been fully addressed. So I am going to use Facebook to publicise InaSpace (look out for the group and join us if you are on FB) and I am going to create a new blog for my own personal musings that will allow me more freedom to say stuff I really think.

Thanks for reading.

The End.

And now, the end is near…

Well they say that all good things must come to an end and it is with some sadness that I must end my BCLC blog.

“But why”, I hear you all plead, “when it means so much to us all, are you stopping it? How will we know what to do with our own little emerging corner of the church”…..

The good news is I have been offered a very lucrative book deal to turn these pages into something of a manual (a bible if you like) on how to set up an emerging church….

Chapter 1, page 1 - “Put this book down and go out and see what is going on have a look at what resources you’ve got and try to work out where you fit.”

The End

Seriously, I haven’t been offered any such deal (yet). No the reason why this must end is because we met yesterday and decided that BCLC was in need of a change. One of the things that will change is the name, hence we will need a new ’space’ in the ether to let people know what is going on with us. Hopefully this will be less a personal rant from yours truly and more the efforts of the group or a sub-set of the group.

So what else is changing and why are we even thinking of altering something that is obviously still working well? Good questions. To deal with the second one first. The answer is that nothing ever stays the same - “He not busy being born is busy dying” - if we were to rest on our laurels, to think that we had this thing called life sussed out then we might as well pack up now So we are “busy being born”.

The major change is that we are seeking more wholeness and balance in what we do. At the moment, if you happen to turn up on any given week you might be expected to be creative about something that you have not even thought about. Or alternatively you might be want to seek some quiet contemplative time about a theme and have turned up when we are in discussive mode. So we have decided to use the whole of the building each week and offer a space to do all these things whenever you want to. The hope is that people will take the theme on and work with it in their lives throughout the week then respond in what they deem the most appropriate fashion on a Sunday morning. This could be one of 4 ways:

1. Conversational - you might want to chew the fat (and a bagel) with other people.

2. Contemplative - a quiet space to look inside yourself.

3. Creative - make something, a poem, a painting, a film, a musical - anything you want,

4. Conventional - you may just want to sing a few traditional hymns and be talked at for 20 minutes

As you can see this is all inclusive. We will start as we have been doing already, with breakfast, then people will go where they please for the next hour or so then return together for further fellowship before departing into the world.

So good bye Big Church’s Little Church, Hello ________________??

The very last post will be the one where I tell you how to pick up the new stuff.

Thanks to everyone who has read this or commented, it’s been a blast. Sorry to anyone I have upset, I only meant to a bit.

Well I’m gonna raise a fuss, I’m a gonna raise a holler….

I watched a really good thing on the telly last night, you may have seen it yourself (no it wasn’t echo beach - although I did watch that as well), it was Stuart Maconie presenting  the first in a series of programmes in which he will, with the aid of some notable names from the music biz, attempt to determine which was the best decade for pop music. It is called ‘Pop Music on Trial’ and last night we were treated to Joe Brown, CP Lee and Pete Wylie talking about the 50’s. For Lee and Brown (who nearly had to change his name to Elmer Twitch and the Fiddlers) this was a nostalgia trip, less so for Wylie and Maconie.

They were all very interesting and some of Joe Brown’s reminiscences were both entertaining and informative.

I had largely forgotten about the 50’s. I am an Elvis fan but I haven’t listened to anything else from that decade in ages. What a mistake that was!! My Grandfathers Clock by the Mudlarks would be going on my iPod (if I had one) and I shall be scouring YouTube for Alma Colgan footage. Seriously the video of Eddie Cochraine doing C’Mon Everybody was brilliant. He was only 21 when he died and they reckoned he would have been bigger than Elvis as he not only had the voice, the looks and moves, he could also write his own material and he was a producer of some note.

Now I am sure that you are all reading this thinking, ‘yeah yeah, that’s all very well but what’s it got to do with BCLC’?

Well the 50’s were something of a landmark decade for pop music and for kids of a certain age. Prior to this people just did what their parents did, they listened to the music their parents listened to and went into the same occupations. Except that here was the chance for some of them to not do that. Here was a chance for people to do something different, something their parents didn’t understand. And some kids did and suddenly the whole world opened up new possibilites and new opportunities. It was like the shackles of post war austerity no longer applied to them and they could live their lives to their own agenda.

And, some kids didn’t. Some kids carried on toeing the party line, doing stuff the way it had always been done. Of course there was no place for the unruly kids in church, here was a bastion of doing things they way they had ‘always’ been done, and, I’m sure some hope(d), would always be done. So at a stroke all the people who wanted to change stuff went off and did something else leaving behind the less adventurous types to keep up the good work.

And so it has gone on through the decades. When you look at how monumental the changes  in pop music have been since those days an how little, fundamentally, has changed in our churches, the contrast is quite staggering.

Until now - C’mon Everybody…..

Thank you for the music

I went to church on Sunday. It was all age so I had to sit through some hymns. I used to sing hymns but I can’t now understand why. I would say that if I spent the rest of my life unable to sing another hymn I would feel no loss whatsoever.

What are hymns? Someone has sat down and written a song about their take on something to do with God or Jesus or the Holy Spirit. Someone else has thought it sounded good enough to sing and then when there are enough of these people they put them together in a book. Then along comes a denomination of the church and they choose to have this book instead of some of the others to be their hymn book of choice, the one they will give out to everyone when they arrive at church.

There is nothing divine or particularly spiritual about these songs. Some are ok, some are rubbish.

On Sunday we had to sing what I would consider to be the worst of all worlds. No it wasn’t Graham Kendrick (well there was one of his but that wasn’t the worst one). I can’t actually remember who it was but I do recall that it was the most drippy lovey-dovey nonsense about Jesus being the king of everything. I don’t understand how Jesus can be both your friend and example and, at the same time, be the lord of all and king of everything.

How does that work?

Please, please, please, let me get what I want

Congratulations to Hilary Clinton, the first female president of the USA!!!

What? She’s not the president?

But it was all over the news this morning, all they talked about was how she won an election ‘against all the odds’..

…that was only a state deciding which of the democrats might go on to fight one of the republicans in NOVEMBER!!! to become president?

Oh well only 9 months to go, how exciting is this going to get????

Apparently, one of the pundits on the radio told me this morning, you don’t get to be president of the US by putting up your hand. You have to be able to campaign tirelessly to prove you are worthy. This reminded me of when I was at school and the teacher asked us to put up our hands if we knew the answer to a question. Most of us would raise our hands and wait to see if we were picked, some more nervously than others. There was always one child in the class though who had to put their arm up the highest and get off their seat and make an noise like they were having sex (though we didn’t know what that sounded like then of course). They were the most annoying in the class by a mile and it was always pleasing when they were finally chosen by a resignedly indulgent teacher and they got the answer wrong.

This is the image I have in my head when I see the likes of Hilary Clinton asking to be president. There are many infinitely more worthy than her but they just put their hands up and wait to be asked. That is not how you become the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth.

Pity.

On New Years Day..

‘Tis traditional to make some resolutions, so here goes:

In 2008 I resolve…

…to Blog less and live more.

…to achieve a better balance in my life.

…to do less at church.

…to get the ball in more often.

…to do better.

…to be happy.

…to be me.

I hope that God exists, I hope I pray

Still looking at hope in BCLC. I am struggling a bit with getting into the subject and I had so much else to do yesterday that I couldn’t get into the activity either. Roll on January.

So I will have to tell you about something else that I saw that made me think a lot this weekend. I watched Russell Brand on the Road, a film about him and his mate retracing a journey made by Jack Kerouac 50 years before and immortalised in his book On the Road. I didn’t watch it all, I do intend to but it was on too late. I do find Brand to be quite an interesting character though, he has been through a lot in his years and speaks informatively (and wittily) on a number of subjects.

In the film he mentioned something about someone being on a quest for God. I presumed he meant a quest to find God as oppose to a quest on God’s behalf. This made me ponder whether we are all on some sort of ‘quest for God’ but we are all looking in different places.

Ultimately, i would say that most mot people are seeking some sort of fulfillment to their lives, some sort of happiness. They look for this in any number of places - work, home, sport, friendships - and believe they have found it in a number of ways - recognition and money, comfort, achievement - all very positive things. Other people believe they are completed in more negative ways, through drugs, drink or exerting power over those they perceive to be weaker than they are.

Christians, traditionally, profess to find themselves in their worship and service. I am not convinced. Yes there can be something of an uplifting, a spritual if you like, experience that can be had in some of the elements of an act of worship (very few and far between in my experience) and would not admit to finding something of that in their everyday lives.

I am now starting to think that God can only truly be found in the everyday things of life. The joy an fulfillment of having ones life in balance must be, to me, ‘finding God’.

The ‘worship’, certainly that which we practice at BCLC, enables us to find that balance. To put our lives into context and perspective and establish who we are and where we belong. As I have discussed before, our identity is in the balance of our activities and our relationships, I am no more a ‘christian’ than I am a ‘father’ or a ‘friend’ or a ‘youth worker’ or a ‘tennis player’ - all those things, and more make me me and the balance of them all is the key to fulfillment and happiness.

Is that not where we find God?

Oh Carol

I heard this today http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/listenagain/ram/today4_carol_20071217.ram

Honestly, could there be a more desperately poor attampt to re-interest people in something?

Return to Sender

I received this twice in the past couple of days:

Royal Mail has traditionally alternated between sacred and secular designs for their Christmas stamps and this year it is the turn for a religious image. Royal Mail has issued two sets of designs this year. The main set of designs, available in all the main denominations is of angels, which is vaguely Christian but not explicitly so and certainly not specifically Christmassy. They have also issued a ‘Madonna and Child’ design for first and second class only. Post Office staff have been instructed to only sell this design if people specifically request it, but obviously people can’t request it if they don’t know it exists! If people don’t buy these stamps, Royal Mail will claim there is no demand for religious Christmas stamps and not produce them in future. Please therefore ask for ‘Madonna and Child’ stamps when you do your Christmas posting and also tell your friends, contacts etc. to do the same. Thank You.

My first reaction to something like this is, ’so what?’. My second reaction to things like this is ’so what?’.

This is in conjunction with an article in our church magazine urging us christian types to reclaim christmas (for God and for Harry?). Reclaim it from whom? I don’t want to go into the whole history of how it was nicked by christians from pagan festivals of light, but some of that is so entwined with our rather confused festival that it is difficult not to.

Surely the moment a church puts up a christmas tree it is buying into the idea that this festival is more than a celebration of the birth of christ?

We really can’t have it both ways, this is, at best, a mixed - secular and spiritual - celebration, at worst a big party that most christians are happy to indebt themselves to. It seems a bit rich to me to then cry foul when the post office won’t be a bit more sympathetic to our fragile sensibilities.

The more important questions we should be asking is why has one of our main festivals become so secular? What are people looking for at christmas? I know that the christian story is a good one to tell and never more so than at christmas, so why does no one want to hear it?

I hate talk of reclamation, you cannot go backwards, only forwards. There is a new reality out there that churches and the people within had better get to grips with or they will be going the way of the religious stamps, an idle curiosity to wierdos and philatelists (tortologous? - no offence).