What’s another year?

Though a big fan of Eurovision I am not a big fan of the songs that emerge from it. And this one is no exception.

It is over 12 months now since I started this blog. I appear to have a number of regular readers, which is nice. Some of them are known to me some are not. In fact finding out that people I knew were reading it and taking offence did change it for a short time but I think I have pretty much returned to form since then.

To sum the year up.. we are still in the process of moving to the Methodists, people are resigning all over the place – albeit to save the church money (don’t ask). The building really is falling down, the heating keeps packing up, but still we persevere. BCLC is improving every week and we nearly started the mid-week encounters, we will do it in the new year I promise. Weekenders is growing nicely under Pete’s leadership and we even have a child safeguarding policy, well nearly.

On the personal front things have improved with all our old friends, so much so that they are all coming over to ours for new year, well if we hadn’t planned anything another year would have passed without our seeing them over the festive period.

Looking ahead to the new year we have the possibility of a new minister at church. This is a big deal and pretty exciting. I can see BCLC moving further away from the main body of the church and I don’t think that is such a bad thing. I do treasure some of the wrinklies but too many of them just need to move on really and let us get on with it. What exactly ‘it’is has yet to be determined but it won’t happen in the current buildings.

I would say that I am not as optimistic about next year as I was this time last year, but I am more certain that what we are doing is the right thing to do.

So do have a merry Christmas and a happy new year and come back to see us again in January.

Please.

Jingle Bells

At our carol service on sunday the yougest lad there was singing hi own version of JB, much to his parents shock and everyone elses mirth he belted out how batman smells etc.

We have a service on Christmas eve this year and then immediately following it on Christmas day. I don;t have to go to both I suppose although I have written some drama for Sunday. It is based on a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens and involves someone going back to church after a while and being visited byt 3 spirirts whilst there. The first spririt shows them what the church used to be like 40 years ago and compares that to now then 2 spirits of the future come and show 2 possible outcomes for the church. Death or Life really. My contention is that if we carry on doing as we have done before (which I refer to as nothing) in the hope that our fortunes will somehow miraculously change (where in the Bible did Jesus perform a miracle that didn’t involve some sort of change int he recipient???) and everyone will realise what they have been missing and flock back, then we are heading for death. If we look on the arrival of Jesus as a great sign of hope for the church and it’s people and actually get off our backsides and make something happen then the future could be very rosy indeed.

But someone doesn’t want this performed. Someone thinks it’s inappopriate for Christmas when people don’t want to be reminded of the past in case it upsets them and they don’t want to confront the present in case it upsets them and they can’t possibly face the future in case … well you get it by now.

So we’ll just spend the time being nice to each other and pretend for a few days that the only problems we have are digestion related.

I don’t think I can stomach that

Safe

The Weekenders tag line is ‘alter your horizons’. The intention was/is always to give the participants the time and space to be themselves, or if they prefer, to be someone else.

How is it then that in the only document we have published that states our intentions all we have undertaken to do is promise not to hurt them. That is our stated policy.

“Come to Weekenders and we will do our best to make sure that you go home unscathed”.

Perhaps I should change the publicity.

Great Church Myths #72

It is about time that someone exposed the utter drivel that is still peddled in churches around the country. Of course that someone, today, is me. So along with ‘churches are not the buildings, they are the people’ I would like to consign ‘children are not the church of tomorrow, they are the church of today’.

Bollox.

I am 42 and even I am not the church of today. The church of today belongs to my parents generation. And they are not going to give it up. For a long time this really mattered to me. It annoyed me that I wasn’t empowered to alter the way things were, to innovate, to modernise, to change.

Nowadays I couldn’t give a fig. The children don’t need the millstone of a dying organisation around their necks, they have enough to contend with (even if exams are much easier nowadays:-). So you wrinklies can keep your church, we’re gonna make one of our own.