How Soon is Now III

Just read this again. I have just returned from Greenbelt 2010 and have exactly the same gripes. Queues for everything popular and recommended in the booklet and heavy handed stewarding of the Beer and Hymns session (I think it was the same steward that got my pip last year).

This year was better though because we volunteered to help in the Christian Aid Cafe. Really nice to work with some young people that are just embarking on, or just returning from,  their gap-year with Christian Aid and to meet all the people coming in for a brew.

I’d like to teach the world to sing

Did any of you see the wonderful ‘Choir’ series on the telly recently? I did and what an uplifting tale of one person’s vision for a community being realised so effectively. For those of you unfamilliar with the concept, Gareth Malone, a choirmaster goes into a community, be that a school or, in the case of series 3, an actual community (South Oxhey) and transforms the people therein through the power of communal singing.

Previously, I gather, he has done this in schools but this time he has taken on all ages from all areas of the town and merged them into a cohesive, and not unpleasant sounding, group of singers. The effect this has had on the town of South Oxhey was quite startling. Here we have a singing group that consists of what were 3 or 4 disparate (and previously non-existant) singing groups. The climax of the series was the South Oxhey Festival, a one day event on a bank holiday to which the whole town was invited to celebrate all that was good about South Oxhey and, of course, hear the choir sing.

To see the pride the partcipants and the watching crowd had in their town was inspiring.

To hear the comments about meeting new people and making new friends made me think back to my time at church. This is apposite as I was invited to a service this weekend on what is known as ‘(please, please, please) come back to church sunday (we’re desperate for people but not so much as we would actually change anything about the way we do anything to make it any more appealing in any way)’. The ‘church’  want us all to go back, to return to the fold. We know that you were led astray by the devil but God is still there every Sunday at the same time, doing the same things and he isn’t even a little bit miffed that you haven’t been in a while. So come on, come back and we’ll pretend it never happened, in fact we’ll pretend nothing ever happens, better still we will actually do nothing so we don’t even have to pretend.

I couldn’t help but contrast this notion of going back and returning to that of the choir going forward, trying something new, inspiring and leading people into new experiences. Experiences that enhance their life and build them spiritually and physically. Experiences that bring them together for the communal good. And with no agenda but that. You don’t have to believe, you just have to be.

The church is one of the few organisations that has the wherewithall to do something like Malone has done but it seems too content to sit on it’s collective big backside and ‘beg’ people to come back rather than get out there and do something for meaningful for them.

So, thanks, but no thanks, I won’t be going back any day soon.

How Soon is Now II ?

Just got back from Greenbelt 09 where the theme for the festival was ‘Standing in the long now’. On my experience of the weekend I would alter that slightly and call it ‘Standing in the long queue’.

I really cannot remember that last time I had to queue so much and I started the summer going to Glastonbury. The thing was, at Glastonbury (G), there were queues for the loos, that would be expected and it was much the same at Greenbelt (GB). The problem with GB was that everything that was even remotely popular had to be queued for, usually for about an hour prior to the item starting. I think the longest recorded queue from someone in our party was 2 and a half hours for Rob Bell.

At times the enforcement of the queueing was a little heavy handed. Take the 2nd Beer & Hymns session. When I went into the beer tent a good hour and a half before the planned start to have a quick beer with Dylan (whilst he ate our shared pancake) there were already quite a lot of people in there. We sat outside and watched the queue form. Meanwhile some of our friends and family arrived to meet up with us before we moved on to our next activity (we had already done the singing the day before) so I suggested they nip in through the side of the fence and join me whilst we waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the stewards realised that people were getting in this way so they posted someone to stop it. Consequently some of our friends were on the wrong side of the fence. When they wanted to go off and do other things I suggested their children came with us so I politely asked the steward if they could come in for a few minutes and sat with us, whilst I finished my drink.

‘No they can’t’ I was told, ‘we are at the legal limit for the number of people and we would be breaking the law if we let them in’. This was probably the case, there were probably more people in than should have been but there is no way they could have known how many more as there was no way they could have known how many were actually in there. There could have been a conversation here whereby they established how many children we wanted to bring in (2) and how long we would be staying for (5 minutes) but there wasn’t. So instead we asked if our child could nip out that way to be with his friends on the other side. ‘No he has to go through the front gate’, presumably so they could let someone in to keep the numbers precise. So I lifted him over the fence and off he went.

I finished my drink and we all moved off, no real harm done, some people were let in to the ‘space’ we had vacated and off we went to queue for something else. The whole thing tainted our weekend though when it really didn’t need to.

So a couple of questions for the GB organisers (lest they be reading this)

• Why were the most popular activities not put in venues that could accomodate the expected interest? e.g. Rob Bell had a 2-3 hour queue fro each of his sessions. Given that he is quite a popular character and he was featured prominently in the guide and he was recommended by a lot of people, why wasn’t he on the main stage?
• Why is there a fence round the beer tent?
• Why can’t the stewards use their common sense?
• Why wasn’t it really sunny?

I did enjoy my GB though, good to see some old friends and to make some new ones (Simon Thomas is on the christmas card list). I really enjoyed seeing and hearing Paul Cookson and Stewart Henderson, two poets that are very entertaining. I also thought that Dans le Sac vs Scrobious Pip were excellent. I would probably not seek out 100 Philistines Foreskins again though (no offence).

So will I be going next year (yes) will I grumble a bit about stuff (probably), still, when you get to 27 you do get a bit tetchy in your old age.

Stockport, my kinda town

So, not only do we have the largest brick built structure in Europe, we now have 2 (that’s right two – count em) players in the BDO world-darts-cup-thing semi-final. Why would anyone ever want to live anywhere else?

Vicar in a Tutu

- He just wants to live his life this way hehey.

Following on a little from my last entry but a little bit more churchy (sorry), I read an article that interested me the other day concerning the calling of ministers. I think I may have touched on this before. I have increasingly felt that the men and women of the cloth that I have encounteried on my travels through the church were in the wrong job. They wanted to inspire and lead and excite and challenge and transform, to be, in their view, a minister. Meanwhile, their congregation wanted them to visit, to chair meetings, to talk to the ladies club to be, in their view, a minister.

How did this get this way? Well I think it is all in the calling. Ministers think they are called by God, the church thinks they are called by the church. There’s the rub, the ministers want to go around doing God’s work, the church wants them going round doing its work – not necessarily, or even very often, the same thing.

You see it is God who inspires, who transforms, who changes people and God doesn’t call minsters to do that for him. He calls prophets to do that, people with no allegience to an organisation, people who can see the truth and speak it.

Ministers meanwhile are called by the people of the church to do the work of the church, whatever that may entail.

This may be obvious to everyone else but it explains an awful lot to me.

Two pints of lager and a packet of crisps please

I have been here before. I read on FaceBook today about a group at Leeds University, christians who have set up what I suspect to be ‘some sort of emerging church group’ and they have given it the rather unimaginative title of ‘Cafe Church’.

Where to start…

This is a group of university students, remember in the 60′s some of them tried to take over Paris, rebels, brilliant bright young things off to change the world, to challenge authority, to…. I’ll stop there. I don’t know what they do at ‘cafe church’ and going by the name I wouldn’t be busting a gut to get a long there and find out. It’s just so cliched.

The other thing that does get my pip about the whole cafe church phenomenum is the word cafe. I alluded to this in the link above, cafes in England are places where you get tea, preferably in a mug, and fried food. I appreciate that we now have bistro style eateries, all Paris-like, and tables on the pavement, and that people prefer them to pubs because they in turn have turned themselves mini tv-cinemas with beer where you can watch foorball or some football related news all the while you are there. But let’s face it we are not French, it feels nice in the Summer (if we get one) to sit on the pavement and drink milky coffee (though your glass teacup, so beloved of the english cafe for serving milky coffee, has grown a few inches, it is still the same thing) we get to do that for about 9 days in any year. The rest of the time you want to be indoors (unless you smoke of course – we do make life difficult for ourselve don’t we?) out of the cold wind and driving rain (or summer as was this year).

I am serious about this, we could strike a blow for our heritage of pubs, where people shared conversation, by creating something called ‘pub church’, hmmmmm needs a better name (suggestions please). But in essence people meet in a pub, drink whatever they like (in moderation please) and talk to each other about stuff.

So, students of Leeds, get out of the cafe, shift your church to the pub and get them to turn the telly off, if nothing else you’ll sleep better without all that caffeine in you.

How soon is now?

I have been preoccupied lately with a lot of other stuff and consequently I have done very little (no) blogging here and almost as little thinking and planning for InaSpace. Well I am pleased to say that I am addressing both those inadequacies today.

With moving churches being at the forefront of everyone’s minds at the moment we have spent a lot of time looking back at our time in the old place and looking forward to our time in the new. I want to spend a morning this week looking at the ‘now’. Is it possible to live in the now or do we constantly look back and forward, plan and review and consequently miss out on the full enjoyment of what we are doing right now?

I will let you know…..

C’mon, C’mon, arry up arry cam on

Sham 69, never my favourite group especially when they did the dire ‘if the kids are united’. Of course the next line to the one in the title is: ‘we’re goin’ darn the pab’ (trans. ‘we are going to the pub’).

I heard on the radio yesterday that pubs are suffering. They have been hit with the triple whammy of rising costs (minimum wage and energy), budget increases on beer and wine and the smoking in the workplace ban. And they are reeling, even the big boys are feeling the pinch.

I am quite a fan of pubs, I don’t go to them enough. Right from the tender age of 15 or whenever I snuck my firat half of bitter in the Flying Dutchman on Hillgate through to taking Katy to the Church Inn in Cheadle Hulme for her 18th birthday ‘first legal pint’ (Robbies – she nearly finished it), I have been a regular and most willing attender of these fine hostelries, the length and breadth of England.

I think more people should support the pub. I think they should let under-age drinkers try to sneak a few pints under reporoachful but indulgent eye of the landlord who, with the help of years of pub etiquette, will keep them in good order until they have had enough and are sent home. How much better for everyone than having them get totally wasted on strong, cheap cider in the park before venting there juvenile frustrations (or trying to keep warm…) by beating up an innocent passer-by?

Perhaps the churches are missing a trick here as well. Their buildings are falling down so why not just decamp to their nearest pub? There’ll be no shortage of lost souls to save, if that is their bag, it will be warm and friendly and attenders can have a drink at the same time. It would provide a boost for the flagging boozers and some booze for the flagging congregations.

So forget cafe church, we are not French and a cafe is where you get a fry up not a hymn sandwich.

Walk out of ‘God’s House’ and into ‘God’s Public House’, it’s the future and you heard it here first.

Baby I love you

I watched the Simpsons the other night. It was an episode where Ned Flanders meets a ‘Christian Rock Singer’ he used to have a thing for.

Ned : “Where’s your backing band?”

Girl : “They left the Christian music scene and went mainstream – you just use the word ‘baby’ instead of Jesus”

Perfect.

what’s goin’ on

On Sunday someone from theological school attended our conventional worship space. This person was there to assess a bloke from our church who is training for the ministry. I spoke to her afterwards about how he’d done and she was quite dismissive in an ‘oh it was fine way’. She then went on to say how it was InaSpace that she really wanted to know about. I duly described what we had been up to and what we had planned. I also told her a bit about how we had come to be there doing that thing. She was interested. I have previously spoken to the head of that particular theological school and he was interested too in what we were doing. The thing is, where is the evidence that their interest in activities such as ours is finding its way onto the curriculum for the school? Why are we still churning (I appreciate that the numbers hardly constitute a churn but you get my drift) out ‘old-school’ ministers?

Our new minister and the minister at the church we are moving into and a couple of people who are interested in worship got together to come up with a plan for how we might worship together when we merge later in the year. They have basically come up with InaSpace.

This is gratifying on many levels. It is great that what we are doing is striking a chord with people. But the people I have mentioned here are either full time ministers or full time trainers of ministers. This might beg the question; what do we have a) theological training colleges and b) full time ministers for? I am no theologian (my wife is but that is another story) I just want to be able to explore my faith in a meaningful way. In that I cannot be unique. So what is everyone else doing to satisfy their need in this area if, as I expect, their minister ( if they are ‘lucky’ enough to have one) is toeing the line carrying out a traditional worship service every week?