Simon Says ...

Today I am in the rare position of having heard three different sermons over the course of a day. (You can have too much of a good thing ...) But it's a hymn I want to cite: "When Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, Upward I look and see him there who made an end of all my sin." (Words by Charitie L de Chenez) Not great poetry, but there is something Satanic about despair, and something about the freedom that comes from Christ. It's not even the sort of hymn I normally like to sing, but today it had resonance for me. I think because I've been in a sort of self-orientated mood of despair over all the things I haven't done. Occasionally it's good to be reminded that there's a bigger picture.

I went to an ordination in Llandaff today, and re-visited my old theological college . I was surprisingly heartened to hear of the changes that have been made there. It was also a chance to catch up with some friends from training days. The ordination service was for deacons (Llandaff's new priests will be ordained tomorrow), so we had the reading from Acts 6 about the appointment of the first deacons. What struck me was the reason the apostles give for appointing the deacons: "It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables" (Acts 6.2). It's a tempting mindset for any Christian leader. But in the way that the church, at least in its Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox versions, has come to organise its ministry all ordained ministers are deacons. Priests and bishops must be deacons, or they cannot be ordained to the other orders. All of us have to wait on tables as the foundation of our ministry. Preaching the word of God, ...

The morning after the game before and I'm not sure whether we were robbed by the referee, outplayed by a better side or just impaled on penalties (again). There's truth to all three. Roger McGough has this poem on the BBC website , which goes some way to expressing the angst of being an England supporter: Ode to Sir Wayne of Rooney... Paint the goalposts black Lower the corner flag Fly them at halfmast Our lads defeated, but not outclassed Rooney in pain No Wayne, no game Supporters openly break down and weep Football heroes long dead Stir in their sleep Wipe the cross of St. George off the face of the moon Blow the final whistle Play the last post Then raise your glass And drink a toast to England

Just did it in time! I enjoyed the session more than I thought I would. The Galleries shopping centre in Bristol has been sold for 123 million pounds, and the new owners want to change its name to ‘The Mall Bristol’. Of course, Bristol already has a Mall at Cribbs Causeway and that Mall is not very happy about sharing its name. They fear that it might cause confusion. If there were to be two Malls in Bristol, how would we know which one we were talking about? But it’s not just shopping centres that have to share names. If you go through the phone book you could well find that there’s someone else in Bristol that has the same name as you have. In the interests of research, I typed my name into an internet search engine, just to see what I got. And I found some very interesting Simon Taylors. There’s a Simon Taylor who teaches salsa dancing in Mansfield; a Simon Taylor who won the 2002 Tasmanian Fly Fishing Championships; and an emigrant ship called the Simon Taylor sailed ...

Tomorrow I scale the dizzy heights of Radio Bristol's training day for their Thought for the Day slot. It sounded like a fun way to spend the morning, at least it would be different. But then I had to do homework - two thoughts, one of which has to be for tomorrow. Here's the first one. Second one coming when I've written it (hopefully by tomorrow). At church in our Sunday morning service this week all the people there sang the wrong words to a hymn. It wasn’t intentional, but the sheet on which it was written was wrong. It wasn’t a big mistake, just one letter missing but it changed the whole meaning of the hymn. The missing letter was the ‘n’ from the beginning of ‘never’, and it changed a prayer for the ‘never employed’ to a prayer for the ‘ever employed’. But since Sunday, I’ve been thinking about this missing letter and I think that, although it was a mistake, there is something very important about praying for the ‘ever employed’. I don’t want to...

. This is the best bit of news from the Anglican Communion in ages. The BBC website is reporting that Rowan Williams may take a part in the Simpsons. The story was originally in the Sunday Times today. Lovers of the Flintstones should start their campaign for Alternative Episcopal Oversight any time now!

I spent some of last night reading Martin Luther's To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation , which is one of Luther's major early treatises (1520) setting out his arguments with the Roman church. What struck me most was the nature of his complaints. This treatise is not particularly theological, but is concerned about the abuse of power and the role of money that undergirds the Roman church. Luther complains that the 'Romanists' "have no right to interpret Scripture merely by authority and without learning [skill]". There then follows a tirade against the way in which the Roman church makes money through the sale of indulgences, positions and so on. The way in which money-making has been incorporated into the church is the root of much of the corruption of the church as Luther sees it. The reason this struck me was not because of a historical outrage over the state of the Roman church, but because I can see so many parallels in the contempora...

"One of the main objectives of ministry is to make your own faith struggles available to others, to articulate for others your own doubts and to say, in effect, 'I don't know the answers either. I am simply a catalyst, simply someone who wants to articulate for you the things that you already know but might get a better grip on if there were some words for them'" - Henri Nouwen "The only true praise of a sermon is some evil left, or some good done, upon the hearing of it" - Lancelot Andrewes

No blogging for a while - partly due to holiday. I've just finished watching a documentary on channel 4 called God is Black. It was presented by Robert Beckford and in two programmes he has traced the rise of African Christianity both in Africa and in the UK. Today was largely about the UK, and Bristol was used as an example. Beckford interviewed (not always fairly) my bishop and one of the clergy in the diocese. His argument was that African Christianity is fundamentalist-evangelical and that it is in the process of destroying the Church of England, and implicitly all other forms of organised widespread liberal Christianity. There was a good deal to complain about, should you choose to. The historical side to the programme was very poor (African Christianity did not start with the Victorian missions; and much of the Pentecostalist Christianity he shows owes as much to the United States as to Africa). But there was other things that are a real challenge. Perhaps th...