Simon Says ...

I found this quotation yesterday, and I think it's one of the wisest sentences I've read in a long time. It's from Robert Warren's The Healthy Churches' Handbook . Parties and thank yous make the world a happier place and more like the kingdom. Take time to celebrate.

The clapper board of the first shot for the new series of Dr Who is available here . Can't wait to see what's behind! Edited to remove picture as it led to a fallen side bar!

Over the summer I'm trying to write a course for the young people of the churches I serve about prayer.  Basically, I want to help them to pray.  There's very little available (that I can see) that helps young people learn how to pray, and so I'm writing my own.  All suggestions very welcome!!!   The problem I face is one the one hand to present a range of different ways of praying.  I know different things work for different people, and I want to help them find how prayer works for them.  On the other hand, I don't want to offer so many choices and possibilities that they are paralysed by the range of options.  So I'm looking for something that gives some focus to it.   As I say, I'm right at the start of the process of coming up with this course.  But I'm getting really excited about it.  There's so much to cram into 8-10 sessions (some self-restraint necessary - there's a lifetime to explore prayer), and I'm expecting to...

I came across the site of The Mass , an alternative worship set up in Derby. Looks very interesting in itself, but the site also has lots of great material even if you're unlikely to get to the services. Worth a look.

The latest Affirming Catholicism newsletter has a piece in it called 'Why I am Not a Liberal'. It has me thinking about why I am a liberal! ‘Liberals’ are in danger of becoming everyone’s scapegoats. They are the one group that Evangelicals and Catholics can agree to oppose. But in so doing the variegated nature of the Church, and of the Catholic and Evangelical elements within it, can be overlooked. There are liberal Catholics and liberal Evangelicals; there are catholic Liberals and evangelical Liberals; there are even evangelical Catholics and catholic Evangelicals. Few members of the Church of England can be placed with absolute purity within one tradition and one tradition only. In this rather messy approach, which has come to seem peculiarly Anglican, there is much to enrich the church and one another. Most of us will, at various times in our Christian lives, encountered and been enlivened by a range of traditions and people belonging to them. Some of us cont...

maggi dawn has added some really helpful comments about a remark I made about controlling the way other people encounter God. She asks "Why do we want to 'control' other people's spiritual experience?" I'm not sure I know the answer to this, except that I know that I find myself saying and doing things that sound and look as if I want to control. Partly, I think, it's because I have had certain experiences and I want to share them, so there is a positive (evangelistic?) side to this. But all too easily this becomes a desire to ensure that others have these experiences in the way that I had them - and that's where the controlling comes in. It keeps me in charge of my experiences, and therefore of theirs as well. This need to 'be in control' of my own life runs counter to Jesus' teaching that we need to give things up in order to receive them. It is a sign of my own insecurity, even in the experience of encounter with God. T...

The 2004 Arts & Faith Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films is a fascinating list. There's much to debate, such as why Martin Scorsese only has one entry and that for The Last Temptation of Christ (incidentally the most complained about thing on British TV ever ). Mean Streets is far more powerfully spiritual imho. Good to see Abel Ferrara on there twice. Bad Lieutenant and The Addiction are both difficult but superb films in their own ways. At any rate, the list will keep my local video store in business for a while.

This was painted by Ronnie Harrison in 1961 in South Africa. It was smuggled out of the country and toured the UK to raise funds for the Anti-Apartheid Movement and has just been rediscovered and returned to South Africa. Harrison was tortured for painting this. The full story is here .

I've just finished listening to a programme about Swing Low Sweet Chariot on the radio. You can find it here . The programme traced the origins of the spiritual, the secret meanings that it could contain and ended up with the way in which the English sing it at rugby matches. The most striking thing, for me, was an account of a semi-pagan funeral (woodland, no religious officiant) in which it was sung. People clearly found it very moving, despite its religious connotations. At first I was a little shocked that people could sing this and ignore the religious element of the spiritual. But then it struck me that this is what incarnation is all about - God making himself available to everyone and certainly beyond the control of we religious people. Jesus' arguments with the religious authorities of his times are enough of an indication of this. There is something of our vocation as Christians that is simply about keeping alive the possibility of encounter with God. But w...

I've been sent an email about Accepting Evangelicals , which is "a new open network of Evangelical Christians who believe the time has come to move towards the acceptance of faithful, loving same-sex partnerships at every level of church life, and the development of a positive Christian ethic for gay and lesbian people". I've been trying not to blog about this whole area, but this is an important new initiative that seemed worth drawing people's attention to.

I'm just back from our diocesan clergy conference. We had Stephen Cottrell (the Bishop of Reading) speaking to us about prayer and evangelism, and it was excellent. Evangelism is one of those words that makes me close in on myself. Although I believe in it in principle, I feel that it is something that I am not cut out for. Bishop Stephen showed us that it is something that I can do, and have been doing. He began by saying that we can't give what we haven't got, so that the first thing to do is to attend to our own spiritual lives. Prayer is about the love of God transforming us into the people that we are most truly. This transforming love is something that we must receive first, before we can point others to it. But people seem to be fascinated by spirituality today. So we also need to attend to how we teach people to pray. Prayer is itself a way of teaching others about the Christian faith, and Bishop Stephen suggested that this is contrary to most approach...