Category Archives: church

you never step in the same river twice

Posted on by
1

One good thing about being in the car for a large amount of time (nearly 9 hours over the last two days) means that I have loads of time to think and pray. It also gives me loads of time to rehearse both conversations and talks that I am going to give.

This quote has been swirling around my head for a good few weeks now. I can’t exactly remember where I first saw it, but I think it was at creative thinking blog.

I think it is an apt quote for the church of today. I have lost count of the number of times over the past six months where I have heard something that sounds like:

‘we have tried that before , but it did not work!’
Such a mundane outlook!

We never step in the same river twice.
We are never in the same time space twice.
We never exerience two identical times when all the possible variables are identical.
We think it.
It may feel like it.
But time, circumstances,opportunities are always progressing, always changing.

‘we’ve never been here before, we’ve never tried it before, and we don’t know what will happen when we do it!’

Now that’s quite exciting!
That’s quite intriguing in a scarey sort of way.
I used to get scared over what may happen because I was unsure.
I think recently I have stopped taking risks!
I want to experience that kind of fear again!

Rob Bell interview

Posted on by
1

Not a cheap shot to raise my hits again, but John Buckridge from Christianity Magazine interviews Rob Bell here.

Some very interesting answers to questions – and I particularly like his spiritual disciplines of making the breakfast and packed lunch for his children but not sure whether I will share that with Sarah and the children here! There is also a great moment when he labels the American evangelical selling machine as anti – Christ rather than bringing glory to Christ.

It’s a good interview and worth a listen.

Can conflicting ideas lead to truth?

Posted on by
Reply


Last week I managed to hold my first meeting of the day at the Tate Britain and so we took the opportunity to walk around the Turner Prize exhibition while we talked. The Prize, established in 1984, is awarded to a British artist under fifty for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the twelve months preceding 9 May 2006. The four nominated artists are innovative, although I did not really ‘get’ the Phil Collins stuff. I loved Mark Titchner’s ‘How to Change Behaviour’which is mind captivating and displayed a strange mix of new technologies and old techniques. He likes to place conflicting ideas next to each other and leave us to make up our own mind.

I kind of wonder, upon reflection, if that is a task that we, as the church of God, should be doing? New technologies and old techniques are easy to see and are used a lot where projectors are used to display images while Psalms are chanted.. Presenting conflicting ideas and leaving people to make up their own minds seems a little riskier – but if we believe it is God, through the Holy Spirit, who convicts where is the real risk?

I wonder – do we need to trust God more?
Do we need to fully take on board the reality that the Holy Spirit convicts people?
Is it time to put less effort into convincing people to accept our brand of truth and allow God to do his stuff?
Time to present the simple God story and leave people to work out what that means for them?

The Church you know!

Posted on by
Reply

I suspect I may be a little sad for finding this a very funy site!
Check out the mini-videos!

Jesus is my disequilibrium

Posted on by
Reply

I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new Hirsch book, The Forgotten Ways.
There are tastes at his new blog here and today speaks of churches seeking equilibrium and so kicking Jesus out.

We want equilibrium:

But Jesus disturbs our equilbrium. He won’t be controlled. He won’t be handled only by priests and professional religionists. He won’t be domesticated. He is Lord! Yes, Jesus is our disequalibrium. And the way back to an authentic Christianity is simply to put Jesus back into the equation. Christianity plus Jesus equals World Transformation. (Hirsch)

I think this kind of sums up how I feel about church and stuff at the moment. Church seems to have forgotten Jesus. The emphasis seems to be on service delivery, rotas, finance, where people are, what we believe, who has upset who, building programmes and so on.

Now I KNOW this is me generalising and I will get it in the neck for doing so, but I am sking ‘where has our focus on Jesus gone?’ Hirsch suggests we need to reboot back to Jesus.

Rebooting is an idea I like, it suggests turning everything off, holding down ‘ctrl alt del’ and starting afresh. It’s something I do now again when the laptop stops working properly, or slows to an unbelievable snail pace due to too many programs open and leaving their residue bits in the temp files folder.

Remnants of past programs, bits of old software. Remains of ideas and visions. Used plans, unused thoughts. Could all these be clogging the church and forcing Jesus to stand outside the door and knock, and wait to come into his church?

Maybe we need a reboot. A pause. A moment to realign ourselves back to Jesus, to remind ourelves of the founders characteristics, before we step out again.

Halloween post

Posted on by
Reply

Jason Clarke has written a thoughtful post on Halloween here – should I even be daring to write ‘halloween’ late in the night of the night … as it were!

A good weekend for …

Posted on by
Reply


… Tom who went fishing with Uncle Chris – cheers Uncle Chris.
… Sarah who got stuff ready for SPLAT, the holiday club she will be running all next week in church.
… Beth who got to play with friends
… Joe who mastered more moves on his new PS2
… me made speechless by the amazing generosity of 2 special people
… us as we spent time over a fondue here with Steve and Kerry with good wine
A good weekend on the whole for the Ryan family.

stand in the gap

Posted on by
Reply

Interesting weekend, although Sarah and I did not see a lot of each other as we were both fairly tied up with work or study stuff.

Today I got to observe Jen’s sermon at St Giles which was excellent. I was made to think more about the rich young ruler and why in particular Jesus specifically looked at those commandments in Mark.

In the evening I had the pleasure of sharing some thoughts at the St Mark’s informal service. The young people asked me to speak which was a real honour.

We looked at walking the Christian walk and I was struck by how Jesus seemed to walk with the oppressed (by standing in the gap) and messed up while he judged the hypocritical leaders of the time. I suggested that much of church does the opposite in my eyes; by judging the oppressed and messed up while we walk with the leaders!

Some Christians seems to love judging people for their lifestyles or behaviour while they welcome politicians or funders without challenge that develop policies and practices that oppress others.

If I’m right (and it is a generalisation aimed to provoke) then where did it all go wrong?