Category Archives: mission

Mission chats – but I’m still shallow!

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Back in London today for the Youth Co-ordinating Group of CTIE and to catch up with Pauline in Solid YFC.

The meeting this morning was quite productive – although I am finding myself getting impatient in meetings who seem to like to talk over and over the same issues. Part of me wants to scream and say … ‘we’ve talked about this quite a lot – can we get on with mission now please?!’

I learnt of an exciting idea to give a more positive view of young people in the media – watch this space!

I met Pauline at The Boathouse next to Putney Bridge for a coffee and chat. It’s a great location wth an amazing view. Coffee is quite good too!

Following that I had to tackle the throngs of people in Regent Street and Oxford Circus possibly hunting for a present – but I can’t say more cos they might read about it here!

I noticed one interesting thing about me! A whole day talking about mission and wanting to reach people – but feeling anger rising inside me when people stp in the middle of pavements or top of stairs leaving tube stations! Reminds me how shallow I am!

Art of Connecting in Plaistow

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I was involved in some of the teaching of AOC in Plaisow on Saturday.

The Whole, part of Transform Newham, held this one day conference for young people who wanted to think more about sharing their faith. The day was fantastic and it was exciting to engage with these wonderful young people.

One young womans comment will stay with me for a while. After someone asked the question ‘when was the last time you shared your faith?’, she answered that she was shocked when she thought about it, because she had not shared her faith for at least …. 2 weeks!!!!

I think I must have met an evangelist!

What if …

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I managed to catch up with Hugh today from Greenwich YFC.
We had a good time chatting over stuff and dreaming other stuff.

On my drive back I started to ask ‘what if …’
What if …
… money was no object
… volunteers were there in abundance
… people just ‘got’ the priority of mission
… the church really invested in young people
… we really thought Kingdom
… we really put aside our agenda
… we really put Jesus first

I’m not sure what the answers would be.
It’s easy to think stuff would be a lot easier, but I wonder if it would?

Do you ever dream ‘what if?’
Is this futile avoidance and space filling?
Or is this a creative and engaging thinking?

I wonder if Jesus ever thought ‘what if …?’

Forgotten treasure

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I was at the NCVYS chief executives meetings today – one of my responsibilities to represent YFC at.

There were a variety of exciting and important things on the agenda but one in particular, the Commission on Unclaimed Assets really amazed me. Unclaimed assets are those pockets of money that people have in bank accounts but have not been touched for a very long time – something like 15 years!

Apparantly, this is the amazing bit, 1 in 3 of us have dormant bank accounts which we have forgotton about and not touched. A conservative estimate is that these amounts could add up to something like £400 million!

£400 000 000 just sitting there, untouched, forgotten, accruing interest slowly.

The proposal is that this money be used to fund the gaps in the (what is becoming called the) 3rd sector. There will be good safeguards and if anyone comes back to claim their money they will have it – so this seems a no-risk, win-win scheme which an independant body is currently looking at. On the website there is an online consultation form to let the commission know your views – if inclined go there.

It’s amazing to think that there is £400m of forgotten treasure in the banks of the UK.

What other treasures have we forgotten about?
Family treausures – like time with loved ones?
Natures treasures – experienced when we step out of the cars, tubes, trains …
Spiritual treasures – like love of God and God’s love of us?
Ministry treasures – like our first love of being called?

Seems like whichever way we turn, whatever treasure it may be, humanity is good at forgetting.

Healthiness – what is it?

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I have been thinking about signs of healthiness. I am trying to write an article for the YFC supporters magazine, IntoView, and I need a lot more inspiration at the moment. It’s only 500 words – which I think makes the task a little tougher!

On Sunday at the Tate Modern, Sarah made an interesting observation. As we looked out of the magnificent Tate window across the city to St Paul’s and beyond, Sarah drew my attention to the amazing number of tall cranes there were dotted around the skyline. A massive amount of building is going on. The London skyline, which probably stayed fairly constant for a very long time, is continually changing and it is quite hard to remember the landscape without the London Eye, the Gherkin or Canary Wharf. Sarah’s observation was that things must be quite healthy, and that people with the money must feel quite confident to be willing to fund this level of building.

I guess Sarah is right. If something is healthy, the natural outcome of that must be growth. Healthy things grow, they cannot help it. It is just what happens. If something is unhealthy is stays static, then withers, then dies.

We have an example of this at home at the moment. I have two bonsais. One is healthy and growing like crazy. The other is poorly and no matter what I do, it seems to be dieing on me. I want it to grow, but it seems no matter what I do, it won’t – namely because it is no longer a healthy specimen.

I think in Christian ministry we look for growth, expect growth, and want growth but often try to achieve that without putting in the hard graft that is necessarily associated with being healthy. Healthiness needs personal care, attention to detail, planning of time, balanced diets, exercise and all that kind of stuff. Healthiness does not usually happen by chance – or does it?

Is there a difference in how we achieve a physical healthiness and a spiritual healthiness? Or do both need the same principles of diet, exercise, balance to flourish?

I wonder, too, whether we can sometimes try too hard. I would suggest that in my spiritual life that it is in my trying that I lose focus on what I am about. Spirituality becomes an aim, rather than a relationship with Creator God. When I realise I am no longer trying hard to pray each day, or study the Bible that my relationship with God is healthier because I naturally spend time with God in my everyday stuff. A result of that health is that I want to pray and spend time in scripture.

Essentially what I am trying to say is that I long to have a healthy relationship with my creator, rather than a disciplined way of doing things on a regular basis – such as daily prayer or bible study. A relationship that results in a disciplined approach, rather than a disciplined approach trying to cause a relationship to develop.

Art of Conecting in Newham

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I travelled around only a little bit today.
After meeting up with Michael, the chair of trustees of Chilsehurst YFC I popped over to East Ham to meet with Liz from Transform Newham.

Early December we are working together to run an Art of Connecting conference with young people from Newham. I love Newham! I don’t know whay, or what it is about this place but I really enjoy being in ths borough and working with some of the people there. Not everyone agrees – Liz mentioned that in a certain newspaper’s national survey that Newham came out as the 4th worst place to live in the country. I don’t know why – well I guess I do with levels of violence and so on – but I, for one, simply love this area. I wonder what criteria has been used to decide which places are worse or better to live in? Doesn’t that kind of assume we all like the same sorts of places? If so, surely there is a social bias and judgement being displayed here?

Whatever – I’m quite excited about this conference and looking forward to spending the day there on December 2nd.

SPLAT Sunday

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Today the church was packed as we welcomed parents and children from SPLAT.
I missed some of the service while helping utside the church to cut bread rolls for hot dogs afterwards.
We got rid of 220 sausgaes in rolls in about 40 mins!
I love events like this as even passers by stop and chat and come in for coffee.
They won’t come into the church building when we are inside, but if we venture outside the doors, even if its only to the courtyard, we get to meet people.
People seem to want to share their stories rather than engage in worship.
This happens every time we venture outside, so why can’t we do this every Sunday?

Sarah tells me there was over 85 children this week at SPLAT, and around half of them made some form of ‘commitment’.
Today we had loads of people around who seemed to enjoy the laid back service and the chance to chat with people.

But I have a worry!
What happens next week if these people return?
They will return to a normal ‘Common Worship’ service which I can’t cope with too well, let alone others!
We must be able to do more … or is it less?
Or maybe I should turn up at 11.00 with a BBQ ready to serve sausages at 12!?

Thought for the day

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No prizes for guessing what I watched last night:

‘If you don’t know where you’re going,
you’re unlikely to end up there.’

Forrest Gump

What do you want, and what do you have?

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The other week at the YFC day we ended the day by just standing quietly and listening to God to see if God had anything to share with us as a family of people. We do this because we firmly believe God speaks today.

I believe we had two messages from God which, although shared simply, are quite profound in their content.

The first person shared these words

‘what do you want from me?’

Too often we ask God to bless things, we ask God for protection, we ask God for this and that but sometimes we seem too scared to be specific. It’s interesting because my children are very specific. They can tell me in an instant what they would like from me. Things like: lets go fishing for a day, a pair or new football boots, to see a film at the cinema, for help me with their homework, to kick a football on the banks. Very specific requests which I can easily respond to in some way.

I wonder … sometimes do we confuse God with our reluctance to be specific in our asking!? I’ve listened to prayers and wondered at the end what the person was actually asking for! They go around and around with no apparent request … so what can God do! In my weaker and more flippant moments I picture God leaving the meeting, head in hands, saying ‘why can’t they just ask me to do something!’

But I think it goes deeper than this as well. I think often we can’t answer that question of ‘what do you want from me?’ because we just do not know. If it comes down to it, we do not know specifically what we would like God to do for us.

The second person shared:

‘what have you got in your hands?’

This was related to God asking Moses a similar question. Too often we wait for things to come our way, wish we could do this or that and all the while God is saying ‘look at what I have already given you … you need nothing else…get on and use it.’ I can relate to this, I know I can do things, I know I have certain gifts, certain abilities, yet still I think ‘before I do that I just need to be able to …’. This kind of thinking is crippling.

In some ways this thinking could be seen as setting up a barrier between us and God. In essence, if we think like this we are refusing to accept what God has given us, we are refusing to believe that he can and does believe in the person he has created us to be.

I have met so many people, particularly in the last few years, who have a clear calling on their lives from God, but they are struggling to take hold of that and accept it. They are struggling to believe that Creator God wishes to work through them. They are struggling to believe that God has chosen them and invested in them

While they struggle they seem to tie themselves in knots and actually believe that the calling they know they had was mis-heard. I hate to think how many creative people there are who are in denial of their creativity because they have allowed themselves to disregard their calling, to disbelieve themselves, to mistrust God.

It’s a sad thought but a thought of relevance.

Some how, we need to help people to re-accept who they are and re-commit to being the people that not only they were called to be, but to re-commit to being the people that they want to be themselves. I think the two are one and the same.

The Olympic Dream

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Today a few people got together to talk about the opportunity of the Olympics. We started to dream some dreams after hearing about how the Olympics will work in the UK.

This was quite an exciting day and, although nothing was agreed apart from meeting again with those that could not make today after having time to think about the dreams that really energised us, I came away quite excited by the possibilities this will give for collaboration.

If you look carefully I think Pete manages to get into the picture twice!