Category Archives: worship

hope

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I love this picture and Ben used it in the closing worship at the OPM day a couple of weeks ago. When in London last week I popped into Howies in Carnaby Street to see if I could get hold of it as a postcard (I also got a great t-shirt!), but they said feel free to download it from their web page and use it. Cool people!

Next week I am talking on ‘Hope’ at Rochester Cathedral and this may well weave it’s way in to what I have to say. I’m not quite sure what to speak about yet- there are many things going through my head, what we hope for, what should we hope for, what is THE Christian hope, (is there / should there be one in aparticular?)what is Hope 08 about, what did Jesus hope for, what does God hope for, are my hopes and my dreams one and the same …. and more!

Over the next few days I’ll need to narrow this down – but for now, Hope is a place somewhere between take off and landing.

everything?

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I am kind of struggling today with the whole thing of letting people down.
My back is still painful, although much better after spending 30 minutes with the osteopath yesterday, which has meant I have had to cancel meetings in London, lunch with a friend and a trip today to meet up with Jim of Cambridge YFC.

One of my failings, so I am often told by others, is of ‘not suffering fools gladly’ which tends to manifest itself a lot in being let down or letting others down. I hate cancelling things, or being cancelled as it were – so the last few days have been painful mentally as well as physically. I guess I have a sense of guilt brought on by my self-confessed stupidity of trying to lift a box in the wrong way.

Currently I have a passion for not singing in worship. It’s probably a ‘stage’ I’m going through, but I find many popular worship songs of the moment that talk about ‘me and my emotions’, rather than focusing on God annoy me and seem to be shallow. I smile when we sing ‘it’s all about you Lord’ in the middle of such songs as the reality of the words of the other songs suggest otherwise.

Today, however, the words of Tim Hughes ‘Be My Everything’ clearly came to my head as I was considering my feelings. The words of verse 2 particularly struck me:

God in my hoping
There in my dreaming
God in my watching
God in my waiting

God in my laughing
There in my weeping
God in my hurting
God in my healing

Reading those words as I currently feel brings a whole different understanding and meaning to the words. I have forgotten, and so missed, God in my hurting. I have been so keen for healing to be able to move on, that I have missed that opportunity of resting with God in pain (which I acknowledge is minimal to pain experienced across the world my others on a daily basis).

My prayer today, then, is not ‘God be my everything’ as I’m not sure what that means. I pray:
God, show me what it means to let you be my everything

God sound, Christ mystery, Spirit Rhythm

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looks interesting (if you click on the image it should enlarge to a readable size)- more info at Contemplative Fire.

Painful but contemplative weekend

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What a painful weekend for British sport!
The Gills painfully lost again away from home which takes them back to the relegation zone.
I am in physical pain today as I put my back out yesterday morning stupidly lifting a box into my car. The box was my ‘worship box’ which I was taking to church and has clearly become too heavy with candles, pebbles etc.! I am annoyed as it was one of those moments when I was rushing and as I bent to pick it up my brain was screaming ‘no – that’s gonna hurt’ but my body was slow on the uptake!

Sitting at the laptop is OK, but if I sit for longer than 20 minutes I then walk like the hunchback of Notre Dame for a couple of minutes until my body achieves a certain sort of vertical equilibrium. Not sure what this will mean for my work output today.

I led a contemplative service last night at St. Marks (which was the reason for carrying the box). A while back John asked me to be responsible for the service and the sermon and so I immediately asked if I could try something different. I based the service around Northumbria Community evening prayer liturgy and added an Examen type reflection. On one screen I had the liturgy and on another I had the Jesus morphing video downloaded via Jonny’s blog.

People seemed to appreciate the space, the quiet, the time allowed to just ‘be’ with God with no pressure to ‘do’ anything. It was great to be able to be part of this space and I hope we can do it again sometime.

God in the Simple …(again!)

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Today I led my last assessed service at St Mark’s. I’ve had to do 2 assessed preaches and 2 assessed service leadings each year for training. The worst thing about these is finding 4 people to complete the A4 form. I have always felt the need to be very apologetic as I ask people to complete a form for me as people are coming to church to worship and did not expect to come to fill in a form and assess me. I have managed, in the main, to use different people each time which people have appreciated.

Today I led the morning service and tried some different things such as use this Captives loop from Work of the People as I read an adapted poem which led us into a time of confession. This followed an excellent talk from Graham around the subject of ‘Looking after Number 1’

But I have been amazed at the feedback for one very simple thing that we did in the service. A young woman called Claire is going on mission to New Zealand for a few months. Rather than pray for her upfront as we would normally do, I had planned to walk with her to the centre of the congregation and ask people to stand and pray for Claire from where they were.

It seems that this simple activity was profound for so many people. People afterwards spoke of a sense of Spirit, a real sense of family and community blessing Claire, one person on the assessment form refereed to it as ‘awesome’ which I was obviously both pleased with and humbled by!

This resonates with my thoughts throughout the year around my tendency to make good use of technology whenever I can, whereas I am often surprised by how powerfully people connect with God in the simple parts of the service. I had expected people to be inspired by the video and poem, and some were; but the point at which God really broke through in a tangible way for many people this morning was when we
turned to the centre of our worship space,
looked at each other,
concentrated on one of our family,
and entrusted her to God.

God in the simple!
Maybe I just try to make things too complicated sometimes!

latest free video

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Lose Your Life is the latest free video from The Work of the People.

worship and mission

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I don’t like to waste time, so while my laptop booted up today I read the last couple of chapters of Unofficial God. (errr … yes, the laptop DID take that long and so I had to delete some updates later in the day … but that’s another story)

I was struck by this quote from Frank Weston the Bishop of Zanzibar:

… if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you, through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. You have your mass, you have your altars, you have begun to get your tabernacles. Now go into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, in the oppressed and the sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good.

Worship and mission are inseperable and feed each other says Bishop Brian. How inseperable should they be? Can we invisage worship being mission and mission being worship simultaneously?

I have always believed that our mission is a true indicator of our worshipful life with God. Our worship, whatever that may be, should be a life changing encounter with Creator God. If we come out of worship the same as we enter it, have we worshipped at all?

worship to give pleasure to God

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Now that I have finished SEITE for the year I have been able to get back to reading out of choice rather than out of necessity. I have returned to Frost’s Exiles which is resonating with me in so many different ways.

Towards the end of the book, Frost starts to look at the question of our purpose in life and he convincingly argues that our purpose is to bring pleasure to God. This another way of saying we glorify God.

He asks the question further, and this is where I find myself, ‘why is it that so many worship pastors suggest that the primary way we give God pleasure is through sung worship?’ Those of you who have read my posts in the past will recognise me questioning on this matter.

Frost suggests we glorify God in 4 ways:
through adoration – public worship, sung or otherwise
appreciation – through admiration and respect as we venerate God in our imaginations
affection – to take delight in and love God
subjection – we dedicate ourselves to serve God

So … I am not knocking sung worship, but I am questioning our attitude that seems to imply this is the only way to worship, because surely worship must be much bigger than singing a few songs every time we get together.

Eric Liddle (Chariots of Fire fame) said:

I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel his pleasure’

As Eric ran, as he felt God’s pleasure – was this not an act of worship?
Surely this is what worship in our everyday existence means.
Worshipping God in our meetings.
Worshipping God while we travel to work.
Worshipping God as we protest for justice.
Worshipping God as we drink and eat with friends.
Maybe this what is meant by our whole lives being worship – that everything we do, we acknowledge and give glory to God, saying ‘God … I’m doing this for you.’

an eventful weekend .leading to thoughts on worship

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an eventful weekend:
Beth has her arm in plaster
Gills won the football
joined Sheena in the club for drinks before the game
I sorted new tyres on the ‘new’ caravan
We ate kebabs and hid behind the sofa during Dr Who
Tom did church parade with scouts
kicked a ball in the back garden with Joe
Sarah made 24 hours stretch to 30 in a day
church was quite good – (although I am currently struggling with songs written by young men whose lyrics make me think they have written them to their girlfriend rather than God!)

The highlight of the weekend was catching up, even if too briefly, with people I have not seen for a while. Most of these people were in church on Sunday morning. Seems to me that there is a good case on Sunday for our worship to also consist of catching up and laughing and maybe praying with each other rather than exclusively the standard worship of sing songs, pray and listen to sermon.

I left church this morning, unusually one of the last, but still finding myself wishing I had caught up more with more friends. I’m starting to feel strongly about this. If we say church should be about quality of relationship with God and each other then surely part of our worship needs to allow personal relationships with each other to develop. If we agree that people join ‘church’ due to the quality of authentic faith and genuine relationship that they see lived out, then we need to give space for this authentic, person to person, relationship to develop alongside our relationship with God.

I wonder if we have started to concentrate too much on God on a Sunday, and neglected each other?

Eucharist of the Ordinary?

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The other day while driving back from Head Office with Sharron we started to talk about the Eucharist and particularly about the bread and the wine. In particular I was asking if the bread and the wine are in themselves symbolic? By that, I mean did Jesus deliberately choose bread and wine for the significance we have assigned to them over the centuries (the bread and wine signifying Christ’s body and blood), or did Jesus choose bread and wine because they were the ordinary everyday foods that were around in 1st century Palestine and easily accessible to all?

As ever, I am thinking aloud, but in that thinking I am wondering and asking if we have missed the point over the centuries.

Was Jesus saying that particularly in the bread and the wine are my body and blood; or was Jesus saying in the normal everyday things you have around you are my body and blood?

We have traditionally gone with the former which has resulted in Christians paying particular reference to bread and wine as we celebrate and remember what Jesus has done. In this was the celebration becomes one of remembrance but seems to me to be restricted to just two things. At this point I think of Christians in the middle of the desert, or in parts of Africa, or indeed in many parts of the world where bread and wine are just not available or are not part of the everyday diet of people. How can Christians in those places partake of God if they do not have any bread and wine for the Eucharist?

It strikes me that if bread and wine are essential that is not very good news for those that have no access, and maybe never will have access, to bread and wine.

On the other hand, maybe Jesus was saying that in the normal everyday stuff you have around you you can find me. Could he have been suggesting that in our staple food, the food that normally sustains us on a daily basis, that we could enter in daily communion with him. If this is the case then the Eucharist could consist of fish and rice, maize, sauerkraut, sushi, or whatever the normal everyday easily accessible diet happens to be.

I wonder if, in the Eucharist, Jesus is saying ‘I am accessible to you, I am here in the everyday – you don’t need to look to hard, you don’t need to struggle to find me, you don’t need anything special, I am here in your normal everyday!’

That sounds more like good news!