Getting Ready To Move

I realise that in recent weeks this blog has been little more than a place to post my sermons. Life has been busy. Some of that has been ministry – some big and painful things have happened, which I won’t discuss here for reasons of pastoral confidence.

We have also been busy with preparations for our forthcoming move of circuit. In August, we shall be on our way to Surrey, since (subject to the approval of the Methodist Conference) I shall take up a new post in the Woking and Walton-on-Thames circuit. We have made a couple of visits down there – one to check things out at the manse, another this last week to have a full tour of the school our children will be attending.

While we were at the school, we drew our children’s attention to a project they have that links them with a village in Uganda. The people grow chillis to sell in order to make a living. There is now a link with a local school there, too. We explained that people in other countries don’t always have the food or money that we have.

All I can say is, it’s funny and illuminating to see how young children take in these matters. The next day, Mark (our five-year-old) announced he no longer planned to follow a career as an author. Instead, he was going to set up huge supermarkets in Uganda, bigger than Tesco’s or Morrison’s, so that people could choose what they wanted to eat. We pointed out they still wouldn’t have much money and wouldn’t be able to buy all the lovely things in his supermarkets.

“That’s easy,” he said. “I’ll open shops where they can buy money.”

Sigh. If only …

May 23, 2010 6

The General Election Debate, Stories And Preaching

Jon Snow comments today on last night’s ‘historic’ (the mandatory word, apparently) first ever live television debate between party leaders in a British General Election campaign:

The most notable American influence in the debate was the wheeling out of individual and anecdotal stories. They didn’t work – they were thin and largely inconclusive, sometimes begging the question as to whether they were true. They don’t seem to work in a UK context.

I heard the same observation on television news last night. (Can’t remember who said it.) Does this say anything to us about the church and communication? We are told to preach stories. We are told that people ‘think in stories’ and ‘live in particular narratives’. I’ve thought for years that stories help. But political reaction to last night’s debate is starting to make me wonder.

What do you think?

April 16, 2010 8

Happy Easter

Happy Easter, one and all. I have no new sermon material for Easter Day this year. In the morning, we are doing worship differently, and although I am giving a two-part talk it is designed as initial input to start discussions around tables. It won’t easily translate here. In the evening I am at another church in my circuit (not one for which I have responsibility) and am taking the opportunity to repeat an old sermon.

In the meantime, let me enc0urage you to head over to the WorshipHouse Media website and view the Easter Drawing video. We’re using this in the morning service. I think it’s great.

April 3, 2010 0

Good Friday: Seven Last Words From The Cross

Obviously it’s too late for this year, but I thought I’d share with you a resource I used in a meditation for Good Friday this morning. For some time now I’ve received regular emails from the Audiopot website. On this site you can find radio-style broadcasts in MP3 format on Christian themes. It was set up by a long-standing evangelical missionary organisation, HCJB Global, whose activities have included radio and media for many years.

Recently, they posted on the site a series of four-minute meditations on the ‘seven last words from the Cross’. I downloaded them (you need to register free of charge on the site in order to do that or to preview them in full). There is no compulsion to pay for the downloads, but they ask if you can donate 50p per item to help towards the cost of the site. And that is almost certainly why these MP3s are not in a podcast and/or with an RSS feed.

I don’t know what the reaction of my congregation was this morning, because I had to rush off to another service, but I thought they were worthwhile. They ranged from a woman who lives on the ‘peace line’ in Belfast speaking about ‘Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing’, to the mother of a soldier killed in friendly fire reflecting on ‘Woman, here is your son’ and an elderly dying minister talking about ‘Into your hands I commend my spirit’. Nothing trite, triumphalistic or easy.

If these interest you, then I suggest you register on the site and search for ‘Seven last words’.

April 2, 2010 0

You Can Make A Difference: Emily Cummins

Last night I had the privilege of hearing Emily Cummins speak at the Chelmer Valley High School awards evening. I must live in a bubble, because I had never heard of her, certainly not that she won the Barclay’s Woman of the Year prize for 2009. And she’s only 22.

Her speech was an extraordinary inspiration. She has been inventing gadgets since her youth, including a toothpaste dispenser for a grandfather with arthritis. But she is most famous for designing a fridge that does not need fossil fuels. It works on recycled dirty water. It began as an A-Level project, but she became so passionate about it that she delayed going to university for a year to take a gap year in southern Africa. She has given away her design in townships. She makes no money from it. Her satisfaction is in seeing people helped by her invention: children who can at last have fresh milk; adults whose medicines can finally be stored in refrigeration. She is negotiating with pharmaceutical companies about a commercial version of the fridge to help with the transportation of medicines.

She spoke about how she never had real confidence in herself, but how she has learned to have confidence in what she can do. Having presented prizes to some extremely talented students at the school, including one who achieved thirteen A* grades at GCSE and another who had five A grades at A-Level, she told everyone that she would never have attained those standards. She wasn’t good across the board, but she had one particular talent, and nurtured it. She told the students they could make a difference, too, if they were passionate about using their talents for others.

I don’t suppose for one minute she is a Christian. I imagine she might have spoken slightly differently about the self-confidence issue if she were. But I thought she was a tremendous example and challenge to the Church as well as the wider world. As I said, she has not sought to rake in the cash for herself. Her focus has been on the needs of others. I imagined missions organisations deploying her fridge. I imagined the pastoral task of challenging all our people to make a difference in the world with their gifts and talents. In particular, I imagined people starting to do that at a young age, and not being lied to in the church that they are too young to do something significant.

And I began to ask if I have made a difference in people’s lives by using my gifts. Have you? We can. By the power of God surely there should be millions of Emily Cummins in the world, if our faith in Christ is real and radical.

Shouldn’t there?

April 1, 2010 0

Taking The Good Friday Journey

Last year, Nick Baines wrote a helpful and provocative post about embracing the desolation of Good Friday (and, indeed, Holy Saturday) without importing the triumph of Easter Day. In it, he argues that we should restrain ourselves from singing the joyful songs that come from knowing the outcome of Easter, and embrace the darkness.

I can see his point, and it has much to commend it, especially in evangelical Christian circles where we can default into triumphalism at all sorts of inappropriate times. Think of the ways in which some funerals become only a celebration of the deceased’s life, and leave little room for grief. That isn’t limited to evangelicals, or indeed Christians. It is part of a wider cultural movement that does not want to feel the sting of death.

I can see Nick’s point too, when I consider the members of churches who avoid Good Friday worship, but who will be at church early on Easter Day. We have people in our churches who can’t cope with the Cross. Not that anyone should cope with it in the sense of managing it – you could say it is meant to be unmanageable – but there are many who wish to live in denial of it, even referring to it as a tragedy or a defeat, completely failing to appreciate the magnitude of its victory.

Yet I wonder too whether this last group of people might be the very ones who especially need the linking of Good Friday and Easter Day. Not that I mean to let anyone off the hook in contemplating the sufferings of Christ, but because it is central to our faith to believe in the victory of Christ, and you can only appreciate that when you link the death and resurrection of Jesus. And given the way I have heard some church people say that Good Friday is ‘the most tragic day of the year’, I do wonder whether they believe the Gospel.

Like it or not, we cannot approach Good Friday without a measure of interpretation. It is there in the inspired writings of the Gospels, although we are perhaps so used to the text that we don’t always see it. And one thing is for sure: for the Gospel writers, the death of Jesus was not a defeat.

And also, whether we like it or not, it is (near) impossible to read the text as if we don’t know what is going to happen next. When I hear people ask me to read something ‘as if for the first time’, I know they are going to ask me something I probably can’t achieve. The trouble is, we do know the ending.

So how do you prefer to approach Good Friday? With a knowledge of the ending? Or trying to enter into the story as if you don’t know what will happen? What are the pros and cons for you?

March 31, 2010 2

Are Worship Leading And Preaching Different Gifts?

Mike Bossingham thinks so. (PDF of article here; equivalent Facebook discussion here.) For my money, I think they are different, too, and I agree with Mike that the culture established in the Methodist Church where the worship leader is just Santa’s little helper to the preacher is all wrong. So too is the notion that if you can preach you can lead worship, but if you can lead worship you can’t necessarily preach. I have always thought my primary gifting was in preaching, but in Methodism that means I normally have to lead worship as well. At that point I break down for ongoing creative ideas.

The Facebook thread goes on to debate Mike’s idea of balancing contemporary and traditional elements in worship, but to me that’s a separate argument.

What are your thoughts?

March 8, 2010 18

World Wide Open: A Social Network For Christian Mission?

Through reading an article on social media and the Gospel in the latest edition of the Evangelical Alliance‘s magazine ‘IDEA’, I came across World Wide Open. It’s a social network that aims to connect and empower Christians across the world in order to share expertise and thus further mission. I wondered whether anyone who reads this blog has come across it. What are your experiences?

I thought I would at least register, because some things can only be experienced from inside. The introductory videos are impressive in laying out the vision. However, beyond that, my first impression is that registration and getting going are hard work. You need to supply a lot of information, type in lots of text and click several text boxes to create the kind of profile that might lead to fruitful contact with others in the future. I’m not sure how it could be simplified, but if it could, I think that would be helpful.

Other tools could do with a different approach. There is an opportunity to blog at the site, but only by creating blog posts there. I noticed no facility to import posts from an existing blog. I would think many likely contributors already have their own blogs, and would not want to create another one. Another worthy Christian social network, Missional Tribe, and my reaction was, I don’t want to go to the effort of duplicating my posts.

The IDEA magazine article tells one or two wonderful stories of worthwhile links being created between different agencies. I hope that will come to fruition at WWO. It says (as seems to be the fashion for a ‘Web 2.0‘ site) that it is in ‘beta‘, and that seems to be accurate to me. It isn’t quite the finished article yet, but I hope it soon will be, and become a helpful tool for the mission of God.

UPDATE, Tuesday 2nd March, 11:15 am: World Wide Open is beginning to kick into action. This morning I received an email from them with my ‘customised updates’. Based on the interests I selected when I signed up, it offers to put me in touch with other registered users. This can be on the basis of leveraging their experience, resources they have uploaded, opportunities to put faith into action, groups I might like to join and people with whom I might like to connect. Naturally, only a minority of them will prove directly relevant, but it is a start and a sign of how the site works.

February 28, 2010 3

Celine Dion At The Crematorium

(For the next several days, I’m not going to be able to post any new topical material, nor shall I be able to interact with your comments. However, I am going to repost some old pieces that once appeared on my now defunct website at http://www.davefaulkner.co.uk. I hope you enjoy them.)

The curate from the Victor Meldrew School of Theology had turned down this funeral. Which was a good job. She never should have been asked. The daughter of the deceased was an occasional worshipper at one of the churches I served.

Like many people at the time, she wanted Celine Dion’s love theme from the film ‘Titanic’, ‘My heart will go on’, to be played at the service. It’s the sort of music that brings me out in a rash, but hey, it was her wish.

We were ready to begin. The congregation was seated in the crematorium chapel. I was outside with the pallbearers from the undertaker’s. I gave the nod to the crem attendant. He pressed ‘play’. Well, it was Celine Dion, it was ‘My heart will go on’ … but it was the dance remix.

As a thumping drumbeat massacred the gloopy song, one of the pallbearers turned to me and said, “So are we meant to take the coffin in at this pace?”

“No,” said one of his colleagues, “it isn’t a drum, it’s the deceased knocking on the coffin, trying to get out!”

It became one of the challenges of my ministry to maintain dignity and not burst into hysterics during the funeral.

The next day, the daughter phoned me to thank me for the service. I thought it prudent to ask her about the music.

“Did you notice the music at the beginning of the service?”

“No.”

“You didn’t notice that it was the dance version of ‘My heart will go on’?”

“No.”

“Only I just thought I should ask, in case any of your relatives were upset.”

“Nah – anyway, my mum was a bit of a goer, and she’d have loved it!”

Embarrassing moment over, I breathed a sigh of relief when I put down the phone.

Now I’ve seen a funeral or two in my time. I’ve made friends with the crem attendants. One says, “Don’t wear trousers with turn-ups, or you’ll bring your work home with you.”

I’ve seen inconsolable grief at the crem, and I can understand that. Without the hope I gain from the Resurrection of Jesus, I can see why Paul in the Bible said that people “grieve without hope”.

I’ve also seen overbearing, unnatural joy. I don’t mean the way Christians (with the hope of the Resurrection) can look forward, I mean a kind of forced joy that psychologically is a denial of bereavement’s true pain. Most grief is nothing to be guilty about, whatever our feelings tell us. It’s an expression of our love for the deceased, love we can no longer give them, because they are not with us.

Maybe then my offering is to say that the healthy thing – the Jesus thing – is the gift of grieving with hope.

February 15, 2010 0

Category: ministry