I love long weekends! It’s Kirsty’s birthday tomorrow and we’re heading into London later today to spend the weekend doing touristy things. We’ve booked to go see the new Antony Gormley exhibition at the hayward which I’m really excited about. I’ll try to take some pictures and post them to flickr while we’re there. We’re also planning to go to London Zoo and catch a show too, so it’ll be a lot of fun!
It’ll be the third time I’m in London this week after the Strategic Schools Work Conference at LICC, and an excellent visit to XLP on Wednesday. I had a great time hanging out with the team, heading into a school and playing football with some kids after school. Thanks to Michelle and Tim in particular for showing me around!
Today I spent an enjoyable day in central London at the LICC Strategic Schools Work Conference. Apart from making some new friends and listening to the excellent speakers (thanks to Chris Curtis for helping to clarify some key points), I’ve come away with a great deal to think about for the new schools-based initiatives we are starting here.
I’m back up to London tomorrow to visit XLP and see what I can learn from their model of schools work. I’ll be joining in with a lunch club and who knows what else! I can’t wait!
Also Kirsty and I wandered down the beach this evening and I had the camera! I managed to get some snaps of the nearly finished East Beach Cafe. Dubbed the “Town Turd” among friends, I’m actually starting to like the design especially with the sun casting shadows on the curves. Click for more flickr photos.
We’ve had a great weekend catching up with friends and chilling out. Part of our fun was heading over to Brighton to track down some of the creatively hidden exhibition 41 Places. From the site:
41 Places is a city-wide artwork of 41 true stories, installed in the place where they happened – stories of people who live, work and play in Brighton.
After wandering around for a couple of hours, we only managed to find around 13 (even using the map)!
Some people have made it a mission to find and photograph all 41. Check out the Flickr group to see the others we didn’t find!
At our church, we are currently starting the process of evaluating our existing children’s and youth work and developing a new vision for what we want to see . The first part of this process was to consult the amazing team of volunteers who deliver the vast majority of clubs and activities each week, and so on Tuesday we gathered as many of them together as we could get to start talking about what this new vision might look like.
In a practical exercise we asked each person to privately write down their own personal aims for the children’s and youth work of the church. Namely, what they thought we should be working towards and trying to achieve in all of our activities. I gathered up all the responses and spent the last day writing them up and trying to pull common threads out of them all. To do this, I simply highlighted similar comments or themes in the same colour and added up the number of times each theme occurred. Of course, this is an overly crude method and I realise that some of the outcome is based on my interpretation of those written comments. However, I do think it gives a general indication of what our wider team believes to be the most important factors in the care of our kids and youth, and is therefore a good starting point on which to build our new vision. Here are the results:
- Help children and young people to develop a personal relationship with God x 20
- Provide evangelism & outreach to non-churched young people x 12
- Help children and young people to develop esteem and self-worth x 11
- Provide solid biblical teaching and practical application x 10
- Provide social opportunities for children and young people x 9
- Provide positive role models and relationships in the group leaders x 5
- Encourage active participation in church x 3
- Help support the parents of children and young people x 2
As part of this evaluation, I’d recently started writing a mission statement for the 11-14’s group that I run. Interestingly, it seems to mirror the first three points listed above:
This group exists to help young people discover their identity in God, to become passionate followers of Jesus and to share their faith with others.
Does anyone else out there have a vision or mission statement for their groups? Do they reflect the sentiments listed here or are they totally different? Are there particular themes that our team has missed? Let me know!
Rosie has challenged people to sum up their identity in just four photos from their library. I found this pretty tricky and i guess my choices would change over time. I’m not going to explain each one, so take them as you like:
So, what photos would you use? Pete, Dave, Dan, Ruth, Kirsty, Mark, Sam, Ben, Rich, Claire, Ian, Ali.
(Sorry about the photo resizing issues earlier!)
Following on from my last post, I attended a prayer meeting this morning where a few of us got together for the first time. Martin announced that his inspiration for gathering together was the passage in Mark 3:17 where Jesus nicknames James and John the “Sons of thunder”. He strongly felt these words are significant for us at this time and we should reflect on being a ’son of thunder’. Having only recently begun to refer to myself as a son, the timing is interesting. It feels as though I need to further explore my dangerous and wild potential as a son. Watch this space!!
A few weeks ago, I forgot my mum’s birthday. Well, I say forgot. I actually remembered it was her birthday and bought a card. What I failed to do was to call her up, wish her happy birthday, or even post the card to her. This is even more unforgivable when you know that I live about a mile away from her. When I finally caught up with her a week later, I felt pretty bad about myself and was really embarrassed that as her son I could treat her that way.
But that shame got me thinking about my role as a son and quite what that means. I have to admit that it is very rare that I view myself in the context of a son. As a youth worker, I am used to seeing myself more as an adult, a leader, perhaps even a father figure as I go about organising programmes, enforcing boundaries and (hopefully) encouraging young people. The son thing rarely comes into it.
My wife Kirsty tells me that through her Psychology studies she learnt about far eastern cultures and how they view themselves in the context of their relationship to others. For example, the Japanese have no concept of ‘I’ as an isolated individual. If you ask who they are, all their answers are given in relation to their roles in society; I am a father, I am a brother, I am a co-worker.
Looking at myself in this way, I wonder what I can learn about who I am now and who I’m created to be. I may be doing OK as a ‘father’, but I’m certainly failing as a son. How do I measure up to my heavenly father? Am I far too busy being a grown-up to enjoy and appreciate the special relationship that comes from being a child of the King?
I went to see Spiderman 3 at the weekend. Being a long-term Spidey fan (since I was around 5) and having enjoyed the last two movies, I was very disappointed. It was long, drawn out, shallow and pretty cringe-worthy in places, but there was some good stuff in there too. In fact one of the main themes of the movie was forgiveness - a worthy subject to follow up on with your young people once they’ve seen the movie.
Thankfully, someone’s done the hard work for you! Head over to sermonspice.com for clips from the movie, sermon outlines and relevant illustrations all ready to download for free!
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