Archive for the 'Christianity' Category

‘Supply vicars’ unable to control unruly congregation

Published
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Jon
on 8 May 2008
in Christianity and Media
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I’m loving the satirical news posted over at NewsBiscuit and this particular article caught my eye!

‘Supply vicars’ unable to control unruly congregation

Rural parishes unable to find permanent members of the clergy have been forced to bring in supply vicars whose inexperience and lack of authority has made them vulnerable to disruptive parishioners, says a new report.

One temporary priest was reduced to tears with heckling and catcalling during his sermon, and when he looked up he saw that all the church-goers had turned their pews round to face the opposite direction. ‘These young supply vicars do not have the experience to be able to hold the attention of wayward Christians,’ admitted the Archbishop of Canterbury. ‘The moment they turn their back they are pelted with screwed up service sheets and Alpha Course leaflets made into paper planes, and many of them just don’t know what to do.’

In a small church in South Devon, one vicar was subjected to mass humming, while another gradually became aware that the mumbling and feigned coughing around the congregation was part of a daring game where each church-goer had to say the word ‘bollocks’ slightly louder than the last. In extreme cases of disruption, tearful vicars have run out to the vestry and phoned for the bishop, who has had to come down and give the congregation a serious talking to.

‘People imagine that church-goers are serene and gentle people, but nothing could be further from the truth’ said one vicar who has quit the Church after the pressure became too great. ‘On one occassion I asked the elderly congregation what they normally did for Evensong, and the old ladies told me they usually did black mass and sacrificed a goat to Beelzebub. How was I to know it was a wind up? It was only when I smeared the goat’s blood on my face and saw them giggling that I realized I had made a bit of an idiot of myself.’

Genius!

Dear God

Published
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Jon
on 23 April 2008
in Christianity and Media
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Dear God is a website where people send in their ‘prayers’ to be posted on the site. Similar to the creative confessional Postsecret, the site allows people to express their emotions and sentiments to whatever higher power they believe in.

It doesn’t matter what your version of God is… Jesus, Allah, Buddha or simply a spiritual universal energy… praying to a higher power soothes and heals. It’s scientifically proven that people who pray are healthier, happier and more resilient.

An interesting idea, and one that is capturing a lot of imagination and press. Go check it out as it is equally inspirational and disheartening.

ht: Digital Orthodoxy

Palm Sunday

Published
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Jon
on 16 March 2008
in Christianity, Youth Ministry and Youth Work
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Just a quick post to say that we had an EXCELLENT church service this morning totally prepared and led by the young people!

As part of the World Vision 24 Hour Famine, the group fasted from 6pm Saturday night and then delivered a creatively challenging service on the theme of global poverty. As well as leading the worship, they hosted the event, gave the notices, created some short videos, did a dance and a drama, an activity for the kids, built a ’slum’ in the church, involved everyone in creative prayer, presented a short talk and hosted a cake sale! The only adults involved in the whole thing were Gareth playing guitar in the band and me doing a quick interview. David, our church elder never even picked up a mic.

Honestly, I was so impressed with them all. Each person in the group really pulled their weight and I’ve been getting amazing feedback from the congregation all day.

Also, in terms of money raised, a whopping £300 was made from the cake sale alone without any of the sponsorship money in yet! The total’s gonna be pretty high! As I’m off on holiday tomorrow, it was a great way to finish up before taking a break (although I’m pretty exhausted now).

Oh and thanks to Adam at YMX for the twitter updates that led to a whole load of Flickr image links! You gotta love the World Wide Web.

Worshipful Dance

Published
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Jon
on 3 March 2008
in Christianity, Personal and Youth Ministry
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I have to be honest; I just don’t get dancing in church!

That may be a strong statement to start off a blog post, so let me elaborate a little here. I do understand the medium of dance as a creative expression, and I appreciate it in things such as ballets or stage performances. I understand it as a response to the rhythm in music and I can comprehend how people enjoy and participate in dance. I even understand it as an expression of joy and worship to God in the same way that I love to sing. But what I don’t get is why in some churches, people insist on spontaneously running up on stage and twirling around before gracefully bending over double and lying on the floor in front of the congregation! There are times when this is totally right and it is clear that God is working through the dancer, but there are times that it isn’t and that can be very distracting.

I remember a few years back standing at the side of the main stage in the big top at Spring Harvest ready to go on and talk about what the young people were up to. While I was waiting, the band were leading worship and three dancers were taking it in turns to do their thing on stage while the others waited at the side. As one dancer finished her move (with a flag), she came to the side of the stage. Realising her two partners were also off the stage, she urgently whispered: “Quick, there’s no-one dancing! Someone get up there now!”

Up until that point, I hadn’t taken much notice of the dancing. But I then watched as one of them sprang into life and launched herself onto the stage in a complicated spin, twist, dive, stretch-arm-out, bow-head manoeuvre simply to fill out the space on the platform. If the dancer’s role was to worship God in their expressive way, why was it so important that one of them was always seen on the stage?

I don’t tell that story to dismiss the medium of dance as worship, nor to criticise those who do it, but I do sometimes question the motive. If you’re worshipping God, do it wherever you are in the congregation. I don’t have to go onto stage to be able to sing!

Last week at church we started with a choreographed dance involving some of the young people. I didn’t really appreciate the complexities of what they were doing, how they moved, or even if it was any good. Rather, I loved seeing their faces filled with excitement and joy as they used their skills. That’s the best kind of dancing for me!

Mecha Manga Bible Heroes

Published
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Jon
on 22 February 2008
in Christianity, Media, Youth Group Resources, Youth Ministry and Youth Work
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Being a fan of super hero comics and Japanese anime, I was delighted to hear of Mecha Manga Bible Heroes, a futuristic retelling of David and Goliath complete with huge armoured robots (mecha) drawn in a manga style!

Alongside the various other comic and manga Bibles starting to spring up, this version will be most welcome. For more, check out the Manga Bible series starting with ‘Names, Games and the Long Road Trip‘ and working it’s way through the Old Testament, or try the Manga Bible by Siku. I’m not sure when and how the Mecha Manga Bible Heroes will be available in the UK, but it will certainly pique the interest of a number of boys in our Ignite group.

Church Forgives Youth Pastor For Slaying

Published
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Jon
on 21 February 2008
in Christianity, Youth Ministry and Youth Work
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No, he wasn’t heavily into some computer game, instead former youth pastor Calvin Wayne Inman, 29, has been charged for the death of a convenience store clerk during a robbery. He was 16 at the time.

Apparently after being recently ordained and with support from his church, Inman went to the Police and confessed to the murder he committed 14 years ago. What I love about this story is the way the church praise him for his recent actions:

“He’s a hero, really,” said Kelley Graham, 24. “I don’t know how many people would do what he did. The Bible says you just need to confess to God. Calvin took an extra step.”

Robin Thac said her 17-year-old son was active in the youth group that Inman led.
“I am thrilled my son has a role model to accept responsibility the way Calvin has,” Thac said. “There are way too many men who don’t accept responsibility.”

If a similar situation were to happen here, I would expect the response from parents to be far more negative: “The youth leader’s a murderer! What was he teaching my kids?!”

Maybe, I’m being too judgemental on the parents ;). However, That church really do forgiveness well and show Christ in their actions. It could be a great discussion with the older members of a group.

Ht to Gman.

Cross Denominational Working

Published
by
Jon
on 13 February 2008
in Christianity, Youth Ministry and Youth Work
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Our local leaders fraternal
Our local leaders fraternal ;)

Since starting my role at ACC, I’ve spent a bit of time meeting up with Youth Workers from other churches in the local area. Although there’s a few of us, a gathering had rarely happened before and so it’s been good to share coffee, stories, and recently events with these other men and women of faith.

At the same time that these relationships have formed and totally separately, a wider group of non-denominational church-based workers have been meeting across the south coast for the very same purpose.

It seems that God is doing something in mixing up the denominations to share and support each other and it’s not just here locally. Youth Hacks had a good post about the benefits of meeting with workers from other churches. Here are a few highlights:

Let off steam - We all have crap to deal with in our communities, and sometimes we need to talk about it. Its great to be able to do some healthy venting to someone from outside of your community.
Share ideas - No matter how cool your ideas are or how long you’ve been in ministry, the folks down the road are probably doing some cool stuff. And there might be a couple of things they can learn from you, too.
Kill unrealistic expectations - Its easy to imagine that other churches have it all together. I was relieved to hear that our neighboring youth workers deal with the same problems that we do. It normalized the problem and helped me to stop beating up on myself about silly things.

Although meeting together is fine, the Christian Youth Work blog is questioning whether we actually need to show unity through practical example. Isn’t communication enough?

I don’t see that there is any actual need for us to physically do things together, because we may all be called to work with different people, at different times, and do different things, so is it more important that we work together, or be seen to be working together, or that we follow the calling that God has placed upon us?

Personally, I think working with others is vital in building trust and relationships. It will also benefit the young people who access the various activities when they see their workers communicating and sharing. As such, I’ve also continued to meet with LAYA, the Littlehampton Area Youth Agencies. This is a planning and information-sharing group made up of statutory and voluntary agencies who run services for young people. I used to be part of it in my previous role, but I now represent the first church invited to attend. As a result the church is becoming known by these professional agencies for the quality and varied work we do.

So how can you work with other churches and agencies to enhance your work and what God is doing through you?

Raising Children Right

Published
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Jon
on 9 February 2008
in Christianity, Youth Ministry and Youth Work
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I came across this quote on Taking Thoughts Captive from Martin Luther the German theologian and reformer from the 16th century regarding how Christian parents should raise their children:

If [bringing up children in the fear and knowledge of God above all things] were done, God would also richly bless us and give us grace to train men by whom land and people might be improved. He would also bless us with well-educated citizens, chaste and domestic wives, who, afterward, would raise godly children and servants. Here consider now what deadly harm you are doing if you are negligent and fail on your part to bring up your children to usefulness and piety. Consider how you bring upon yourself all sin and wrath, earning hell by your own children, even though you are otherwise pious and holy. Because this matter is disregarded, God so fearfully punishes the world that there is no discipline, government or peace. We all complain about this but do not see that is is our fault. The way we train children and subjects spoils them and makes them disobedient.

(Large Catechism, “The Fourth Commandment,”)

Well 500 years later his observations are still true and the problem is certainly magnified (if not quite “no discipline, government or peace”). Taking Thoughts Captive has some great views on this regarding youth ministry:

Luther reminds us that the piety of parents is of no avail if the ‘training’ and ‘discipling’ of our children consists of shuffling them off to amusing (literally), relevant, worldly, youth ‘ministry’ events that are more focused on being hip, cool, and trendy than they are teaching the true Word of God.

Any thoughts on the role of youth workers as surrogate parents and the lack of parental discipline?

Bible Text Visualisations

Published
by
Jon
on 25 January 2008
in Christianity, Media and Technology
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There’s been a lot of activity recently in people mapping data from the Bible into visual representations.

Chris Harrison took the King James Version and produced some beautiful images based on the connections between the passages, before developing a social network representation and distribution of people and places like the image below.

The background is the entire text of the Bible. Floating above it are all of the biblical names. These are positioned according to their average position in the text and lines are rendered to show where the names occur. Font size is proportional to the number of occurrences in the text.

Also, in a similar vein Crossway Books have put together an interactive Social Map of the New Testament that shows the connections between each of the characters.

It’s great to see the Bible being presented in new and exciting ways that allow Christians to interact with the people and stories to see the connections. I’d love to see this kind of research developed into abstract art that illustrated the various scriptures!

ht: Happy Traveller and Think Christian

The Radical Reformission

Published
by
Jon
on 9 December 2007
in Christianity and Media
. 1 Comment

Reaching out without selling out

Although I’ve known of Pastor Mark Driscoll for some time due to his exposure in the emerging church scene, I’d never read anything of his directly until a friend gave me this to read during our recent holiday. I have to say, that although sceptical when I picked it up, I loved this book!

The main thrust of the book is about getting back to the business of sharing the gospel with the world by being present in the various cultures around us. Driscoll argues that to fulfill this mission we must have equal emphasis on the gospel, the culture and the church. To leave one out leads to parachurch, liberalism or fundamentalism. For examples and explanations of this, read the introduction.

Reformission is a radical call for Christians and Christian churches to recommit to living and speaking the gospel, and to doing so regardless of the pressures to compromise the truth of the gospel or to conceal its power within the safety of the church.

I found the whole argument rather compelling and it certainly reinforces my own experiences about the relationship between gospel, culture and church. In fact, I agreed with pretty much everything he was saying! Throughout the book he punctuates chapters with real-life interviews with people who are living out ‘reformission’ and therefore back up his argument.

Driscoll has a really honest yet direct writing style which is bound to get up the nose of certain traditional Christians. For example:

Doesn’t the story sound like the plot of a trashy, daytime television talk show? The God-Man is born to a teenage virgin in an animal stall, grows up with a blue-collar dad in a dumpy rural town, and has a weird cousin named John, who lives in the woods and survives on a steady diet of bugs, sugar, and repentance.

I would highly recommend this book if you’ve ever longed to see Jesus transform the world around you but become disheartened by the evil in the world and the traditions within the church. Driscoll helpfully puts all these struggles into context and explains an exciting way forwards; reformission!