a vicar's blog....

What does it take to believe?

As a youth worker many moons ago, I remember taking a 6th-form double lesson (quite why they let me loose with their 6th-form RE students for nearly an hour-and-a-half I'll never know?) where I'd been asked to help them think about the evidence for the resurrection.

We did the now well-worn route of looking at alternative explanations - eg. hallucination; swoon etc. (and if you've never thought through the historical evidence for the likelihood of Jesus being raised, you could do worse than read Who Moved the Stone? by Frank Morrison).

At the end of the session I asked who was convinced by the evidence. The huge majority of hands went up.

Was there a mass conversion? No, of course not.

Seth Godin - prolific (and usually wise) writer about marketing and business, gets the point very well:

...no spreadsheet, no bibliography and no list of resources is sufficient proof to someone who chooses not to believe. The skeptic will always find a reason, even if it's one the rest of us don't think is a good one. Relying too much on proof distracts you from the real mission--which is emotional connection.

...and if that's true for business, how much more for religious belief.

Why do you believe what you believe?

New Year is the somewhat cliched - but singularly appropriate - time for taking stock.

This New Year, for All Souls, carries with it a 10th birthday (of the church plant - September 2000) perspective that we're aiming to help propel us energetically into the next decade and more...

A recent piece on Seth Godin's blog quoted a friend of his:

I spent the last seven months doing this [job] and I have nothing to show for it. If I had known I would have spent seven months and gotten nothing, you can bet I would have done something a lot more fun.

Godin looks back on the past decade, suggesting that most people missed the opportunities and simply "hunkered down and did their job or did what they were told or did what they thought they were supposed to, and just about everyone got very little as a result."

Given that ten years is beyond most of us to imagine ahead into, he suggests seven instead:

Seven years from now, what will you have to show for what you're doing right now?

If your answer is, "not much," perhaps you should consider a new plan, one that might generate a different answer, or, at the very least, be a more fun way to waste seven years.

...so back to All Souls' 10th birthday year, we're asking that sort of question. There's simply no point 'hunkering down' and just keeping things going. If all we have to show for it in seven (or ten, or fifty) years' time is a church that is still here and keeps on going, then we've missed the point of why we were planted.

If you're someone who pours time and energy into All Souls - what have you got to show for it so far? What have you seen God do here? What do you dream of him doing in the years to come that we could be celebrating in 2017 or 2020?

The end of a wonderful (overused word this time of year, but justified in this case) few days - starting with the Christingle Service on Sunday morning and finishing this morning with our Christmas Day Celebration.

We finished with a bang - party poppers seemed to fit the occasion of celebration, even though the combination of paper streamers and suspended lit candles was perhaps a little on the risky side...

Here's the moment we shouted Merry Christmas!!

 

 

Numbers over the five Christmas services were very encouraging - especially the number of visitors (many who know us through Little Souls in particular). I remember Andrew Watson (then Vicar of St Stephen's, now Bishop of Aston) once saying something like "Bums on seats isn't everything, but every one of those bums is loved by Jesus!"...

In a day when people speak of the death of the church, the fact that attendance topped 750, with perhaps 500 different people (adults and children) seems something to cheer about today... :-)

Hope you enjoyed your present-giving and receiving today... I'll be back on the blog in ernest (finally) in the New Year - have a great few days!

Almost as much a part of Christmas as the race to be "Number 1" in the pop charts (though somewhat less bad tempered) is the annual dual between ASD and myself to be the first to blog Helene's latest brilliant Christmas card design (here's last year's!).

This year I'm afraid my scanner may well have scuppered the lovely colours, but the captions say it all... you'll have to imagine the rest!

It's been a long, long time since I've been here - same for you I suspect - but with a New Year on the horizon, restarting blogs is a bit like restarting at the gym... only this one I'll aim to actually keep!

Provoked into action by finding my friend - and part of the All Souls team now - Luke Taylor, Pastor to the Ivybridge Community Church - on film. He's in a segment from a Diocese of London video showcasing mission and outreach work in London. You'll find the few minutes with Luke and the Ivybridge team, church and teens (including one or two other faces you'll recognise from All Souls) around three minutes in to the piece:

London Mission from London Diocese on Vimeo.

Thanks Jules for a reminder about this intriguing movement that's come out of the TED organisation (mentioned previously here for their remarkable and stimulating series of talks available online and worth your time one rainy Saturday...). Here's the recent email about it to TED supporters:

In just over two months the Charter for Compassion will be unveiled to the world.  On that day, November 12, 2009, Karen Armstrong will read the Charter at a global press launch. This briefing will be followed by a week of celebratory events - from concerts to art fairs, lectures and readings - and a weekend of sermons coordinated in houses of worship large and small.

Also on November 12, a plaque inscribed with the words of the Charter, designed by Yves Behar,  will be hung in important religious and secular buildings in ten or so cities around the world. Images and video of these "hangings" will be shown at the press launch and then posted on the Charter for Compassion website, re-launching that same day.

All the info about the Charter is available online at the movement's website and, perhaps most engagingly, here's Karen Armstrong's 'pitch' for it at TED in Feb 2008...

Compassion is one of those big all-inclusive, feel-good words that, I hope, every Christian should be lining up to cheer for, but what do you make of this particular take on it? Karen Armstrong's take on "belief" isn't quite the one I'd go for, though she makes a good point that it's not merely an intellectual ascent, but it's about behaving a particular way.

Listening to Armstrong above, I want to cheer about "only understanding doctrines when you put them into practice" and it must be true that "compassion" is a great linking word/lifestyle across faiths.

The problem is that what she pitches is (to quote her) "a test for true religiosity"...

According to whom?

For Jesus, the test of true religion was loving and following him - which, sure, is to be lived out and shown in lifestyle, nor mere intellectual belief... but he was absolutely clear that no lifestyle, however pure and compassionate, is enough to be right with God, nor to change the world.

On the other hand, I'm reassured by these words on the website itself:

The Charter does NOT assume:

• all religions are the same
• compassion is the only thing that matters in religion
• religious people have a monopoly on compassion

The Charter DOES affirm that:

• compassion is celebrated in all major religious, spiritual and ethical traditions
• the Golden Rule is our prime duty and cannot be limited to our own political, religious or ethnic group
• therefore, in our divided world, compassion can build common ground

What do you think? Do these sort of declarations change anything? Do Christian water down their faith in signing up, or is this exactly the sort of thing we need in a fractured world?

Update: Link to read the full assembly now works!

It's rare, you'll know I suspect, that I have a script to reproduce for any of my talks or sermons, but there are occasions when I make doubly sure I know what I'm going to say by at least writing it down beforehand... even though I don't go on to read from it up front.

This week saw one such occasion - very sadly, the tragic death of a pupil who should have been returning to Year 10 at a local secondary CofE school where I'm part of the clergy team (with a particular responsibility for Yrs 10&11).

Here's a portion of the words I used, taken from the middle of the assembly... you can read the rest online, should you wish, here.

"It's odd, isn't it, how we think God won't be interested in our emotions - that he might even look down on how we feel.

I wonder whether we think that way because of how we see the Bible - that it's a quiet and respectful book, talking about religious themes, in a religious way, for religious people... But it's not!

In fact it's a bluntly noisy read, noisy with people's feelings - full of the sound of weeping... and of laughter... you hear shouts of pain, and cries of triumph; the sounds of friends partying together and of families mourning aloud.

It's written by real people, living out real lives alongside the very real God who made, loves and walks with them.

And so those who wrote the songbook of the Bible, the Psalms, were convinced that God, far from being uninterested in their feelings, held them as absolutely precious... listen to these remarkable words from Psalm 56:

You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.

An amazing picture of God : collecting our tears in a bottle - each one precious, not a single one lost or wasted - and taking the painstaking time to write our emotions down in a book? What was true for the Psalmist all those years ago is, I believe, true for all of us as we miss [name] today."

How would you describe All Souls to someone who's thinking of coming along?

That's the question we set in the survey. Some ninety responses later and I'm scratching my head to know how to communicate the results...

But try this:
It's a wordle - from a terrifyingly addictive website, where you simply enter your text (you can put anything into it - "War and Peace", the lyrics of U2...), it strips out common words (like "and" or "it"), counts the rest and assigns size according to popularity.

The more popular the term, the bigger the word is shown.

And I haven't touched the data before entering it, apart from the obvious stuff: removing "All Souls", taking out people's names and (in just one instance) a rather misleading word (someone wrote "not boring", so wordle just selected "boring"!!)...

Every single survey response went into the pot.

It's the image that's going to be on the front of postcards dropping through the letter box of every house in the area during the week leading up to September 6th - and they'll be available to take away as invitations from church too.

God's good - this isn't down to us, it's what He's been doing here... and there's plenty more to come!

Heard about this at New Wine - no idea if it'll take off, but it sounds like a simple idea that has plenty of potential for building community.

StreetBank allows you to offer three things - a skill, an item for lending and/or something you'd be up for giving away.

You put in your email address and your postcode and the website links you up with anyone else in your area looking for what you've got to offer... and vice-versa.

Hardest part in getting a site like this going - hitting that critical mass where most of your street are on it.

Worth a try though....