Keith has a great story posted over on under the acacias
please go read
why missionaries should wear a tie?
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Particpation and teenagers
Youthblog posted this link to a teenagers report on technology as part of their work experience. Whilst i am sure the student was motivated which i guess from the fact that the placement was with Morgan Stanley, it make think about how little we expect from young people generally in terms of participation and leadership in youth work and church.
Simply complex
Rohr talks about how Jesus asked people to follow him 17 times but never once to worship him. For years I have wondered what it is to live your life as a life of worship. We get so tied up with the worship question. Imagine the church service where we simply ask the complex words follow Jesus
, and the worship that would flow.
Missional communities
I have been reading Richard Rohr on Simplicity
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and he discusses how community happens as people head in the same direction.
The concept of community has always been important to me since reading the early days of David Watson, Keith Green and many others where community living often seemed to be connected to significant moves of God. In my work I have often been at fault of trying to encourage community and in the process stifle it (something Rohr discusses). As I look back at times when I have moving in the same direction with others there has been a real sense of community but without the communal living sense. Still now even years later I know there still people dotted around the world (an extended community) who although I may not have seen in years I would be confident of seeking out if I needed help, I would have no qualms about turning up on their dorstep at 2am. This includes some of the young people who maybe would be seen as the receipents of mission, but were in effect co-creators of community. FYT has always been another part of this extended missional community as we follow the missio dei.
The direction we were heading together was always missional, and this sense of community extends to people who even though I was not working directly alongside were heading in a simular missional direction working on the other side of the country but who I would still count on. Before I was employed by FYt this was how they fitted, but in reality the relationship sense of community has not changed, I just see them more often.
For most of the times whilst I was in these extended missional communities I was in a church, but there isnt anyone from those friends I would be so confident of dropping in on drunk or in need. As I reflect I wonder if this because the churches never had a real missional DNA, (they had other priorities and diversity of directions to travel in) and was my community the by product of following the missio dei (heading in the same direction). Perhaps our extended missional community was church as it was intended to be?
Even now I have people around me who are following the missio dei and all the time new people are added into this extended missional community my hope is that they too may feel confident to drop in me unexpectedly or to ask for help in needed.
Streetspace
track the project here Straightheads divx Raging Sharks psp Nice Guys download The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc the movie
Killer Klowns from Outer Space movies
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PS can anyone donate us an apple mac laptop or £850 to buy one to use with the young people in M and M’s and for admin.
Following the ecclesio-dei
Pompey pinoneer has a good post here
that connects with my thinking around mission and church and that led me to comment on his thoughts about how mission and worship is confussed. My approach is to see mission as an expression of true worship the giving of ourselves to others and God, aligning our lives with the missio dei, (and to paraphrase and add a bit to Bosch) that theology and church has no other reason to exist than to accompany the missio dei who is also the ecclesio dei as biblically church must hold the tension of being missional and the attitude of worship otherwise it does not remain true to the biblical narrative.
Reconnected 1
My head has been down in books and study not to mention playing catch up on all the work I missed in Spain. I have managed to complete my dissertation for my postgrad in practical theology and will post a few of the tentative conclusions. Then when marked hope to make it available on line.
The hypothesis of the study is that many UK based practitioners hold a dualist distinction between mission and church that can be limiting, however by challenging this distinction and understanding the Church on The Edge (COTE) process, mission orientated practitioners are released into a creative space, and way of thinking that enables them to engage more effectively with the communities they serve. Damien: Omen II film
One of the interesting things was a link between how open a person is to new ideas that push our orthodoxy around church and how experienced they were in relational based mission. The more embedded people were in the culture they were serving, the more they recognised that old ways of thinking and working werent cutting it and were more open to new ideas around eccelesiology.150 Cartoon Classic [Popeye Vol. 8] on dvd
its been a while
FYT conferences used to keep me going when i just started out in youth work in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Meeting with like minded people working with young people on the edge was an important part of maintaining sanity and hearing stories encouraging. Now FYT have teamed up with Worth Unlimited East to West and Church urban Fund and The Living Well trust to put this on. Go HERE No Country for Old Men move I Can’t Think Straight move
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still here
Life has been difficult over the past few months with personal issues (three weeks in Spain with my sister Angie who was ill and passed away last week) and work issues (with the challeneges of the recession hitting charitable giving) but I am slowly getting back into the swing of things.She Hate Me buy
awareness and orthodoxy
Over the past few years much of my reading has been on the more radical theology side, raising questions over perceived orthodoxy, mission etc. Much of this has given good arguements about why we need to question our approaches and offered a lot of questions about how we are shaped by culture into our orthodox views. Every few years I try to read the bible cover to cover and over the years picked some of the main examples where the text challeneges the percived orthodoxy of the day (Peters vision), but even though I have done a cover to cover reading in the last few years it is only now that I am picking up more nuances in the text and even more explicit examples (samson) where God encourages/allows the perceived orthodoxy to be broken.
Obviously there is the role of reader and what I am bringing to the text, but I am left wondering two things, how much is God directing these perceptions and how do we open ourselves up to the breadth of the text when the position of the reader plays such and important role.