Greenbelt reflections

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I finally made it to beer and hymns this year – albeit cider and carols, and it was awesome, and a real highlight. I didn’t get to a lot as FYT had a stand, and sadly missed Pete Rollins, nowadays I find it impossible to switch off my mission head, and was disappointed with the limited imagination of most of what I went to. It was great to go to some of all age orientated alt worship, and at one level it was good but it was still full of christian jargon, language, and I would have to agree with the title of one of Pete Rollins sessions Changing something so that everything remains the same. There was a great comment during one communion from a girl, as the leader used the liturgy to introduce the communion she said “we’ve all heard this story” clearly impatient with the process. It sums up much of what I experienced in talks and worship, whilst cider and carols would fit right in as an approach to mission in our current context where many people still have the echo of a christian memory.
On the reverse most of people I was camping with found the sessions stimulating and worthwhile, the question is where do I and they go now.See Spot Run on dvd The Narrow Margin on dvd

Balance, feel and prayer

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I used to build pebble towers with the kids on beaches so I was prompted by Robs post on balance to experiment myself with some stone balancing and prayer/meditation . At charmouth beach today and I put up a few stone circles, it was a really helpful way to centre and good entry point to prayer without words. I have always found creation and nature helpful in getting me to focus but usually it motivates me towards praise and thanks. However the physical act of trying to balance with an object of nature was really helpful and I found myself in Flow quickly. Perhaps it was seeking the external balance that helped the internal.

‘When thou prayest, rather let thy heart be without words than thy words be without heart.’
John Bunyan

As asbo baby approached to knock over the circle, Exodus 20 v25 came to mindIf you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it, -and the hammering behind of fossil hunters was magnified in my ears, as people split rocks searching for ammonites.

Going with Flow at Greenbelt

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Grenbelt has always been a thin place for me where Flow and earth meet. This year I am really excited as usually I find for me it is either a good year for music or a good year for talks but this year both seem fab to me. Especially looking forward to David Dark Birds of America download

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and CMS has interesting series around emerging church and mission which is worth checking out including a sessions from asbo, tsk, richard subworth, mark berry. I am also doing a session on God as Flow on Sun 12-1 and FYT will have a table in the resouces area so hope to catch up with lots of people which is always the best bit anyway .
Hope to see

Youth Gangs in an English City

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A research team, led by Dr Judith Aldridge at the University of Manchester, has found evidence which directly contradicts the core assumptions of government policy on gang and knife crime. Based on two years’ work with members of six gangs in an English city, the research finds that in reality, gangs are loose, messy, changing friendship networks – less organised and criminally active than widely believed – with shifting and unstable leadership. The guardian has published podcast interview online with the researcher. here

“A Letter to a Young Activist” by Thomas Merton

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Dear Jim,

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…

…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.

The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion…

The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand…

Enough of this… it is at least a gesture… I will keep you in my prayers.

All the best, in Christ,

Tom

The scope of the voluntary youth work sector

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The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs one in three of the total voluntary and community sector workforce and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year, according to new research published today by NCVYS and the National Council of Voluntary Child Care Organisations (NCVCCO).

Every Organisation Matters is the first ever mapping of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sectors and was undertaken by a team from the University of Hull led by Professor Gary Craig as part of NCVYS and NCVCCO’s Speaking Out project.

Speaking at today’s launch Deputy Director of Strategy and Communications at the Office of the Third Sector, Juliet Mountford called the research ‘ground breaking’ and thanked the partners for providing an ‘excellent piece of research’. She also announced that Birmingham University will lead the new Third Sector Research Centre dedicated to analysing the impact of the sector’s activities.

Janet Moore, Third Sector Team Leader at the Department for Children, Schools and Families also commended the work and expressed the government’s commitment to taking on board the research findings, to shape future thinking and policy making.

Amongst the report’s key findings are:

The children and young people’s voluntary and community sector employs over 160,000 people in England – as many as 1 in 3 of all those employed by voluntary and community organisations – and generates income in excess of £1.5 billion a year.
Small organisations, many of whom work with highly vulnerable children and young people, are under threat because of the government’s shift towards commissioning services.
Children aged 7-13 appear to be poorly provided for, with an emphasis on early years provision and a growing government agenda around services for young people leading to this transitional age group missing out.
Effective understanding of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector is currently hindered by poor quality data.
Voluntary and community sector organisations need to be doing more to measure the long-term impact of their work.

The report calls on the government to invest in further research to better understand the changing nature of the children and young people’s voluntary and community sector, to prioritise support for small organisations who often work with those most in need and to provide sustained investment in workforce development.

The research team and representatives from the voluntary sector who attended the launch emphasised the importance of ‘valuing what is valuable above valuing what is measurable’.

For more information and to access the full report go here 100 Tears the movie Code Name: The Cleaner full

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Info via CHYPPS and NCVYS

Gordon Brown backs skate parks

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Gordon Brown is aware of the need for youth facilities in promoting comuunity cohesion and particularly mentions skate parks State of Play buy Click movie download

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Highwaymen movie . on the whole this is good news but it still begs the question why do communities usually put them right on the edge of town when most young people dont have transport. Having just taught on community cohesion is worth noting that the government use the word community to conjour up fluffy feelings associated but the reality of funding long term workers to help build communities that reflect the warmth of the word, still remains a long way away.The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift movie