Wrapping

Whenever I've talked/written about this subject i have the (in)appropriate Goldie lookin chain song going round my head, anyway...

So i was on East Midlands BBC news on Saturday night, my first TV interview! (sarcastic woo) Then on Monday morning i was on the radio, but i never listened.

In fact pretty much no one turned up! The idea appealed to the TV, radio, my clergy colleagues, the diocesan press people, all of whom were greatly supportive, but to the people of the meadows...

Well we'll see, the truth is that it's all gotta come from relationship, it's time I got out there more, first three months have been about familiarisation, but from January it's about time on the streets, open house and starting the three house/organic/simple congregations. Off to suggest it to one family today, COME ON!

(just bought 'guns don't kill people, wrappers do!')

Set about putting together a course/programme/thing to use in these gatherings for the first 6-10 weeks with pete farmer, good to do something i feel like i can for a change!

Anyway, midnight service (with bead baked during, mulled wine and hot chocolate!), xmas day celebration, big food shop, wrap caroline's pressies, clean house and we're sorted for the Christmas collapse.

bus-ed in, or incarnation?

The other day I drove into the meadows from town.

As I pulled into the box in the middle of the road to get across the lane of traffic I saw to vehicles in front of me heading for the meadows, one community policing the other a housing agency van. Then me.

How does it feel when you live in a place where everything’s done for/to you? Is it disempowering, are we creating apathy through this outside in, top down approach?

Where do I fit in? I’m not an official insider or anything yet… I do say to people I could have moved anywhere in the country and I chose here, but they just give me that “nice line mate” kinda look.

I’m wary now of our social action, we’ve organised a free present wrap for anyone who turns up at church on Saturday. Is that patronising?

Is it loving, I guess I came up with it ‘cos I’d appreciate it.

But are we perpetuating an unhelpful cycle?

I’m not sure but since I don’t fear failure anymore, I looking forward to giving it a bash and seeing what happens. If a few people come in and get chatting about important things… that’s a start.

Frustration (with me)

Ok, so I'm up at 5.30, Dan awake, his little cousins woken up by him waking and now I'm supervising/sleeping/blogging/being blasted by Jesus you're my superhero.

Deep joy.

Holidays for me are the times when I wander, routine goes, family routine, God routine, the time when I have most time means that I get least done and God kinda gets put to the background.

I'm struggling with the concept that I need a pattern to relationship with God. I mean I want it to be out of love, relationship rather than routine. Within a marriage it takes both I guess, scheduled time, fixed points and spontaneous eruptions of intimacy, fun, relationship.
I constantly worry if I'm giving God the fag-ends, If I'm more honest maybe everyone gets the fag-ends, there's a self-centered-ness that still pervades me. My head space, my time, the personal me-ness never gets invaded, given over to anyone else except in occasional moments of total intimacy. There's the high points, the times in worship, the moments of soaking, prayer, study etc whether alone or in a crowd, but the general day-to-day, it's still mine and jealously guarded.

I'm often aware when i preach that some of the comments I come out with are aimed at me. Its like Balaam's ass or something. I was trying to get across on that God is always better (more good) than we think he is. I gave a list of things he wanted for us, all good and finished with the point that he wants to bring the best out of us/achieve things with us, there was an audible groan. I love speaking to a small intimate crowd!
It was obvious that the point of God's goodness hadn't got across, or that we're seriously lazy! I guess i think the same way, the idea that God want to achieve great things with and through me can leave me groaning, the whole getting off my backside into things that are difficult but good isn't really appealing.
It's the old Aslan thing of him not being a safe lion. We're all aware that if we let God have full access to all areas that safety goes out of the window, not physical safety, but internal freedom/selfishness. My internal space, the core that I'm still clinging onto.

It's got to start from a depth of conviction of God's love. Then that journey begins, steps of allowing him in and building upon the trust that is born. I guess my frustration is born of stagnation. meeting the same issue repeatedly. We all have issues and blindspots and I guess as I get older and re-hit the same things a few times one of two things happen:
1. I accept these areas and blockages/callouses form. I don't doubt God's goodness out loud, but in practice, i stop and become entrenched, certain things are beyond me and then the enemy gets a platform to tell me I'm failing/fearing etc...
2. The build up of revisiting these areas produces a momentum, an anger, a frustration that leads to change. An eruption, like a volcano creates new life. A step further into full life.

Ok so this is the circle again (life shapes).

Letting God into my inner land, is my promised land.
It's the choice of the desert with manna and quail or the battle of a land of milk and honey where I need to trust in God to work with me in taking it.
I'm stating a lot obviousness today, but its helping me and that's the point of this blog.
More of my selfishness on display!

In freezing Dorset

So i'm away on holiday, time to reflect, well, sleep at the mo...

So much for the warmth of the south, the windchill factor is -40degrees.
missing the meadows, but needing the rest.

received a biggish cheque, now have the fun of responsibly using the money without getting into materialistic mess...
good problem/bad problem.

story I was writing which i've binned in favour of a better version.

My God My God,

Why haven’t you forsaken me?

So I’m here, guilty, it’s all too easy, the edge is so easy to avoid, I’m the few not the many, I’m lucky, blessed, I’m the fittest, the free-est.

There’s no battle to fight, no race to be won, just the monotony of easy success.

If I fail it’s the dole, the TV, chronic boredom of squatting.

I cannot fail, so I explore the edge, I explore that outer land of possibility, could I fall, can i go so far they’d never have me?

Can I do enough so you stop loving me, can I find the punishment for the guilt that surrounds, that absorbs, that hides in the back of my consciousness?

The Nine Million who suffer this, while I cruise. The countless in poverty, the women trampled by terrible governments.

Maybe if I watch enough of them on a screen, maybe if I listen to enough people getting righteously indignant, maybe if I subscribe to the right site, wear the right band, buy the right coffee…

But will it do anything, I know I won’t do enough cause I’m too well, I’m too, like you man, like me, like everyone. It’s not that one person can’t change the world it’s just I well I don’t want to.

I’ll never do enough and then I’ll have to put up with all those folks saying how great I am and I’ll know its just to feed my ego and I didn’t do it for good reason.

So what, I’ll sit here and slowly, petrify, ossify, become the missing link. The evolution of the soul stops here, this was the moment. The integrity destroying society who stopped it all.

Drama queen,

We know it isn’t that big a deal its just the death of a world order taking too long to happen, it’s just tectonic plates shifting from one age to another, it’s just a 33 speed slo-mo, the size of the change, the clear out needed, it’s so mammoth it’ll take forever, meanwhile I’m stuck here; bedlam on lithium and larium. A non-chem induced downer with the occasional incandescent, bubble-bursting explosion from man-made air into drowning water.

So what the point of my stream of cancerousness?

Who needs a point, apparently the meta-narrative is dead, as procrastinators love to spout.

Welcome back to my lecture, I mean life, I mean, I know I’ve seen however many million hours of adverts that have polluted every thought I’m capable of having, no song I know is short of corporate sponsorship. No smell isn’t packaged, sight is un-franchised, but then it’s full of franchises, except in the great out-there that is so aspirational it’ll make you vomit. Even going somewhere no-one’s been is destroyed when the competitivety you show by doing it makes you a loser.

Ach, Verbal diarrhoea

Blogger’s paradise becomes a restless hell as the formless shape that is my best mate appears and disappears in annoying mindless moments. He’s directionless even around the environs of his own home, even his own body, his being frustrates me and yet I’m as bad on the macro level.

He’s strung out on the check-out girl; somehow in his mind he thinks if he sleeps with enough of the proletariat then he’ll prove he’s human. He reckons there’s more wisdom in the life of the average struggling family than in the writings of everyone post 1900 but the truth is he’s just another target for Jarvis Cocker’s common people rant.

Some much bull and here I am adding to it.

Eventually conversation has to happen and when it does it about milk. The perfect fridge that we bought still can’t make the milk nature made last more than a few days past sell by. Apparently it’s lumpy and Kester needs nutrition.

So here we are on the edge of life, playing paper scissors stone to go to the maul and buy milk.

Fisrt post when i almost started a blog a couple of years back...

Day 1

The British spirit, what is it?

In the course of looking at what men need, who we are I’m starting to question what is British, as I uncover my own identity I find myself less British, less English as I define what that might be. I am and always will be a Yorkshire-man, that pride and bloody-minded passion for direct speech is yet to be refined.

The game of the English is that of the critic it’s like a national spirit of deconstruction. Built on the edifice of a history of invention and creation which is old and tired, like the second year undergrad we know what it is to be enthusiastic and find ourselves superior to that enthusiasm. We look down our nose at Americanism, religious fervour, political passion, action, our sporting teams are supported with a singular fervour.

In them alone do we allow a true fervour, a passion, an intensity to build. Here we let go all our inhibitions and fly in the face of who we are. And yet where is our critical spirit most clearly seen and articulately voiced as when we fail, as teams must from time to time, the bloodletting, the putsches, the vilification and destruction of the messiahs built only days before is our, British, offering to the world of virtue.

I am not calling up a nationalist spirit to rival the American, Zionist and Islamic imperialism of our global political climate but I am seeking to let us be happy, free and unashamed, to no longer be the confused teenage boy of the world, born to a privileged family but guilty in his own success, fearful of all things yet protected by historical veneers of responsibility and an all pervading cynicism and irony which works both as defence mechanism and prison.

So here I find myself quoting an American president who’s politics I might not entirely endorse but this quote will resound in my head at least, impacting every muscle from blood pump to brain through every sinew until I can say I’ve lived it.

I will not lead from insecurity.

‘It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. He who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and at worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.’ Theodore Roosevelt, 1910.

Recently a friend told me about a prophetic ministry that sees the First World War and the blind sending of our youth to slaughter as still having effective power over the nation. Does this somehow keep people in apathetic poverty, and blind affluence? I don’t know if I agree, but I do believe that the legacy of the death of an empire through the death of millions and the correct deconstruction of the politics of power and nationalism has left us inept and confused. The nation state is dying, yet as it rails against the dying of the light in the Middle East and Middle America we Brits are susceptible to both the old excesses and extremes, and the apathy to the modern abuse of power through materialism.

Our deconstruction of the past brings no bearing on the present, no global action on the blights of poverty and the true causes of war and terrorism. We sit in the worlds corner, knowing some prophetic answers yet like that petulant young man we sit and keep them to ourselves for fear of failure and ridicule.

Hey cheer up, it might never happen!

Prophetic Seers

Okay so from a place of being sure of myself as someone who can take the best of everything, enter Jill Austin… @ revival fires, Dudley

I’m into politics and history, sad but true, and when this prophet turns of phrases and political views completely contradictory to mine I couldn’t cope.

I was watching others being helped and led to God, but comments on Obama, allusions to the USA’s history in glowing terms over leaders I would group as nearing fascism, led me away to do the baby sitting.

It’s really made me thinking. I identify personality wise as a prophet (plumbline ministries) and that judging view leads me to want to discard things if part of the message is “wrong” in my humble opinion.

Various different ideas on who I am, from five-fold ministries to MBTI have helped me, but the above link is the best I’ve found, and it helps that I reaching a mature enough point to look past the traits that describe me and learn to overcome.

I have no idea what Jill said, bless her, but Ken Gott was really prophetic, speaking into some of the bless me culture and the historical pente/charismatic reputation for holiness that we seem to have lost, spoke out of Isaiah 6, an old chapter i thought I knew.

Bill Johnson, did his usual, which sounds disparaging, but it's just that he's impossible to describe, yes i did think that the whole thing wa about an old model, but there's no model which is infused with so much of God.
i found myself crying out for the wineskin that would carry and release the wonders of the uncritical self-blind charismatic movement out into an merging model. As always, run with your own ideas Davey boy...

Sloshie

My post on drunken-ness alludes to this event, Emerge Wales is the place to start and Jon Crowder and Ben Dunn the way to get more and go deeper. I've been amused by some of the comments about such things from the well-known emergent bloggers. start here People who are usually so good at thinking out of the box perplexed by some really out-there mystics with really culturally (in)appropriate reclaiming of language and culture and early church ideas.
It was here that I re-got the gospel and took a further trip into the arms of a loving Father.

If we try and rationally discuss the Holy Spirit events it inevitably ends up in a place of 'why do these weird things happen, why would God be so weird, where’s the fruit' question (from a rational, sensible point of view versus a 'It's transformed me, Appeal to specific verses and church fathers/revivalists, God's sovereign he can do what wants' (from an experiential place) .

Having crossed the divide from rational to mental(!) It is simply about stepping into the situation. My journey into stuff I would previously have dismissed began as a call from God to learn from individuals who's lives were full of great things happening rather than simply clever writers/speakers. Jesus taught with authority because he taught from example and practical experience, not form having studied. It's a farce in the modern world that you can lecture on a subject with no practical experience in it. blind leading the blind?
Anyway, having begun this journey in reading, I found myself more and more exploring those who claimed to move in the miraculous and as i spent time under their influence, with discerning antennae highly tuned.
The moment of change was in a large room where Roland Baker was speaking, he was wacky and completely out of it. I was mentally destroying his techniques, theology and was offended in very religious pharisaical kind of way, until Roland walked past me, gently put a hand on my shoulder and i went over backwards laughing my head off, still thinking 'this is wrong!' Both my wife and friend next to me responded in the exact same way, the instant i did.
Experience, theology, tradition and Bible all in a weird conflict. The way forward was to journey on with a more open mind. Eventually I'm on the way to being able to experience, throw myself into all Godly things and take the best. That doesn't mean not being constructively critical.

But it beats sitting on the side saying the water's polluted for fear I may go out of my depth.

The Problem

Ok, so the perennial church leader problem,
I have too much maintinence to do, I don't have time or space for mission.

I need to support my church, It's about having lots of people, making church cool, putting on the show, providing the programmes...

I just want to put a bomb under it all, I mean we all got into this to follow Jesus and spend my time following Branson or someone...

But i can't just pull the plug on Sunday and Wednesday night... well not without another option, not before giving the congregation who've been taught to consume and demand to fly the nest and sow and reap for themselves.

It helps me that Papa has me on a pincer movement not going tunnel vision.
As I chase the early church model of life/church as it should have been, He's set me on a path of Jesus ministry, Spirit filled, mind exploding, world changing, sickness killing, power.

And the Spirit isn't fussy, He'll work whatever weird kind of church we event.

I'm loving God's fore-sight. I mean He's good, so good, better than i keep finding out.

Loving this.

In the interest of druken-ness

I was always a lairy drunk,
bit of a handful for those who had to cope with me drinking.

I say that in the past tense but even though I've hardly had a drink in the past 3 years I've been drunker than ever over the weekend.

"If evangelicals really believed 10% of what they say they do, they should be 100% more joyful."
Well I've found the joy, lying on my back, like a Riggwelter who's happy to be messed up with the Shepherd. There's so little fun and joy in the church and all Jesus seemed to do was go to parties with bad people and bring them more joy than they've ever known.
It offends me when I write that Jesus spent his time partying, but its the truth of the gospel!

I've also read things that have blown my mind. (see the book list)

Man, we've messed up this Jesus following thing in the western world.
It's like the lights or on, but the King hasn't been allowed in for a while.
"Behold I stand at the door and knock," he's knocking on my doors! The Vicar, the Christian, saying can i come in and get involved, any chance you'd sit back and do it in my strength, my way? He's not knocking on the doors of the lost, thats our job!

I've never felt so bold, so lairy, so up for transforming the area.
There's a power in me, He raised Jesus from the dead and I'm gonna let Him out and loose!
Time to get get lairy drunk again, no substances needed.

Journal

What is my plan for today?

In all your was acknowledge me and He will make straight our paths.
There will be visits but today embrace that which you don't like, prepare your heart for ignorant praise, for joy un-abounding without strategy or plan. Be free and receive but do not copy.
The joy will be your boldness, the love will be our catalyst.

In all your ways acknowledge Him and I will make straight your paths.
if the ground is good but the seed is not buried and dead, the ground remains good but fallow.
If the ground is poor but sowing if done right, there will be at least a small crop.
Sowing is the responsibility I lay on all of you, love is the responsibility, sow into new ground, reseed the old ground until the field of my joy is complete.

In all you way acknowledge US and we will be your God, we will make you our people.
The community is coming, some will procrastinate some will run, the land and the food you share will rejoice as you come together, do not lead by position, wait to be lifted into leading by the community. Write your patterns and plans on my walls, live long in my room in your house, let one and another who come build my sanctuary.

I will provide, send today for money and the outpouring will follow.


My love is over you, my jo will be complete in you, rest in my love, work in the fields.

Struggling towards ecstasy

I'm sure life in all its fullness isn't sitting on my arse.

I'm thinking about difficulty, I mean, I never want to do anything difficult.
Taking initiative is only something I want to do if its for my good or someone else's without causing much pain or difficulty.

To go into difficulty is to find fulfillment,

We're cocooned by a world which tells us that the next thing we buy will give us life in all its fullness, we think we get advertising and yet the big lie is that the most media-savvy of us are still sucked in.

I think I've made my actions too easy and my faith to complex.

I watch my 18months old son and see him challenge himself daily, no good reason to, he's just growing. How much am I stagnating?

Church feels like its about stagnating, about the status quo, learn more head knowledge, read this book, listen to this sermoniser. I mean when did a church leader say lets all do this difficult thing together, oh and by the way I've already been doing it for a year, maybe its time i was the change I'm moaning about. or some such cliché.

Life to full, thats what i have thats what i offer.
I'm guessing finding a church with the best band and coolest leader isn't the fullness. It's the easiness.

I'm struggling with people who talk behind my back, with others defensiveness, I need to forgive and I need to instill loyalty, not a loyalty that means that I as leader am never questioned but that creative discussion and disagreement happens without anyone feeling they have a right to show off about having put me down.
Loyalty thats about the destruction of ego and self-will, but i guess thats a journey of pain into life in all its fullness, but then you know all about that don't you.

I need to go first, where you led.
Give me grace.