Here's a nice little theological joke.  HT Geoff Colmer

This coming Sunday I am preaching on God's call - lectionary (I think!) gives the call of Samuel and in the C of E strand the calls of Philip and Nathanael.  I'm not overly fussed if I've got that wrong, it's a good theme for the start of the year anyway.

As part of the warm-up bit I am using a few of the 20th century martyrs as per Westminster Abbey to see what we know about them and their sense of call (probably not a lot really!) and am then adding on Mother Theresa as someone well known who died of natural causes!  A quick internet search on Mother Theresa was quite enlightening, revealing a faith that struggled and questioned as well as a profound sense of call.  It was from her story that I came across the idea of the 'call within the call' - not simply to be a nun, but to be the nun she was, working with the poorest of the poor in India.  Her own 'dark night' experiences never led her to deny or abandon the call which was worked out over a long life.

So, now I'm thinking about calls within calls, and various ideas are wafting through my mind.  One (rather cringe-laden) phrase is that of 'reason, season and lifetime' often applied to friendship in those gloopy emails that circulate from time to time.  Is there, within the life-long call to discipleship the potential for timebound calls - for reasons or seasons?  I am sure the answer is 'yes' - otherwise why do people move on from time to time, sensing God leading them to new things?

Another idea owes its origins more to computer programming  in the days when you had to be able to speak FORTRAN or COBOL, and the idea of 'nested do loops' (Remember them?  No?  Never mind). The outer 'do loop' would be the call to Christian disicpleship inside which other loops would be, for example 'to this role' 'in this place' 'at this time' 'for this purpose.'  How many levels of nesting, and how many nests within the outer loop may vary.  If this is as clear as mud, well either (a) you're too young to have learned to programme properly (b) you are too old to have learned to programme at all (c) you avoided computers before the advent of Windows (d) I'm talking gibberish [(e) a combination of the above!!].  Visually a series of concentric circles almost expresses this idea - at least in its simplest form.

At various times I, like many others, have had people say my (current) 'calling within a calling' is 'for such a time as this' and maybe that's true.  But I am left wondering now, as I look around the world (or at least my bit of it) what might be the voice of God 'for such a time as this' and that, I think is where I want our sermon exploration to go on Sunday.  Not the naff and predictable 'how do we hear God's voice?' or 'How many times constitutes God's call?' (where does that ridiculous notion of three come from?  Samuel was called four times!) or 'the call is to follow Jesus.'  Rather, what is the 'call within the call to follow Jesus for such a time as this, with credit crunches, rising unemployment and wars and violence across the globe?'  I can't neatly 'exposit' that from Samuel, Philip or Nathanael, but I do feel that is what the "divine niggle" is prompting me to say.

Yeserday's sermon at D+1 got me thinking - and that's a good thing!  The preacher was focussing on the theme of reconciliation as the heart of the gospel, and using 2 Corinthians 5:17 as a central text which is, in Greek, ὥστε εἴ τις ἐν Χριστῷ, καινὴ κτίσις· τὰ ἀρχαῖα παρῆλθεν, ἰδοὺ γέγονεν καινά·

This is important, because the dear old NIV, like any Bible, uses interpretation alongside translation, in its rendering of these words.  The NIV version says 'Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!'  The NIVi says 'Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!'  This is a more precise translation of the Greek and has a very different meaning - which I was pondering long before the preacher got there!  This morning I was reminded that καινὴ κτίσις is actually feminine language but I won't pursue that one!!

So, a very literal translation would probably be 'if anyone (or anything) is in Christ, there is a new creation...' which is pretty mind blowing stuff.  It is as if each time someone comes to faith (by event or process) creation (all of it) is renewed and not just that person's immortal soul.  Wow!  That will keep me thinking for a very long time.

The sermon spoke of reconciliation in three directions - personal with God, corporate within the faith community, global/universal with the whole of creation.  That's worth a lot of pondering too.

Missiologists seem to like numbers - if counting derieres on chairs or how many pledge cards were signed are out of fashion, then we'll just squeeze lots of (albeit little) numbers into our writing.  Having read a bit of the stuff I bought before Christmas I now have a list of...

6 Christian constants, 5 marks of mission, 4 marks of the Church, 3 perspectives (2 turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree).  To be fair, the stuff they have is helpful in my thinking, but if you start playing with the concepts and combining them in varied permutations you can just end up tied in knots that achieve very little.  So, in case anyone reading this wants to ponder any of these themselves here they are...

Six Christian Constants

1. Christ
2. The Church
3. Eschatology
4. Salvation
5. Anthropology
6. Culture

Five Marks of Mission

1. To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
2. To teach, baptise and nurture new believers
3. To respond to human need by loving service
4. To transform unjust structures of society
5. To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth

Four Marks of the Church

For this one, one of the books on Fresh Expressions (and fresh expressions) offers some interesting and helpful parallels for each of these which I see as 'both/and' rather than 'either/or' so what follows is very interpreted by me...

1. One (unity) and Diverse (many) -  'in' - a unity in diversity
   
2. Holy (set apart) and Charismatic (anointed) - 'up' - set apart and anointed by God
3. Catholic (universal) and Local (contextual) - 'of' -  reflecting global culture
4. Apostolic (authority) and Prophetic (sent) - 'out' - sent out in authority (Not sure I see 'prophetic' as 'sent' so much as 'speaking out' or 'apostolic' entirely as 'authority' but still...)

Three Perspectives

This one is quite complex but can be summarised by key words, early thinkers and contemporary thinkers ...

1. A - to save souls and extend the church: Law - Tertullian - John Paul II
2. B - a call to fulfil own potential, allowing Christ to be the answer: Truth - Origen - Rahner
3. C - liberation; Christ as transformer of culture: History - Irenaeus - Gutierrez

I think this is possibly the most helpful bit I've read thus far, even if what it says is hardly rocket -science: dependent on how one understands one faith, then one will understand and exercise mission accordingly.  Whilst I have an analytical mind, I am always a little wary of neat categories but from a practical perspective a few boxes can be helpful - just so long as they don't end up as a new set of labels that define themselves over against each other in the way that existing theological labels tend to.

What all this means, I think I already knew:

• That there are certain cores essential to being authentically Christian (even if people may vary over what they think those are and how they are understood!)
• That mission is diverse and complex, so that one size doesn't fit all and no one church can do everything

I also like the frequent mentions of the word 'history' and its links to liberation - freedom - within the context of mission.  But then Anglicans (who write most of this stuff) ostensibly value history and tradition more than your average Baptist

Seems the New Year is the time when people look back over the last twelve months and forward to the next.

The equivalent Saturday to this one last year I was visiting someone in Leicester General Hospital and by chance/grace was there when she received a diagnosis of cancer; eight months later I conducted her funeral.  Today I could be hospital visiting, but have elected not to - I am still on leave and the outlook is possibly marginally less bleak.  A lot has happened in the last twelve months and yet the same basic patterns of life continue unchanged.

Regular readers of this blog will have shared in the happenings of the last year, and many have had their own share of tragedy, challenge and change to contend with.  Rather than chart a list of events, I want to 'stream of consciousness' some of what I think I've learned that I will take forward into the next year.

I've never really been a procrastinator, but this year has been a keen reminder not to put off until a more suitable occasion those things that one deems important.  At the same time, there have been runs of weeks when I've worked way too hard and too long, and have paid the price in fatigue and irritability.  Someone said to me that it is good every now and then to say 'no' to something that sounds really good, really interesting - and discovering that actually you don't feel guilty or unfulfilled as a result.  It will take me a lifetime to manage that one, but maybe the awareness is a step on the right path?

Beware success criteria - especially if they are numerical.  In five years the membership of my little church has decreased quite significantly from mid-forties to low thirties.  We have closed our building, our Sunday School and our children's work.  By some criteria we (I) are (am) failures (a failure).  But I don't believe that we are (or that I am).  We have grown up a lot, bravely faced countless challenges, established many new initiatives from Lent/Advent prayer lunches to a travelling lunch club to events in a pub.  We have learned to be far more creative, long-suffering and forgiving, and now almost everyone under 80 is on a rota for some aspect of worship-life and/or mission.  My person who died from cancer said to me at one point in the year that she'd never realised how much love there was in our church until she became ill - this for me was a measure of success that no numerical method would ever identify.  As it happens, we reached the dream of 500 people-contacts in the week up to Christmas but what I treasure are the qualitative moments, often shared with very few people.

The God of small things - not a book by an Asian writer, but the glimpses I've caught of God this year.  Right there in the most insignificant moments there is God.  I have found myself pondering many times the mustard seed, the yeast, the seed that dies, the widow's mite, the one lost sheep... one small Baptist congregation doesn't even show up on the radar of the world church, but God sees, knows and is.  Five years of little things like saying 'thank you,' of refusing to put people down, of attention to detail seem to be bearing fruit, transforming the dough, whatever the metaphor might be.

2009 will bring it own numerous challenges, already they are emerging: the end (we hope!) of the process to sell our building; the challenge of convincing anyone to stand for election to the diaconate; a shortfall of several thousand against budget for last year (understood and justifiable but nonetheless real); our older congregation getting increasingly frail... but maybe what we've learned in the last year will help us to step forward in ways 'known and to be made known' as we walk with God into the future.