A couple of links from today's BUGB e-news sweep.  Should minister-types blog or not?  Is it wise or foolish?  Is it safe or dangerous?  Why do I blog and why do you read it?

Have a look here and here and see what you think.

Whilst I think that as a blogger and as a minister I have clear responsibilities, I would hope that I find a reasonable balance of honesty and integrity, openness towards, and mindfulness, of others, as well as sharing stuff that now and then might make my readers pause for thought, encourage them, or just give them a good laugh.

Next week it is the Baptist Assembly in Scotland - which means I'll be over in Dunfermline for three and a half days and probably offline (I may top up my mobile broadband, haven't yet decided).  It is also the October half term for most parts of England, though not all.  So what?  Well this week I've had emails from two lots of folk I know asking to meet up during that week.  A minister friend because his children are participating in leading worship at the Assembly (I'm really looking forward to that bit as I missed the equivalent for BUGB in May) a former colleague because he is visiting relatives in Edinburgh.  The really 'small world' bit is that the second family have booked to stay at the exact same place I will be staying, so we not only get to meet up but to have no worries about where.  The world is tiny.

Yesterday I had a fun - if surprisingly tiring - day doing the filming with Libby.  Apart from trying to persuade Holly Cat to be filmed (which we eventually managed) it all went pretty well, and hopefully Libby has some usable quotes and good footage.  The only hitch we had was severe disruption to local trains which meant abandoning overground in favour of subway at one point, which lost us some time.  Anyway, the small world thing is that her mother grew up and went to school on Northampton, not exactly a million miles from where I did.

In a weird kind of a way, I find a connection between this and one of the concepts I am exploring on Sunday - an African understanding of family.  Recognising our interconnectedness and interdependence ought to impact our attitudes and actions...

Spotted this on Matt Stone's blog today and thought it was interesting/useful.  Lots of similarity between Anabaptists and Baptists, unsurprsingly, but also some differences.  See what you think.

(From Palmer Becker's "What is an Anabaptist Christian"; you can see the original in text form here)

(Tried  pasting it in but the formatting went skew-whiff)

I am sitting in an abnormally tidy (and dusted!) living room, as I am waiting for my house guest and fashion journalist in training Libby Page to arrive (cue polite applause!).  So I thought I'd just give her blog a quick plug... it's called love pink which is just so funny as I 'don't do pink' if I can avoid it.

So, tomorrow we will be doing some bits of filming around Glasgow, at home and maybe even at church as part of her project... I'm kinda looking forward to it.

Just before I began treatment last year I had a private photo shoot which was fun and helped me 'escape' for a while.  There's a nice sense of circularity that now I can put something back by going in front of a camera again.  I'm not great in front of a camera, so I hope she has some good tricks up her sleeve - sure she will have.

I'll report back in due course.

A few folk have noticed that my sidebar linking other blogs has been updated and have asked (off blog) about some of the changes. 

Now and then blogs become 'defunct' because their authors find better things to do with their time.  Other people decide to delete their blogs for various reasons.  Occasionally I feel that my interest in a blog probably isn't shared by my readers. 

This is just to say that I have removed links to one or two blogs on this basis today, and please don't read anything sinister into it!