So, we had the vision day.  It was great - twenty folk came along, worked hard thinking about various ideas and sharing laughter, food and fellowship along the way.  Then as we were going someone felt she had to tell me "that it it was very nice apart from seeing your bottom when you bent down, in fact if your trousers had gone any lower we would have seen it"

Wish I had had the wit, speed and guts to reply "yes, but it's rather a nice one."

OK, so my jeans and jumper parted company and revealed a few inches of back - was that really the most memorable moment of the whole day?  What was that about 'if your eye causes you to sin....?'

Ah well, most people enjoyed the day, I think, and it was good to have half my membership together reflecting on 'why are we here?' 'what makes a church?' and 'where might God be calling us to go next?'

By spending my time overseeing the catering, it meant the usual culprits could not hide in the kitchen and had to take part fully in discussion groups.  I think they appreciated the change.  As for the twelve baskets of leftovers after the feeding of the 20... well, everyone left with a doggy bag of some sort.

So, thanks Matt for leading our day, Community Centre for accommodating us and God for inspiring us.  Now, I intend to put my feet up after another long day in the life of the vicar of Dibley.

I am trying to convince Churches Together to do something more creative, more public friendly, for Good Friday.  We have booked the Community Centre and the usual crowd are going to do the usual activities for children, but I wanted to move things on a bit from the, usually very dull, adult service that runs in parallel, so the idea is to offer a 'drop in' with free tea and hot cross buns as the carrot, so to speak.  Once inside - and hopefully before they reach the room with refreshments (I could almost get a job in a retailing) - the hope is to offer various 'zones' for people to explore - with for example a labyrinth, a place to light a candle and reflect, some images, etc.  One of the things that would be good would be to find a suitable short video of the Passion narrative that runs for not more than 10 minutes (ideally 5) so that people can actually focus on what it's all about.  I know I could use an extract from something like the Jesus video, and copy the relevent chunk to a DVD, but that's a tad clumsy and illegal to boot, so I wondered if anyone knew of anything suitable that could be used?

Of course, the planning meeting might over rule me and say thay want the usual, boring, communal reading of the fourth gospel account...

Today one of my complex pastoral issues reached completion.  A long day, with a lot of waiting, and high on stress levels, but which ended with evidence of grace, resurrection and new life.  Oh, and more evidence that those white plastic things that slot into shirt collars are sometimes useful!

Praise be to the God of grace and mercy, hope and a future.

For some reason formatting is currently doolally and Blogspirit site working very slowy -apologies for near illegible posts

UPDATE

Don't know what happened by after I re-installed Java it is now OK.

Technology.  pah!

I can't say I'm sorry to get to the end of January - it has been a singularly crazy month, demanding physically, emotionally, spiritually. I am due a good telling off from all my minister friends for working 31 days straight, but here you go, it's like that sometimes. Hopefully February will be a tad less loopy, though my diary is already pretty crammed. Anyway, Saturday is our vision day, with the title Pilgrim People, to be led by the minister of a churchin Derby whose situation is not a million miles different from ours - they too have been in schools and other centres for three years after their building was closed by a fire, This morning one of my task is to plan the closing worship for the day, and I have to be honest in my state of exhaustion, it is proving fairly self indulgent - creativity, "secular" resources and letting the Bible speak for itself. So here's what it will be.

Matt 7: 13 -14

Poem : The Road Not Taken

Luke 9: 57 – 10:9

Video Clip – Sister Act “I will follow him”

Response – Footprints (cut from paper) to be pasted onto a poster 'I will follow Him'

Prayer

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