Last night at our deacons' meeting we were discussing the future options regarding our building, and I asked if they thought the members in general had actually grasped the financial aspects of any of this.  The consensus was that, no, they hadn't, and a couple of examples were cited...

One woman apparently asserted that if we'd all put 20p a week in a jar since the building closed (around 3 years ago) we'd by now have enough to buy a new one.  Hmm, 40 people x 150 weeks x 20p....  I'll take three of those churches please!

Another person apparently mumbles that we spend £6 a month on sandwiches to give away at our 'thing in a pub' on the same basis.  So, since may when we began that's a whole £36 - clearly enough for a decent sized vestry, I guess. 

I realise most of these people paid no more than a couple of thousand for their houses, but they have children and grandchildren in the housing market, and surely they see the news once in a blue moon.  I am a bit taken back at the total lack of a clue about costs, but if anyone can find me a nice church building in good working order for a couple of grand, please let me know!

As we sold our stored ancient Steinway piano for £1k this week, we are clearly well on the way to a nice new church...

In the meantime, one of the deacons is going to try to find out some indicative costs to inject a note of realism next time such things are said!

A couple of days ago I was talking to someone who asked me what I used to do before I was a minister.  He asked because his wife is a chemical engineer employed in water treatment and he knew I'd done something vaguely similar.  Observing that he thought his wife was anti-nuclear, he asked me if I would make the same choice of field given my time again.  It's a good question, and I think it cuts through the good/bad dichotomy towards something about being timebound.

I still remain convinced that, at this point in time, there is a place for a civil nuclear programme.  I may be in a minority, I may even be proved wrong, but that is my honestly held opinion.  However, if I was now 18 or 25 I doubt very much that I would choose that path, since the more future oriented paths are towards renewables.  It is a fact, that in terms of greenhouse emissions, nuclear energy is clean; it is also a fact that in terms of waste it has its own problems (though no one seems to get so bothered by car tyres, thermoset plastics or chemical wastes which present equally significant problems - my bias showing through here!).  It is also a fact that renewable sources of electricity are under-researched and under-developed; their environmental impact is not as yet properly worked out and we don't have anywhere near enough of them to meet our needs, let alone our wants.  Somehow or other we have to address this mismatch - and that could mean the radical decision to accept a very different lifestyle with less electrical/electronic equipment.  Less internet, less blogging - well maybe that'd be a good thing?!

The point is, though, not whether or not I'm right in my view; it's to what extent my views are 'timebound.'  My reading on historical methods last year raised this topic, something that emerged from the history of science.  Ptolomey's model of the universe was wrong  but that didn't mean he was a bad (poor or evil) scientist, it meant he was timebound.  Just because the likes of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein have come along since doesn't impact on the quality of his thinking or his integrity, it has just been superceded.

Is the same. at least to an extent, true for all of us?  The career choices I made at 18 and 25 were honestly made, based on a carefully thought out worldview (or as careful as any 18 or 25 year old worldview can be!) and I suspect that with the same choices and the same information I'd make them again.  They may have been 'poor' they may even have been 'evil' in someone's view, but they were mine.  If I hadn't been persuaded by God to follow the path I now do, I'm pretty sure I'd still be involved in some way in the safety side of the civil nuclear industry - possibly by now working for the regulatory body, and I would have done so with integrity.  But if I was 25 now, my future and knowledge would be different, and I think I would be more likely to opt for anorher industry.  That's not 'better' or intrinscially more 'good', it's just different.  Just because my decisions were timebound does not make them automatically 'bad' or 'good' just 'timebound.'

All this waffle - what is she on about?  I think I am wondering just how much of what we see as 'good' or 'evil' is 'timebound' - both in terms of chronology and our own 'life stage.'  Middle years are, allegedy, when we reflect and wonder - supposedly where narrow waist and broad mind swap places.  At 18 things seem clear and absolute, by 45 (or almost) questioning is becoming normative.  I am sure there are things which are 'wrong for all time' and 'right for all time' but the older I get, the more things seem to be in the murky middle ground.  Perhaps being the best equipped we can to make our choices is the key to balancing our timeboundedness with our integrity?

Today is pretty manic... just grabbing a few minutes between events to read emails and such like.  Got my work proposal off by midnight Myanmar Time (Google tells me it's the right number of hours ahead of the UK...) and made it to the Bright Hour 70th birthday service.

There was a nostalgia section to the service - recalling the early days, but not really saying very much at all.  Apparently a man used to go in early to light the boiler to heat the church and then light the fire in the upstairs schoolroom.  Sometime later someone known as the 'copper lady' would go into the washhouse and light the copper in readiness for making tea.  The chapel crockery was, so far as anyone could remember white with a coloured rim around the top, water was pumped from a communal pump shared with adjacent cottages and milk was fetched from the farm in a can.  Tea was bread and butter with homemade jam.

What was sad was the lack of anyone who seemed to know anything about what they did or who they were.  There were recollections of rallies with soloists and the ubiquitous (in this area) 'roll call' of churches and groups present but nothing that spoke of people or purpose.

As the women who began this meeting would have been contemporaries of my grandmother (who, had she lived, would have been 100 this year) I found myself able to imagine some of what they would have experienced, but am no wiser about what they actually did.  Did they sew and knit?  Did they pray?  Did they swap recipes?  Did they work for charity? I don't know, I'm not sure anyone else did either.

Psalm 71 was well received, along with my imagined old man playing his equally old harp and singing his praises to God.  The oldest person present was 99, but as an incomer had never been part of the Bright Hour.  I think I was the youngest, though there were a couple of others about my age, which made a pleasant change.

I don't generally like speaking to women's meetings, but this one always feels a little more alive than most.  They had a few men present, not just as chauffeurs but as welcomed participants.  Maybe there is life in the old thing yet.

After the service we had tea and scones, with the jam so thin you could pour it over the scones, and tea poured from an enormous, ancient pot.  The copper lady may be long gone, but her legacy lives on!

Will there be another generation of Christians who socialise together or meet for fellowship?  Will they, like the Bright Hour grow old together and find themselves slowly dying off?  Does this even matter?  Should each generation find its own level and do it its own way?  Is there anything new under the sun - will "Cell Groups" one day sound as quaint as "Bright Hour?"  Will someone tell of how people used to drive to someone's house, order take aways and sit on IKEA furniture in the way the Copper Lady was spoken of today? 

If, by some miracle, our 'Thing in a Pub' ever makes it to 70 years, what stories will be told of its early days?  What stories will anyone tell of us after we are gone?  And what about the neverending story of which we are a part...?

"Even when I am old and grey, do not forsake me, O God, till I declare your power to the next generation, your might to all who are to come."  Psalm 71:18 NIVi

Today I am short on time to get together a proposal for this year's DPT work.  This is bad news, I don't like being this close to a self imposed deadline and having nothing done.  A couple of weeks ago the ideas wre flowing nicely then a whole heap of important, interesting stuff came along and forced them out of my brain - and unfortunately not onto paper, literal or virtual.

I think that what I am wanting to dothis year has something to do with the hermeutical task of both reading and writing history.  My central, generic question for all of this is along the lines of 'what is an/the appropriate way of using historical documents in theological reflection' and my specific focus is 'Baptists considering the potential for change.'  I have to keep writing these down as they tend to get nuanced as I go along and there are always new and exciting 'side streets' opening up along the way.

This year's focus is on denominational history writing, and I think what I want to is probably two-fold:

1. To re-read key BUGB 'endorsed' texts to try to anser a series of questions:
   • What prompted the production of this document?
   • Who wrote it?  Allied to this, who commissioned/sponsored it?
   • When was it written?
   • What is included?
   • What methods or assumptions undergird the writer's approach?
   • Have primary sources or other references been identified - e.g.
     church books/minute books, press cuttings, denominational archives, etc?
   • What is the 'feel' and 'trajectory' of the document?  What is the
     document trying to do? 
   • Who is the target audience? 
   • Is it forward looking?
   • Does it endeavour to evaluate or simply to record
2. If possible, and following item 1 above, to interview or correspond with, some of the authors to explore their responses to (some of) the above questions and to compare the findings.

My feeling is that this would be valuable for various reasons:

1. It will help me to learn to read history in a different way - i.e. that I come to it with a set of questions that are not 'what happened in 1864,' expecting a 'gospel truth' answer, but actually 'what is going in the writing' as well as 'what is this document saying to me'
2. If it is possible to obtain responses from some of the writers, it will allow me to test out, to some degree, the degree of correspondence between their intent and my reading - connecting a 'real writer' to a 'real reader' and maybe allowing some picture of the 'perceived writer' and 'ideal reader' to be deduced?  (I feel a diagram coming on here...)
3. What I hope the work will do is then to begin to question how useful the history writing is for theological reflection - whether that might be on Baptismal practice, potential for change, atonement theories or anything else.   As a 'frinstance,' the 17th Century debate over singing of hymns affected both strands of English Baptists, with the majority of published rhetoric being by a couple of Particular Baptists, yet most histories report this as an issue affecting the General Baptists.  My suspicion is that the reasoning runs roughly thus: the General Baptists are seen as the heretics, and there is a suggestion that most of them slid off into Unitarianism, they are the 'baddies.'  In C20/C21 English Baptists cannot imagine not singing, even if we squabble over books, words, guitars and data projectors.  To acknowledge that we once squabbled over whether or not to sing is a tad embarassing.  So let's say it was the heretic Generals who didn't like it, then we have mentioned it but can distance ourselves from it.  I can't prove this is the case, it is my reading of someone else's writing - my hermeneutic if you like.  Setting aside, for a moment, this perceived distortion, the 'high level' histories don't seem to be much help understanding underlying thinking, it is necessary to go back to the dusty musty documents of the time - which of themselves are an incomplete and biased record.  This is fun for me, for not much use to normal people who have neither the access not inclination to dig them out.  The more practical question that arises is, I think, can we find a way of writng and reading history that is more than summaries but that actually helps us to think - history that 'speaks to us' that has 'light and truth' of how God's people wrestled with issues or situations in a way that does inform our present and shape our future?  All of this is a long way down the line, and certainly not this year's project.  For now, I think I have to be content with beinning to relate better history and hermeneutics along with a bit of literary stuff; thankfully this does connect back to last year's work on congregational studies, which as well, otherwise I'd be, in a word, stuffed!

Point 3 above should be more than one paragraph but I can't fathom out how to get this thing to let me do it so the formatting is right!  Sorry, I haven't finally learned how to write long paras.

Now the challenge is to turn this waffle into a workable proposal and email it north by midnight!

I am writing a reflection ( a short sermon I guess) for Sunday's harvest service using the BMS sermon outline as a guide, and getting cross with it!  Focussing on the land of Indonesia, still recovering from the tsunami three years ago - and now recent earthquakes - it talks about the beginning of psalm 46, God as our refuge and strength and then says this "the great mystery of God's power and protection is that it often remains hidden and unseen until a moment of crisis when it is powerfully there to protect us" and talks about some recent animated adventure in which a female superhero rescuses a family at the last minute from certain death.

This makes me cross because it isn't how I understand either God or faith.  God is not a superhero who swoops in to rescue me from trouble just as it is about to overwhelm me, rather, God is there in the midst of the trouble, strengthening me to face it - an ever present help in trouble, not out of it.

God is an ever present help... therefore we will not fear...

To me this means, because we believe that God is strong and ever present in our struggles to help us, we doggedly choose not to be overwhelmed by fear.  This is not the same as 'whoopee do, God's here, I'm not scared.'  No?  I am readily terrified by people and situations!  Even when I believe God is with me.  But because I believe God is there, I can face them, that's the difference faith makes.

A couple of years ago when reading part of Isaiah and the bit that says the Lord's servant will not be discouraged (sorry, I cannot recall chapter and verse and I'm not about to look it up to try to look clever) I recall realising that, for me, this didn't mean 'the LORD's servant won't feel discouraged' but rather 'the LORD's servant doggedly determines not to let things get on top of him/her to the extent that she/he is too discouraged to go on.'

Do I believe in miracles?  Yes, I do.  Do I believe in a superhero genie-in-a-bottle/lamp God?  No, I don't.

Because we believe God is strong and safe, always with us in the struggles of life, we choose not to be afraid, no matter if we lose everything in which we find security... "Desist!" shouts God, "I'm in charge" - this is the God who is with us.

There now, rant over, back to Sunday's reflection....