Today we took our lunch club on an outing to Cambridge, and had lunch at the church where I preached with a view unsuccessfully four years ago.

It was a good day out, even if the coach driver seemed incapable of grasping that the best way from Dibley to the A14 is via the M1.  Ah well.  Some interesting leafy lanes made a pleasant, if over-long journey.

It was good to see the folk in Cambridge, and I was touched that one former deacon made a special trip in to see me.  They did us proud with lunch, making the room very welcoming and accommodating the countless foibles my people have - including one or two that turned out to be fictitious.  Slightly odd to think that that might have been my church had things worked out differently but an awful lot of water has flowed down the Cam since then.

I spent the afternoon wandering around Cambridge with the lunch club co-ordinator and two folk who had come alone and had not been gathered up by any of the friendship groups.  Walking at dead slow and stop is not my greatest gift, but I managed it, and we were able to give these folk an enjoyable afternoon - which was what it was all about.

Cambridge is a beautiful city, and I will always believe that I was called to minister there, but I have no regrets that I ended up where I am.  The unlovely folk on the margins of anywhere need our love and support, and in some small measure we are able to do that here.

As I walked home fom the coach drop off point, a man (not part of the club) who can be abusive and rude called me over and told me he wanted to join our church.  Part of my heart sank, he is a very difficult person to deal with, yet this is what we are called to do.  There are some of our unlovely people I find it quite easy to love, and I'd spent the afternoon with one of them.  Now I need to find it within me to see this other man as Jesus sees him, a man who perhaps is lost and desperately seeking to be found.

I got told off by one woman because I didn't say grace after the meal as well as before it; some of our church folk don't really see that me spending a day on an outing is 'work;' the niggles are always there.  But this is what we do, and with God's help, we go on doing it. 

Just got an email from a friend who started their ministreial training a year before I did.  They have just received their degree result - a 2.i - for which they have worked very hard.  The scary thing is that it is longer since I finished mine than I took to complete it, and hearing this news just made me aware how much I've forgotten since then.

According to Glen (in a very blokey post) there are droves of new Baptist ministerial students this year.  In my year, with an intake of 4 (I think) I was the only one on the BA and there was only one in the year above me... things change it seems.  He poses some interesting questions, but the kaliedoscope metaphor was mine first (even if I nicked it, so far as I recall, from someone called Minear!!)

Julie echoes some of my own feelings on the gap that ending college study creates for some of us (perhaps why I'm nutty enough to do this doctoral stuff...) and the tensions that being a theologian (of sorts, in my case) and a minister bring.

Not sure this really goes anywhere, but congrats to those who have just completed their degrees and every blessing to those just starting out.

Tonight the lunch club committee met.  As church committee meetings go, it isn't too bad, it is small, low key and a reasonable level of banter.  We were talking about how to develop the work it does, in particular how to strengthen the links with the worshipping community.  At the last Church Meeting someone suggested a lunch club service - something that sounded fine but we hadn't a clue what they meant.  We came up with a couple of ideas that I think have good potential... twice a year we could have a 'Songs of Praise' service followed by tea and cake (or tea, if I can convince them...) to which we invite the lunch club folk...  and twice a year we could up sticks and take our service to the sheltered housing complexes and take tea with us.

I find these ideas quite exciting because they make the boundaries more fuzzy between the two groups, avoid the threshold issues of coming into "church" (even if its a school hall) and actually means we engage with each other.

I will be praying between now and Thursday that the church give us the green light...

Today was last week's day off, well almost, I had to do some urgent admin this morning and have a meeting this evening.  But I did get to spend the afternoon lying on the settee reading most of 'Gilead,' a novel that many people have been raving about for a while.

To be honest, although I'm glad I've read it, for me it didn't set the heather alight.  Perhaps I didn't "get it."  Although I found bits that resonated or that I found quite clever, it didn't excite me the way it seems to have done others and certainly wouldn't find its way onto my 'must read/recommend' list.

One thing I might think a bit more about - because it intrigued me - was the paralleling of the Ten Commandments with the start of Genesis.  I'm sure lots of people have already thought long an hard about this, but I haven't!

It's not a case of disliking the novel, it was a perfectly acceptable read (and a relaxing way to spend my afternoon!).  I wonder if, perhaps, because it had so many recommendations I had too high hopes for it?

Whether this just demonstrates that I'm a literary philistine or that my taste is widely different from others, I have no idea.  As something to read for relaxation, it worked well, and as I will soon have to get back into reading for research purposes, I'm glad I got the chance to complete it.

As part of our service today, I gave out some bricks I had found lying around the back of our defunct building.  I had assumed they were Victorian and of no great value (about 10p each) but opted to check with the deacons before giving them away.  No one raised any objection, but one person informed me that they were specially commissioned bricks (an unusual size) and worth considerably more than 10p each.  I mentioned this to the person who helped me cart them from car to school hall.  "Rubbish!"  he said, "I made them when I worked at the brick works, they are machine cut imitation Victorian hand made bricks and worth absolutely nothing."  Seemingly they were destined for the tip and the brick yard let him take for the chapel, where they might be useful one day.

In a sense this fitted all the better with the service - that which the brickyard seems worthless is valuable in the service of God (if only a visual aid!).  Hopefully people heard the message that whilst we might feel as old and worthless as crumbly, dirty old bricks, the Temple referred to in 1 Peter is built of us.