This is me trying to be nice minister, it happens occasionally.  It is also me trying not to leap in and take over.

Our children's club reached near meltdown tonight.  I was there in 'minister' capacity so not really in a position to do much other than stay calm and try to support all involved.

I am a good, if rather old-fangled, children's worker.  (Maybe that's why I use short sentences!! ;-))  But me trying to offer insights would not go down too well - they have been doing stuff almost as long as I have but with no training.  I am now looking for something, anything, that isn't GB/BB/CLGB/Covies/Campaigners/The-Organsiation-Formerly-Known-As-Crusaders/or even SU or Guides/Scouts for that matter.  Any ideas?  

Broadband is back - and without any outside interference, just a replacement router as something had gone 'phut' inside mine.  Mutter, mutter.

Anyway, last night went with someone from church to her daughter's school perfomance of 'We Will Rock You.'  She then told me she wasn't sure it was suitable for a minister's ears, which was mildly amusing.  There was a fair deal of inuendo which was lapped up by the 16-18 year olds in the audience, went straight over the heads of the few little children there and seemed a tad puerile (which I cannot spell) to this forty-something minister.

I was struck by the story line, with its messiah figure and some not very veiled biblical parallels - 'the living rock' and the search by the killer queen (Herod meets Cruella Deville) for the star that heralded him.  I enjoyed the mis-pronunciation of 'video tape' as "vi-day-o tap" and the crackly version of the Bohemian Rhapsody video that merged into the "Big Brother" title sequence.  There was some clever stuff going on here that made me think.  Perhaps the most significant thing was when one of the characters said 'our hope lies in the past' - resonating with some of what I've been looking at and thinking about from a history perspective.

At one point the cast called upon the audience to raise their hands and 'wave' along with the music - my neighbour turned to me and said 'just like Hillsong'... at which point I switched to 'lightbulb changing' and said 'not quite' but she did have a point... what is the real difference?

It was a good perfomance - even if it made me feel old because I was younger than any of the performers when 'Bohenmian Rhpasody' was released - and would have made a really good starting point for talking about some real topics around freedom, the meaning of life, globalisation and so on, if only a few church folk were a little less wary of taint.

A friend who works in IT tells me most queries are a PICNIC - Problem In Chair Not In Computer. Hmm.

My broadband connection has been down since Monday and I have made more phone calls than enough to the technical support people for my ISP (who evidently won an award for this...).

The 'troubleshooting' is a bit of a joke - 'is your router plugged in?', 'is the LAN cable connected' etc. After three variants on this, my query was 'escalated' which meant a 'senior technician' took 24 hours to confirm that my account was live and connected at their end... then asked me for the umpteenth time whether I had a microfilter, had a swapped it for another one and questions designed to make my patience get tested. They have now decided that the problem must be the line (never!) and have referred it to BT who will check the line in the next 48 hours or so.

In the meantime I have discovered that there are no cyber cafes in Didcot (where I was at a meeting yesterday) and not having a laptop I can hardly lug my PC to an open access wireless 'hotspot' so today I am back in Leicester drinking my skinny fairtrade latte and reading emails at £2 an hour. So while cyberspace is enjoying the peace and quiet, I'm feeling very out of touch with the world.

Blogging will disappear until broadband resumes... enjoy the escape from my drivel.

Monday morning 'blog-sweep' picked up this interesting post on 'wellness'.  It did make me pause for a moment in thinking about my own work - am I focussing on 'dis-ease' or 'church sickness' rather than health or 'wellness'?  I suspect the answer is 'yes and no.'

I am prompted in my thinking by experience of churches that 'could do better' - whose health would benefit from being improved, but I don't think that means I am being totally negative.  What I think I'm saying is that in undertsanding ourselves better - in this case by engaging withour past - we discover the latent potential to do things well, which is not a million miles away from the ideas in 'wellness.'

When I think about some of these 'seemingly opposite' ideas, I find myself reminded of the old debate between physicists (boo hiss) and engineers (hurray!) over centripetal and centrifugal forces, and my conclusion that it all depends which end of the 'string' you are at.  That along with the assertion many years ago by Professors Laithwaite and Thring that both exist and a jokey reminder of Newtons laws about equal and opposite reactions.  'Wellness' and 'Health' aren't opposite (nor does the post highlighted suggest they are) but the focusses on both what is 'good' and what is 'not so good' are, I think, important.

I suspect that in churches we need to be looking at both 'what is good that could be developed' and 'what is not so good that should be addressed.' 

I'm also intrigued by the way that 'emerging' and 'deep' church is looking at some of the same broad issues that I'm trying to explore in 'conventional church' - and wondering whether we'll come out at similar or different places.

Well, I am doing well for compliments at the moment!

In recent weeks I've discovered my services are 'sometimes strange but not boring' and that I 'don't look like a minister.'  Today after my visiting preach, I was told something I hear periodically from 'little people' in churches with lots of intellectual members - 'I understood everything you said.'  That is definitely the biggest compliment, the one that I cherish when all else fails: sometimes I feel I talk a load of old tosh, sometimes I'm not sure if the sermons actually go anywhere, but if someone feels that it's made sense, and they've been able to engage with it, then, yes, it's been worth it.

A strange but understandable service led by an unministerial minister - mmm, I think I like that description!!