Plans for Baptist Assembly are drawing together, it seems, and one of the 'Special Interest Groups' is that of 'Small Churches' - nice irony as we account for the biggest number of Baptist churches and last year there were over 200 of us at the seminar!

Anyway, the ambitious plan is as follows (though final order is to be agreed)...

Introduction – Ruth Wood

Free from buildings – Catriona Gorton

Free to be different - Nigel Williams, Sandra Thwaite and Ken Walker

Free to die – Sheila Martin

Free to give – BMS representative, as arranged by Carol

Free to be – Carol Murray

An observation - isn't it funny, proportionately, how many women serve small churches?  I'm glad there are a couple of blokes involved but do wonder how a group of three will speak in the allocated 5 minute slot!

Some interesting titles and, whatever size your church, you'll be very welcome to join us (I think on Sunday afternoon but that isn't final yet either!!).  See you there.

A leap from Palm Sunday to Low Sunday bypassing Holy Week - that will be the case for most of my congregation this year - less than half are coming on Maundy Thursday, maybe half a dozen on Good Friday and only four on Easter Sunday (I know this I had to sumbit numbers to the host churches!).  Yesterday as I offered words of blessing and 'sent them out' it was with knowledge that I wouldn't see most of them for a fortnight.  I am, as I have already posted, very saddened by this, but how can I deny tired, busy people their holidays just because I feel they are missing out by missing Easter?  Let's face it, most people missed Holy Week the first time around and most who were there didn't 'get it.'  What's actually changed?

Last night tired after a long day I had a phone call that broke through my depsond.  A 'shut in' couple who look to us for some kind of pastoral support in crisis, rang to ask if I could take communion to them 'as close to Sunday as possible.'  Although I have managed to fill Sunday morning - I am leading intercessions for the Methodists at 8 a.m. and overseeing little girlies at 10:30, it will be good to actually lead a short act of worship for people who really want to mark Easter.

On Low Sunday I am using the Emmaus Road story (much as I love Thomas, I've done him rather a lot) and linking it to some vision stuff from Isaiah and Revelation under a loose (and well worn) title of 'Easter People in a Good Friday World.'  Flicking through my very tatty BPW, I fund a song that seems to fit with all of this - I have never sung it and it is of a meter that means I can't readily pick an alternative tune - somewhere in the Low Sunday service it will fit in: -

God is hope, and God is now!

Hope, despite distress and darkness

War and famine, woe and fear;

Hope though hearts are sick with sorrow,

Hope afar, yet richly near:

Heart rise! Your faith avow,

God is hope, and God is now,

God is hope, and God is now!

 

God is hope, and God is now!

Hope not only for tomorrow –

Death defeated, heaven won –

But for present needs and graces,

Ours today through Christ the Son.

Spirit-wrought, we know not how,

God is hope, and God is now,

God is hope, and God is now!

 

God is hope, and God is now,

Hope for earth, and hope for heaven,

Hope not meant for us alone:

Then to all God’s human children

We must make the gospel known.

Up, my soul, make good your vow –

Take God’s hope, and share it now!

Take God’s hope and share it now.

 

Margaret Clarkson (b. 1915) (c) Hope Publishing USA

Palm Sunday and I had two services to take - Center Parcs, congregation of 7, Dibley BC congregation of 25.  Two very different places but the same sermon each time.

I do not how it is some people get 50 adults and 20 odd children when they lead worship at Center Parcs whilst I get a handful of adults, but I do know I like leading worship for people who are there because they REALLY want to be there. Only one person knew any of the songs I'd picked and we abandoned one without even trying it, as me playing the piano and singing solo is just toooooooo awful to contemplate.  Interestingly, this time everyone came alone, their families all being busy doing other things, and one man had to leave early to go to a laser-war game (discuss...!). They sat with the duty four chairs gap between them and no one ventured onto the front row.  They were an interesting mix - a Gideon from Staffordshire, an Anglican from Runcorn, two RCs - one from West Midlands and the the other the Philipines, and the rest unspecified from, among others, Weston Super Mare.

The first person to arrive was a woman in her 60's, who was obviously a bit wobbly.  She told me that she was on holiday with her children, that her husband had recently died and that she could not believe it was Palm Sunday.  Eeyore was her way in to the service.  When I pulled him out (6p plus P&P from Ebay for a BIG Eeyore!) we shared his characteristics - though rather than 'gloomy' I said he was 'sad,' that life was not easy for Eeyore.  As the service progessed, I noticed her gaze keep returning to him - yes this sad, lonely little donkey was valued by Jesus, and so was she.  She didn't have to be happy if she wasn't, it was OK.  Other people perhaps related to Shrek's Donkey (another Ebay bargain), or some other part of the sermon, but I was glad I'd taken Eeyore with me; he was there when he was needed.

Back home and it was a fairly typical Sunday turnout, though we saw the return, after illnesses, of a couple we hadn't seen for about 3 months (we'd been to see them, they just hadn't been to church) and quite a few regulars were away.  For various reasons, I'd wound up having to set out comunion, send someone to get bread, get the micorpohones to work, operate PowerPoint and preach.  Somehow I had got some of my slides out of sink with the order of service, and then lost part of a Psalm - it wasn't a great start!  Even so, the service went well and I think most people heard a message of encouragement - that whether 'donkeys, disicples or ordinary people' they were an important part of the story.  People enjoyed the donkeys, they recongisned Donkey and Eeyore and seemed quite ready to tell me their characteristics.

I guess this was not the most deep and meaningful Palm Sunday sermon preached this year, and Jim Gordon gives a far more profound reflection on the donkey here, but it did seem to me that being able to recongnise that Jesus chose a donkey - loud, talkative, stubborn, gloomy, unhappy, untried... - allowed people in various life experiences to feel included in Palm Sunday today.

So says Rowan Williams on page 2 of Why Study the Past: The Quest for the Historical Church.  It's only a little book and it doesn't use hard words, but I have to concentrate to read it!  I'd say it oozes Williams - I can hear him saying it as I read it - and like so many other people he had all my best ideas before I did.

He helpfully (for my purposes) links the writing of history to change.  Page 5:

"When you sense that you cannot take it for granted that things are the same, you begin to write history, to organise collective memory so that breaches may be mended and identities displayed."

 

One key theme that runs through Christian history, he asserts - and I think I agree - is that there is both change and continuity.  People in the past times are not, as he keeps reminding his reader, twentyfirst century folk "in fancy dress," we cannot simply assume that they thought like we think or that we can recapture their world, nevertheless, whenever a Christian undertakes to study the work of past Christians, there is a connection as members of the Body of Christ, fellow participants in the Eucharist and prayer, who read the same scriptures and in whom the same activity of grace is at work.  In other words, overt or not, the 'God-factor' is part of the process, part of what shapes the work - one of the constraints if you like, upon the student.  Page 28:

"For the historian who has theological convictions, [the] challenge is to discern something of what is truly known of Christ in the agents of the past"

"What we are attending to is the record of encounter with God in Christ"

 

That all recorded history has an aim, plot, trajectory, is as true for Christian history as any other type, page 23, "To relate the story of the Christian Church is always - at least for the Christian - to look for a 'plot' in the record."  By choosing some examples he illustrates this - Eusebius has a theme of suffering and vindication, Bede a battle between the true church and the false church, the writers of the Reformation a need to reconstruct the truth from the original sources of the Fathers (rather than as mediated through Rome).

Importantly, "[h]istory will not tell us what to do, but will at least start us on the road to action of a different and more self-aware kind, action that is moral in a way it can't be if we have no points of reference beyond what we already take for granted." (Page 25).  I think he is right, it is by engaging with an 'other' whether that is someone/thing in the past or a different viewpoint in the present that our thinking is stretched and we begin to understand better why we are as we are, and are open to be transformed ever more into the image and likeness of God.

Now I need to go and read chapter 2!

With apologies to GBS.  And I've probably only got it until it all slips away again later on today!  'It' being an insight into just what it is I think I'm wanting to research...

OK, so here goes...

I am undertaking an exercise in Practical Theology, which is a wide-ranging and diverse discipline.

Within that discipline, I am undertaking an exercise in the field of Congregational Studies, an area which is also multi-faceted and complex.  One essential ingredient of, or motivation for, all Congregational Studies seems to be the issue of 'change' whether internal or external, chosen or imposed.

If I accept the typology of Guest, Tusting and Woodhouse, which is far better than anything I could come up with in the time available, I am working mainly in the area of Church Health - enabling churches to handle change more effectively/successfully, which is a form of 'Extrinsic Congregational Studies,' i.e. one that seeks to identify general principles that are broadly applicable rather than something specific only to one congregation.

HOWEVER

I am looking to introduce historical resources (Church History as conventional 'umbrella' field in theology) as a tool to aid reflection.

In order to do this, I need to gain an understanding of the hisotorical task and how it has developed and changed over time, spefically learning from contemporary historiographers.

This is turn raises questions about what kinds of historical resources might be more or less helpful to the process, and how suited those which are available may be.  For example, many people access their history only by secondary rather than primary sources, which adds layers of interpretation of which they may be unaware.

Further, my focus is on English Baptists, and so is in some senses a more 'Intrinsic' approach in so far as what is deduced is of value even if it speaks only within a Baptist context.  If there was a spectrum from 'Extrinsic' to 'Intrinsic' I guess it would be somewhere around the middle.

Within the 'Intrinsic Congregational Studies' sub-division the work of such people as Hopewell or Becker resonates with some of the work on historiography and helps secure the otherwise tenuous link.

What will hopefully emerge at the end of all this is a greater understanding of 'how a knowledge of the past can inform our present and shape our future.'  This will, of itself, raise lots of questions, e.g. the 'authority' of non-canonical historical resources (be that Biblical or Baptist canons!); the writing of 'God' into or out of history; the local/universal nature of what is found, etc. etc.  Overall, I think it's likely that it may help to address an apparent gap in much practical theology which is very much 'of this moment' or at least in relation to the very recent past.

By this time tomorrow, I will probably have lost it again, but for now, I think I can see a glimmer of a 20 minute presentation emerging from this waffle - and if I can't I'm sunk!