This week, finally, the church prayer diary was reissued - it's only taken 6 months since we 'approved it.'  I don't really care for the wording at the start - it is pious twaddle in my view... 'pray for these people/organisations on the date specified and on other occasions as the Holy Spirit leads.'  It sounds ever so holy but what does it really mean?  Pray when you remember I guess.  Still, it is overall an improvement as we do now pray for the local community - schools, businesses and so on - as part of our cycle of prayer.

It got me thinking about the huge pile of prayer diaries that occupy my prayer time - BUGB, BMS, TLM, NBC, SU, Tearfund... Did I miss any?  Hope not!  They vary wildy in their style and, well to be frank, usefulness.  I am often asked to pray for so-and-so on the XYZGP&F committee, not that I know what this committee does, or the role of so-and-so within it, but pray for them anyway.  I get asked to pray for Anytown Bapist Church in the Somewhere-or-Other Association but without knowing if this church is small or large, inward or outward looking, let alone its needs (nice idea to pray for 365 Baptist churches, but not very helpful just to have their names and need my direcotry to find out anything about them at all).  I get asked to pray for You-know who and their family working You-know-where.  The least bad diaries offer a bit of information about the situation and identify some specifics for prayer but on the whole it is hard to pray more than 'God bless you, every one.'

So what should I do?  Abandon the diaries all together?  No, they act as a good reminder to pray for these organisations/people.  I guess I use them as creatively as I can, not always praying exactly as guided and sometimes praying as much for wisdom in my reading as for the requested topic.

Does anyone have any good advice in this area or have you just abandoned the diaries as a disaster? 

This week I get to lead two Lent meetings.  Tuesday lunch time we conclude Can We Build a Better World? the series based on the story of William Wilberforce.  Wednesday evening is the final part of our ecumenical one using Life Source exploring prayer; this week 'prayer as caring' which seems to me to cover both intercessory prayer and life as prayer, and suggests a clip from the film Dead Man Walking.  I tracked down the DVD via Ebay, and then via Amazon the book and its more recent follow up Death of Innocents.  Although the books are very informative they get a bit repetitive, so you need to be determined to keep going, especially if as I've done you try to read them in about three days.  You also need a strong stomache to deal with some of the graphic descriptions, so be warned.

What emerges clearly is the link between poverty,edcuation and race to being executed under US law.  If you happen to be of African-American extraction you are likely to be poor and unedcuated, therefore more likely to face 'cruel and unusual' punishment.  If you are African-American you are also more likely to be descended from slaves - the ugly legacy of slavery continues to this day.

It is good that we are commemorating the work of Wilberforce and others, good that the C of E is recognising its part in slavery (would be good if other denominations were as honest), but if we don't recognise the immense legacy of past slavery and act to address that, then it all becomes idle talk.  Helen Prejean is quite clear that murder is wrong, that some sort of appropriate legal redress is needed; she is also clear that killing achieves nothing, noting the irony that the death certificate of an executed prisoner in the USA will read cause of death: legal homicide.

Reading all this, and pondering it, in the run up to Easter is challenging.  A couple of thousand years ago the execution for blasphemy of an itinerant preacher changed the course of history.  Crucifixion was barbaric, but no more so than a decade or more on detah row waiting for someone to decide when to kill you.  I guess people can speculate what God might have had there not been a death penalty under Roman Law, or get into 'angry God beat up Jesus to save us' arguments.  It's an incredibly complex topic - beyond my brain on a Monday morning when I ought to be phoning the water board to get the chapel water suply cut off - but I'm glad that as I approach Holy Week I do so with a renewed sense of the horror of human inhumanity.

PS if you want to find out more about Helen Prejean go to http://dpdiscourse.typepad.com/sisterhelen/

Radio 2 listeners will know that around 6:20a.m. every day Sarah Kennedy shares with the world  'religious news' gleaned from the press - it is often pretty negative, even contradictory.  Today we had Archbishops Williams and Sentamu on the need for the C of E to offer apologies/make reparation over slavery and a piece in the Telegraph entitled 'Believers are Away with the Fairies' (here).  The arguments seem quite tired to me, though the title was vaguely amusing; even the speakers in the debate seem predicatable (here) but obviously it is a debate attracting lots of listeners - and that must indicate that the question of the relevance of religion is relevant, if nothing else. 

Next Sunday I have services at Center Parcs (morning) and home (afternoon) which are loosely based on some Scripture Union material from their resource book Easter Cracked.

The talky bit is meant to divide into two parts - who was there at the first Palm Sunday, and who is at this Palm Sunday.  In each case three "groups" are identified...

This got me thinking a bit about the characteristics of each group, and in particular about donkeys.  The SU theme is a nice neat 'service' motif but I felt that was not terribly inspiring.  What about the untried/unbroken state of the colt?  What about the reputation of donkeys (and mules) as stubborn?  Was there mileage in these?

Someone I mentioned this too, said, "hmm what about Donkey in Shrek?"  Good point!  What about Eeyore too?  I am, I think, looking forward to a slightly playful service in which these characters will make cameo appearances as we ponder something of what Palm Sunday says to us in 2007.  Watch this space!

Today one of my lay preachers was taking our service; the fact that I was there, and had always intended to be there, caused some confusion, people having assumed it was one for my free Sundays, rather than, as is the case, my desire for these folk to serve us now and then rather than only preaching in places where they get paid.  Also, I feel that I have a repsonsibility to them, and to other congregations, to be sure that they aren't too far off the rails in what they are saying.

The preacher who led today is very experienced and is a competent speaker.  That she was married to minister shows in some of her language, that she has not had any training shows through in other ways.  Nonetheless, I am more than happy that she leads worship, even if she did inflict on us a set of fairly grim hymns from the red book.  Some people loved them - old tunes with proper harmonies remembered by those who once sang in the church choir did make it a pleasant sound, even if most of these hymns were last sung in nineteen hundred and frozen to death and I struggled to connect them to the theme of 'ordinary people'.

I have no problem with old hymns, some are truly inspiring and timeless, others would be better consigned to the waste bin.  I guess I can say I learned a cople of new songs today - just that new meant 19th century! So the red hymn book struck back - until next week when Palm Sunday will mean a real blend of old and new all on screen or large and giant print sheets.