I'm feeling a little sad this morning as I received a letter from D+1 saying that they cannot accept our proprosals regarding a merger.  They do not wish to close the door, and say that it may be possible to consider this again in the future, but for now the answer is, effectively, 'no.'

I am sad, because it offered a lot of exciting opportunities to do something new that built on the heritage of these two congregations.  I am sad, because maybe I/we expected too much of them in what we asked.  I am sad, because, humanly speaking, the consequences of the decision are not positive.

There is good news, the two congregations do now know each other better and have had a unique opportunity to think and pray about our futures.  On balance, hymnbooks aside, the shared services have been a positive experience.  It is good that a conclusion to the discussions has emerged, even if its content is disappointing.

There are consequences.  D+1 want to continue to share services on a monthly basis, but I feel that sends out a confusing message.  The whole purpose of the shared services at this frequency was the potential for merging - with that purpose gone, the emphasis shifts to one of shared friendship, and my own view is that quarterly services would express that better.  Something has changed; we cannot simply carry on as if it hadn't.

There are benefits!  A lot of time and energy has gone into the discussions, and sustaining this long term impacts on other ideas and opportunities.  At least if this pathway has reached its end, we are free to walk along others.

At a personal level it is a little unsettling.  I have a fairly clear view of what I believe is the task God brought me here to do.  With these conversations seemingly over, part of that task is done and, effectively, I have the first 'sign' that time  here is limited.  I had already felt that this year I needed to devote a lot of energy to handing over repsonsibilities to others if initiatives were to be sustainable longer term; now there feels a greater imperative so to do.

My memories of the settlement process may be tempered by time, and although I remain firmly committed to it, they are not pleasant - so I hope that God gives me enough time to get my head around it before I need to enter it again.

Exciting things are happening in Dibley & District and lots of changes are afoot - my prayer is that I will have the nous to understand what God is saying in it all.

Today I have been asked to take a 5 minute slot in a seminar at Baptist Assembly and I feel disproportionately honoured!  The seminar is the 'Small Churches' slot which is using a theme 'Being set free from/to ...' and I have been asked to share a few reflections on our experiences of leaving a building and the new opportunities that have emerged.

I think we have been set free to be a misisonary community, to be pioneers in a new experience of church expression in Dibley & District, and, surprisingly and in a positive way, to be the church people don't go to!

In our last church magazine I noted that we had been active in events and intitiatives that brought us into contact with around 500 people last year.  I do think that for some of them we are now 'the church they don't go to.'  Furthermore, I think this is actually positive!  Why?  Because prior to that many of them did not have a 'church they don't go to' but now they have us.  If the dear old BUGB recorded adult numbers on the same basis as it does children (i.e. all those who come to your midweek things) we'd be talking of about 50 more than our membership figures - so more than double our size.

Yesterday the school caretaker came to me before the service and asked if we could mention in our prayers a friend of his who had died the day before at the age of 34.  It has taken two years of general chit chat and a genuine interest in him and his wife, but we have reached a level of trust where he felt it was alright to ask.  I was privileged that we were able to meet his need to do something for his friend, and that he felt we were safe to approach.

During yesterday's service we covenanted together and received into membership our first new member for three years.

After the service we hung around drinking tea/coffee and chatting in a way that would have been inconceiveable even 12 months ago.

OK there's a long road ahead of us, and we don't know what it looks like, but by heck we've come a long way.

Set free?  You betcha! 

Oh, and my five minutes of fame will probably be around 4p.m. on the Sunday, in case you want to avoid it!!

The old hymn by George Rawson is one of my life long favourites, and the line above came to mind as I was beavering away on an essay today (now taking a break after it's taken 4 hours to get to the point of having 2k words on 'paper' albeit including an hour's planning and a bit of debugging software problems).

I have just finished a short section giving my working definitions for some of the terms in the essay - and deciding not to include a whole load more words that I will simply try to avoid using.

'English as she is spoken' within different academic disciplines coupled with multitudinous variation in everyday English leaves me very aware of the (BIG WORD WARNING) particularity, partiality and contingency of it all.  These were words I opted not to define, since I am probably the only person reading my essay who has even a vague clue about how scientists understand 'particularity', that the meaning of 'partiality' as either 'incompleteness' or 'biased towards'  would be evident from the context and that 'contingent' seems only to have one dictionary defintion!

Even so, the whole enterprise is crude (rough and ready, not rude or disrespectful) partial (incomplete and biased!) and confined (I may not have a word limit this time but the final version will).

Linguistics, semantics and semiotics (BELATED BIG WORD WARNING!) may be important research fields but they don't really help interdisciplinary communication very much.  Word games can be fun, and lots of effort goes into pun-laden witty titles for books, sermons and reports: trouble is that unless you speak the language and know the rules, it goes over your head.

The apostle Paul said he'd rather speak one word of plain speech than a whole lot of stuff in angelic languages (ace paraphrase don't you reckon?) - I wonder if academics and professionals need a 'go and do thou likewise' ?  Plain English crystal mark - I wish!

Still, if you have understood any of this it means (a) you understand the insider language of this blog and/or (b) you are incredibly intelligent.

Now 'let a new and better hope within our hearts be stirred: The Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth using words!' (Apologies to Rawson and others)

Every now and then I look at the 'detailed stats' that this blogging platform provides for me.  Not entirely sure why, but it is always facinating to find out which keyword searches have landed people here.

Those at appear fairly regularly include:

• 'kairos and chronos time'
• 'crowd mentality'
• 'rahab'
• 'northumbria community'
• specific lines from hymns/songs and/or song writers' names (especially 'our God is so big, so strong and so mighty' and 'Brian Wren' though not in the same search!)
• 'funeral' or 'wedding'

This month has seen 'Kez Lama' and 'Sean' with relatively high frequency, so be warned, someone is watching you!

It is pretty rare that I follow a Google search to a blog, and when I type in the search words listed above I never get referred here myself, so I'm not quite sure how it all works (or even if I want to).  I guess it is kind of gratfiying that people do read this stuff when they are looking for things on the web, that is afterall part of the motivation for posting it.  It's just interesting to compare what I might think is the more significant stuff on here with what the world at large thinks.

Today I spent around 7 hours on the road and managed to find two of the Little Chef outlets that had been closed on 3rd Janaury when the company was sold after going into administration (did you know this?  I didn't until I checked online tonight).  Whilst it wasn't the most amazing food outlet in creation, it was preferrable to MacDonalds, which I ended up at today and had a singularly foul cup of coffee.  Ah well.

I left home at around 6:30 a.m. and finally managed to park in Manchester (in the second car park I went to) at about 10:10 a.m. before running along Oxford Road (not a pretty sight (the location or my running)) to get to my meeting 15 minutes late.  Thankfully my kindly supervisors were understanding and gave me a cuppa before we got going on 'business.'  Late is not good for my stress levels, I don't 'do' late; it's a good job others are more laid back about it.  The homebound journey was far less horrendous, wasted 'stops' not withstanding.

It was a good, productive meeting, and I came away feeling that I do now have something adequately concrete to work on for the next 5 months.  For anyone who reads this and did the BA with me, I have managed to develop a three circle model for it, so honour is satisified (for those who taught us, one of our student secrets is not secret any more!).

It feels like getting to this point has been quite a long journey - metaphorically as well as literally - but I think that it has been worthwhile, despite the McCoffee and closed down cafes along the way.  Just a small matter of 12k words to  research and write by mid July...