As a member of a small church, I quite enjoy attending 'big' Christian events.  It is helpful to be reminded that the church is much larger, and more diverse, than my week-to-week experience of it.  However, I do sometimes wonder quite what is going on in them and where the line between 'large scale worship' and 'Christian entertainment' should be drawn.

Last night I went with a few of my folk to the second night of a local, annual two-nighter.  It was an interesting experience but left me wondering just how 'awesome' is the God some of those 'up front' believe in.  What follows is based on what I understood to have been said - apologies to the speakers if I misheard/misquoted them.

Right at the start there were some technical difficulties with the PA system.  The worship leader, strutting around the platform announced something to the effect that 'we're not going to let the devil stop us worshipping God.'  Is our worship really dependent on functional PA?  Is it really a satanic attack if, as I suspect, there is is a bad connection somewhere or a flat battery in a radio mike?  Is God really so weak that, depsite the prayers of the organisers, and their best efforts on the day, satan can sneak in and plant gremlins in the PA?  Actually, as the evening wore on, I began to wonder if it could insetad be divine intervention, but that's another story! 

Later there was an appeal for people to seek prayer for healing.  Individuals were asked, as I heard it, to lift their hands 'nice and high so God can see.'  Poor God, so myopic that it is impossible to see quite who the hand belongs to unless it is held high and probably waved too.  Heaven forbid that the wrong person be healed!  Don't get me wrong, I have no issue with prayer for healing but I would like to think I pray to a God whose is quite capable of seeing who it is who requires this.  What a tiny God it seems we were calling upon.

I am sure that both speakers would be horrified by my understandings of what they'd said, I am sure they do believe in the omni-everything God but I was left wondering about the relationship of the size of the event/church and the perception of God we express.  Maybe it is just that in my little congregation we don't need to worry about God's eyesight or the potential for satan to sabotage the hi-tech equipment we don't have?  I like to think not.

A friend of mine who works in the defence industry rang me in my capacity as 'tame vicar' to see if I knew the date of Easter for 2006 - so I looked in my good old fashioned paper diary.  Having provided this piece of information he asked if I had the date for 2007.  Being the boring organised soul I am, I have already got a 'next year' diary so I could supply this too.  When I asked why he wanted this information he explained that a colleague was developing a work programme that ran past these dates.  After a little scrabbling on my cluttered desk, I found my ASB (good Baptist that I am, I'll nick anything useful from other traditions) and supplied dates up to 2025.  I was amused that a work programme in the defence industry depended on the vagaries of a religious festival.

I decided to have a look on the web to see what resources there were for this.  Typing 'date of Easter' into Google brought up the website of the US naval observatory where it is, seemingling, a frequently asked question!  They also provide an algorithm to calculate it, though beware after about the year 4000 it'll break down!  Try looking at aa.usno.navy/faq/docs/easter.html or aa.usno.navy/data/docs/easter.html  Hmm, intriguing.  So why is it significant to the US navy?

For a more overtly Christian site, the diocese of Ely also has a calculator which allows you to choose Julian or Gregorian calendars and to travel backwards or forwards in time.  Have fun!!

Yesterday I was reading a history of the New Connexion General Baptists which explored the emergence, growth and decline of this movement prior to the union with the Particular Baptists.

Within the discussion, the author noted the difficulty of retaining subsequent generations within the movement and it got me wondering how many direct descendents of those Baptist 'giants' Spurgeon, Clifford, Taylor, Carey, Fuller, etc. (or even non-Baptist ones such as Wesley, Doddridge, Whitefield, etc.) are still actively involved in Christian churches.  I'm sure someone out there must have a clue.

Oh, and by the way I am a first generation Baptist!  If the theories are right, it is probably the "first generation" believers who keep the church alive as subsequent generations tend not to 'become' or 'remain' Christians.  Maybe this says something about our children's work and our attitude to mission?

Recently I have been leading a series of services looking at Ephesians.  When I was in my late teens I loved this book greatly but tended to understand it rather legalistically.  I also tended to avoid/ignore the stuff about predestination and the like as I didn't undertsand it.  I'm not entirely sure why I undertook to preach on it - seemed like a good idea at the time - but I am very glad that I did because I have seen it as through new eyes.  I still avoided the bits that Calvin undoubtedly loved, but found myself blown away by the wonder of what it was saying to me - to us - at this time.

One of the the key themes of the letter seems to be that of equality and unity expressed so eloquently in chapters 2 and 4.  But until re-reading and studying this time, I don't think I'd grasped just how radical this really is, nor how it needs to relate to other themes of the letter.

The whole 'mystery' thing seems to be highly relevant in our day and age with so many apparently on spiritual quests and the emergence of such things as 'Vintage Christianity'.  But what a mystery!  God's technicolour wisdom expressed through the lives of frail and failing human beings (Ephesians 3:10).  God's dwelling place as a 'work in progress' including the work of the prophets and the orignal apostles and now continued by us today.  Perhaps I am struck by this - or see this - because of the experience of my own congregation who have left the security of a permanent base to 'tabernacle' in the wilderness as we seek God's direction for our future.  God, it seems, chooses to live in a building site rather than waiting for a completed, beautiful Temple; and in the meantime this imperfect structure, scaffolding still in place, stones still being dressed and fitted in, somehow expresses God's Godness (no, I didn't miss an 'o' out of goodness).  Wow!

If this is right - and it seems to me that it is what the letter says - then my reading of chapters 5 and 6 must change.  Far from a legalistic reading that allows those 'inside' the church to set boudaries on who may be permitted, it becomes a way of understanding better something of the implication of the unity of Jew/non-Jew male/female slave/free.  The attributes to be developed are something we all aspire to - not something that those inside have sorted and those outside must achieve in order to get in.  Recognising this, glimsping something of the grace of God who is shown in our lives - complete with our constant legalism and failings - means looking again at our ideas about boundaries.  Chapter 5 with its guidelines on human relationships seems to recognise the double standards we apply of 'in church' and 'in the real (sic) world' - if we believe that all are equal in Christ then it affects the whole of our lives, not just what happens in worship on a Sunday.  The neat boundaries are further eroded as, like light, salt or yeast (hurrah for Matthew's gospel), we permeate and alter the society in which we live.

For us as a little church having had our security of a physical building removed, it is challenging and affirming to hear what Paul is saying.  Recently a lot of folk have been talking and blogging about 'sacred space' and ideas of temple and tabernacle.  This revisit to Ephesians has added to my thinking in all of this - and the language of mystery seems to offer hope to this non-sacramental heretic!  The building God inhabits is a 'work in progress', with Christ as both cornerstone, setting the direction of build, and goal.  With the unclear edges of any part-built project, the boundaries cannot be neatly defined and we are challenged to recognise ourselves as imperfect, yet somehow essential to the expression of God's wisdom.  It is our lives - our relationships - that form the building, the space, in which God dwells, so somehow God's trinitarian relationship is echoed in our communities.

A last thought in this verbose ramble - one of the commentators I read said that the word 'manifold' used in Ephesians is the same as the word used for the 'multi-coloured' coat in the OT Joseph story.  If this is so, and if the church is also understood as the body of Christ, then we, the people in our diversity form a technicoloured expression of God's wisdom - wow indeed.  The picture of Pavarotti Jesus (something to do with his beard and big sleeves) was our attempt to visualise/ground the mystery of our inter-related lives as the body of Christ, the dwelling place of God.

In recent months, many friends, colleagues and acquaintances have entered the realms of blogging.  I have enjoyed reading their stuff, left the odd, not very erudite, comment and finally given in to the suggestions that I should join the fun, so here goes!

One of the biggest challenges seems to be choosing a name for the site - some are witty, most are quite punchy, this one is just long (like my essays, reports, etc).  So why have I chosen it?  The logic is roughly as follows: -

• As a student in Manchester I used to spend some of my ‘free’ time sitting in the food court of the Arndale Centre drinking coffee and planning my essays on the serviettes kindly provided by Baker’s Oven, who also served a very acceptable bacon butty.  I guess there’s some sort of irony in considering ‘The Fourth Gospel and Anti-Semitism’ whilst munching bacon, but there you go, it somehow fits with my experience of life and the flavour of my ramblings

• If I’m in a coffee shop I tend to order Fairtrade lattes and, if the choice is there, will opt for ‘skinny’ in a forlorn attempt to keep the inches from settling on my hips!  Something about ‘skinny’ seems to fit the depth of these musings too.  That and the fact that a ‘skinny latte’ is an oxymoron – and therefore makes a suitable metaphor for the incongruities, “creative tensions” and enigmas of life and of theology.

• Food courts seem to epitomise early 21^st century life in Britain.  You could as easily be in the Arndale in Manchester, Fosse Park outside Leicester or any of a hundred other places.  You pick and mix what you want to eat/drink, watch people/TV/both/neither and in so doing discover all sorts of interesting – if irrelevant – thoughts whirling around in your brain.

• There is something fleeting, provisional and unfinished about eating in a food court – there are no proper edges, the food tends to come in paper or polystyrene cups (except from Costa or Baskin Bobbins) and the average dwell time must be around 15 minutes (excluding queuing!).  This seems to match my theological (and other) musings – ideas snatched from here and there, mixed together and enjoyed before the pressure of life moves me on to something else.

So this is it, a skinny Fairtrade latte in the food court of life!