Some of my loyal readers have accused me of ranting about a certain type of electricity generation of which I suspect they disapprove.  Well, we are all entitled to our opinions and I respect yours.

More importantly there is an opportunity for anyone and everyone to have their say by completing an online questionnaire at the DTI website by clicking here: - http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/review/ and then using the button to choose the questionnaire.  Whatever your opinions, if the future of electricity provision in the UK or the health of the planet are really important to you, then take a few minutes to have your say. 

See, I can be reasonable sometimes ;-)

It seems this is the season for alternative worship songs to be blogged and for Biblical studies tutors to reveal their true colours (and the lack of hard work certain Baptist colleges south of, well Manchester really, clearly impose upon their students ;o)) with some entertaining and thought provoking stuff - lots of 'lol' as my texting officiandos would say; me, I just had a good giggle!  Should you wish to find them, try looking at http://www.christilling.de/blog/2006/02/winds-of-worship-4.html (also items 1, 2, 3) of basically the same format. 

For a slightly more serious look at exactly this stuff - though still with lots of laughs and some Sean-like 'scripture in song' try the little paperback 'And Now Let's Move into a Time of Nonsense: Why Worship Songs are Failing the Church' by Nick Page, published by Authentic Media in 2004 and available from Amazon secondhand for as little as £3.40 + p&p.

My own modest contribution is a version of 'Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty' altered to remove all vestiges of power langauge and gender specificity, making it suitable for worship in a certain context in a certain (now hopefully past!) era.

Our God is so [ ] so [ ] and so [ ] there's nothing that [ ] cannot do

The mountains are [ ] the rivers are [ ]  the stars are [ ] handiwork too

Our God is so [ ] so [ ] and so [ ] ther'es nothing that [ ] cannot do

i.e

Our God is so-so and so there's nothing - that cannot do!

The moutains are, the rivers are, the stars are handy works too but

Our God is so-so and so there's nothing - that really won't do! 

Since Sunday I have gained a lot of new perspectives - some more useful than others no doubt.

On Sunday we had our first official "date" with "Dibley + 1 mile" Baptist Church, joining their 6 p.m. service.  It made for an odd kind of a day - as I was 'working' but not taking an active role in service leading, it was remarkably relaxing!  After >30 years of regular church attendance always once, often twice, sometimes thrice, it was odd to experience a Sunday that would be 'normal' for >90% Brits in 2006.  It was very pleasant to get up late, spend the morning reading a novel and taking a stroll in the afternoon.  I began to see why people would need some convincing to give this up in favour of sitting in a draughty building for an hour or two listening to me waffle on about things like mission or God.  Alas several years of fitting meals around church service times meant I didn't ever quite know when to eat - the inverse problem it seems of some of my church folk who think service times should fit around their 12:30 roast and 5:00 high tea!

The service itself was interesting - not least as I had preached there one week ago.  The order I had chosen to ignore was back in place (so the reading was at least two hymns before the sermon and the intercessions somewhere in  between!).  A couple of my folk tentatively suggested to me that 'it was like going back two years'  and a way of seeing 'how far we've actually come'- I think that was a compliment!  The place was freezing but the welcome was warm and three of my people got 'mixing points' for deliberately sitting with people from the other congregation.  The after service cup of tea - something new for both congregations (revolutions in Dibley!) - saw a good level of mixing by folk from both congregations and the atmospehere was encouraging.

Within a couple of hours of getting home I fell victim to the latest Leicestershire lurgy and undoubtedly raised the revenue of Bowater-Scott whilst discovering a viable alternative to Atkins or the Tesco diets!  Having to leave a funeral (which thankfully I was not leading) to avoid keeling over was embarrassing - but better than the alternative!  However, I gained new insights into why ministers are never ill and why it has, in the past, been the right decision to preach dosed to the eyeballs with Beechams etc.!  My people very thoughtfully kept ringing to see if I was OK and offering pots of soup!  Aaaaaargh!  Good job I have learned to do 'gracious minister' responses.  When I had a "real job", being ill was a nice, private affair, meetings could go ahead without me, even if I was due to chair them.  Now I was expected to decide (from my sickbed!) whether a meeting I attend as a co-opted adviser should go ahead without me.  Hmm.  Minister as indispensible?  I hope not.  Now I am back at work I have a stream of emails and answerphone messages to attend to (more soup offers!) and wonder why I took the time off!

The time off, however, gave me a glimspe of day time TV (what else is there to do when you feel rough and reading a novel is too much like hard work?).  I now know that the three pyramids at Giza are aligned like the stars in Orion's belt, that the Spanish Inquisition lasted about 600 years and that the most popular word associated with pizza is 'mozarella.'  Apparently people north of the Trent in South Derbyshire are more friendly than those south of it in North Leicestershire (matter of opinion!) and a 1960's boat shaped bar thing fetched more at aution than a Troika vase.  Many of these programmes were repeats and some as much as 10 years old, so if you've been ill in the last decade you may have seen them too.  Is this really where life is at for those who don't work?  Is this the diet our senior citizens and those unable to find employment are fed?  Wow!  It certainly is a wakeup call for the churches to open our tired edifices, spruce them up and offer something better.  Maybe we could do cookery classes/demonstrations, host antique fairs or history talks?!  Perhaps people might even fancy a church service rather than the worn out cliches and puns of 'Bargain Hunt,' 'Car Booty' or 'To Buy or Not to Buy?'. 

I don't think I'll do 'ill' again  for a while - the catching up outweighs the benefits of recovery time - but it has certainly been an interesting experience with some new perspectives on life!

Well, I guess it had to happen eventually - my old life as a risk assessor and my new life as a Baptist minister finally find their link as I begin the process of developing a generic risk assessment tool for our senior citizen's lunch club.  It is quite good fun to use the old skills again, even if the context is a little different from the old days, and the consequences of incidents rather different (though one wonders how much the difference in outcry might be if we mislaid 50 senior citizens or released the odd microgramme of something nasty into the north sea... not a lot I suspect).

In the Johannine version of the feeding of the five thousand, the baskets of scraps are collected up so that nothing is wasted - the remnants of my risk assessing knowledge could well fill 12 large wastepaper baskets so it's good to find that they, too have their use.

When I moved here from central Manchester, it felt like moving to Dibley - and the manse has more than a passing resemblance to the vicarage in said fictional village.  Hopefully Geraldine Granger does not have to live with the fact that her gas fires have been declared unsafe and cut off, or a chimney that was described last week as being at imminent risk of collapse.  That said, my diaconate cannot quite measure up to the Dibley PCC, so we must be grateful for small mercies!

A vicar friend of mine often refers to summer weekends as 'cinema time' with anything up to four weddings and a funeral.  If that is so, this must be a reverse film fortnight, as it has seen four funerals and not even a hint of a wedding!

The result of the above means that not much energy has gone into much else, and having delivered two services literally back-to-back yesterday my brain is largely reduced to mush! 

I was using the lectionary readings from Deuteronomy 18: 9-20 and 1 Corinthians 8 as the basis for paired reflections looking at the balance of 'life in the faith community' and 'engagement with the communinty of which we are part.'

My own congregation began with an activity to list things they had been told that 'Christians don't do' and then I asked them why not - they realised they did not know (as expected!).  So we should not be knitting or sewing on Sunday, swearing, laughing at risque jokes, hanging out washing on a Sunday or gambling.  They seemed rather shocked when I told them I could make a Biblical case in favour of drinking alcohol and probably justify one against hair dye and perms!  And as for the fact that if I take the church table cloths to wash after a Saturday event they'll be hung out Sunday morning ...

Anyway, we used the Deuteronomy passage to think about life in the faith community and the need to engage with questions about life style, spiritual matters and so on.  The twin risks of foot-stamping, proof-text quoting legalism at one extreme and laissez faire 'as long as we love each other' at the other were identified.  We talked a little about occult involvement but focussed on the central theme of seeking God's guidance in matters of faith and life. 

The 1 Corinthians passage raised questions about understanding the culture outside the faith community and the need to respect the sensitivities of others and not simply assume they know what we know or think as we think.  What are the stumbling blocks we put in the way of people discovering a relationship with God through Jesus?  We identified the need to be culturally aware and to understand why, for example, alcohol, meat eating or head covering might matter to others.

We concluded by recognising the tension that must exist between seeking to develop our own 'holiness' (to pinch a Wesleyan word) and being gentle with those on the edges of faith community.  We are not to be holier than thou, thinking we've got it all sorted, but as learners oursleves, we need to be gentle with others, allowing God to challenge and change them (or us) if needed.  Got a few raised eyebrows at my illustrative scenarios but hey, that's the job!

The second congregation (at Dibley plus 1 mile) did not do the interactive bit but heard the same reflections.

I'm not too sure if what I said made any sense to either of them, but I found it helpful to reflect on these two lesser known passages and to see how my own understandings have changed over the years as I have better (I believe) understood the challenges of authentic discipleship and become less dogmatic in my views.

I'm not too sure what either congregation would have made of me ordering a pizza delivery when I finally got home on Sunday evening - but I can find at least two proof texts in my favour!!!