The Joint Public Issues Team (BUGB, Church of Scotland, Methodist Church and URC) along with the Scottish Churches Parliamentary Office have just released this resource to help Christians think through the big issues and make up their mind how to vote in the upcoming EU referendum.  It aims to be objective and does not endorse either viewpoint.  It is a relatively bulky document, yet remains very accessible and worth reading.  As you can see, Sophie Cat is already getting to grips with it!!

There is a meme thingy on social media inviting people to post seven nature photos in seven days.  It seemed like maybe a nice idea to share the same photos, and my reasons for choosing them, here.

This jolly puffin was photographed on Staffa in June 2011.  It was my first "AD" holiday and I was determined to make the very best of it.  To fulfil a very old promise, I was paying a return visit to Oban where 14 years earlier, with some friends, I'd been on a tour of the  distillery.  We made a pact to retun in 2011 to collect a bottle of 'our' whisky.  Times changed, but I remembered the promise and I returned... I expect the friend has long since consumed and forgotten the whisky, let alone its significance!!

One very special day of my holiday was the Mull-Staffa-Iona trip, and on Mull I chose to go puffin spotting rather than entering Fingall's Cave (not time for both).  This cheeky chappy is a wonderful reminder of a very 'golden' day at a time when I was beginning to discover what "new normal" might mean.  Almost five years on I can still recall the wonder of a day on which I saw puffins, eagles and dolphins.

Another nature photo, and another memory tomorrow!

Today someone steered me to this article from a Baptist church in the southern part of the USA that has remained in the SBC even when it would have been easier to leave.

They describe themselves as 'moderate Baptists' and seek to share a 'big tent' which is not a crazy circus, but a safe space in which a wide range of genuinely held theological understandings can co-exist.

I like the article and it challenges me. 

I like it because I think the 'big tent' (which can be as colourful as a circus Big Top without becoming the associated disaparging metaphor of disarray, noise and nonsense) is what we aspire to and, in some measure, achieve.  The willingness to accept that "I might be wrong", that our understandings are always ever only provisional, that "the Lord has yet more light and truth to break forth from his word", held within a conviction to Baptist principles of local autonomous authority within a covenanted connexionalism seems to be what this is about.

The article challenges me because I'm a wimp or a wuss when it comes to conflict.  So I had a bit of a "cue spooky music" moment when I read this article the day after drafting a sermon in response to the Letter to Philemon.  The sermon doesn't do what the article does, but it does hinge on how diverse responses to compex matters can each have value.

So, in my sleep deprived brain lots of little sparks are sparking - and that has to be a good thing!

This new website may or may not be of interest.  It is a collection of responses by Baptists to the statment at the recent BUGB Council on 'Same Sex Marriage'.  Many, but not all, the contributions are from ministers who have 'accepting ' or 'affirming' understandings.  Some contributors are gay, some are straight, some are married, some are single/celibate.  Some use their real names, some are anonymised.  All are committed to being properly "Baptist" in this and, indeed, other matters.  Whatever your own theological standpoint, it is worth reading these letters, reflections and stories from people who want to get it "right" in a way that reflects all that is good about being Baptists... and that isn't always easy.

Not afraid of elephants - and recognising that it isn't possible to eat one in a single bite!!

Tomorrow I will be one of three speakers at a little symposium type thing on Baptist History.  I will be speaking on the 17th century hymn-singing controversy among English Particular Baptists, and will end up with some of Benjamin Keach's most terribe doggerel, one sample of which is here:

Our wounds do stink and are corrupt,
Hard swellings do we see;
We want a little ointment, Lord,
Let us more humble be.

(Try singing it to Winchester Old (While Shepherds Watched) which is a tune that was around at the time - I have no idea of the tune originally employed)

Tomorrow is also Shakespeare's birthday/deathday, so by comparison here is what is allegedly one of his most overtly religious sonnets: