Last night as I lay awake in the wee small hours (not an infrequent occurrence) I found myself recalling 'O' level physics with remarkable accuracy and setting myself the exercise of calculating how long it would take to heat the water in the portable baptistery from "flippin' freezin' " to "pleasantly warm"... answer - almost certainly longer than we have available, even if I neglect heat losses to ambient.  Good job, then, that the instructions come with advice to use lots of hot water (once you have got a few inches of cold in and can switch on the heater safely).

My guess is we have potentially 12-14 hours heating time, which with a baptistery of approximately 3500l will take some heating... At least we will get the chill off, even if we use totally cold fill, and I am planning on getting some hot in there by fair means or foul!!

Anyway, I leave it as an exercise to the student to calculate how warm you think the water will be on Sunday morning.  Assume specific heat capacity of water is 4200J/kgK, immersion heater is 4.8kW and water starts at approx 6C...

(I won't make you do the O level maths to calculate the volume of a dodecagon, you can assume it's a cylinder 2m in diameter and 1m deep and round down to allow for it not being totally full of water! Archimedes principle comes in too when you have to allow space for the people!...)

Things they did not teach you at vicar schoool number.... very large.

And proof nothing is wasted - never thought O level physics would come in for Baptist ministry!

I saw this today... it made me smile, it made me go 'hmmm' and I like it lots

This afternoon our portable baptistry, or at least the one we have hired, arrived.  I am so excited... like a child in a sweetie shop!  Seven big boxes all waiting to be opened to reveal their contents and everything we need for a fantabulous service.

So far, I am VERY impressed with the service from BaptistryUK from whom we have hired it... excellent communications by email and phone - they even contacted me this morning because they had been tracking the delivery and were concerned it had not yet left the Glasgow depot.  Opening the boxes to search for the instructions - illustrated, laminated - I discovered a roll of parcel tape and a couple of type-wraps ready for us to re-pack it all for the return journey.

A fun time will be had - by order! - on Saturday evening getting it all set up ready for Sunday.  And a wonderful service will follow.

Today we repeated an experiment we did this time last year... we explicitly combined our church meeting and morning worship so that each was part of the other.  I guess having done it twice, it is now a tradition...  The great advantage was that we had more people present for more of the material, and we all got away earlier than if we had a normal service followed by a meeting.  I think we probably also had some better quality conversations because we were a tad less exhausted!

It was good to meet and not make any decisions; rather we had some open-ended conversations to pick up again next time we meet.  There was no rocket science; no radical new ideas were shared... like any and every church we were simply revisiting perennial topics for a new season.

Next Sunday is so exciting (for me) I could almost pop... so watch this space, cos it is going to be a-may-zing!

I was recently asked to provide a photo of myself to someone who is collecting images of Baptist women  'firsts'.  Not exactly Miss Photogenic 2013, and not exactly sure what I look like anymore, I posted three possibilities on my Facebook page and invited my 'friends' to vote.  It was interesting to read the comments and reasons for choices, but the one they chose, and which will find its way into Baptist lore is this one:

It was taken on the day of my 50th birthday bash at church, and I like it because I am wearing some of favourite colours.  It's also not too formal but not too casual either.  Of course a more honest portrayal would be the dragged through a hedge backwards look... but no-one said it had to be honest!