It was a year ago today (to the equivalnt Saturday, not the date) that I sat in the office of the Dibley manse waiting and wondering what was happening in the Gathering Place.  A year since, on a sunny June day I looked out over a by now largely cleared site that had been the home of Dibley Baptists since 1875 (when they moved from the site they'd occupied since around 1749).

A year since, with trembling hand, I picked up the telephone to receive news from Scotland that would decide what the next chapter looked like.

A year on, of course, we all know that the outcome was, and I have now been in post for around nine months, but it is amazing how, even now, I can feel the tension in my muscles and the trepidation in my heart I felt then as the minutes ticked past.

It is good to pause for a moment or two and reflect on the last 12 months - a personal rather than a church-related moment, since it overlaps two pastorates in churches which, outside blogland, share the same initials (I am, despite everything, still the minister of _BC).

In the last year each of these churches has seen a lot of change.  Well established work has reached its natural end and new things have been tried.  Much-loved friends have died, others have moved on and new friends have arrived.  Once church is now numerically larger and the other numerically smaller; one has concluded a building project the other has one that rumbles on for the foreseeable.  One is a special place in my memory, the other my present home; both are part of who and what I am.

A year has whizzed by all too swiftly.  Good things have been achieved and mistakes have been made: such is real life.

Today the sun is shining brightly, and I am tapping away on my laptop in the comfort of my living room before deciding how to spend the rest of my day.  Tomorrow we celebrate our Sunday School 'end of year' in the morning and in the evening a gentle and reflective choir-led communion.  Between the two, Professor Werner Jeanrond (theology, Glasgow) leads one of our contributions to the West End Festival with a public lecture/debate entitled The Politics of Love. It will be a very busy day, a very 'Gathery' day, a very God-given day.

A year ago today, give or take, I felt a kairos moment occurred... and today its outworking continues.  No trembling muscles or butterflies today, just the assurance that I'm where God wants me, doing, as best I can, what God wants me to do, being, for the most part, who God made me to be.  So, on this 'kairos plus one' day it is good - and from deep within my soul cries 'Alleluia!  Praise God.'

This evening I went to see a play called Roadkill which is a powerful and moving exploration of sex-trafficking of young African women into Scotland, in this case Glasgow.  The format was original - we boarded a mini-coach outside the theatre and were joined by the central characters to travel to a tenement flat in a predominantly Muslim part of town.  The action alternated between the hall and one of the rooms and combined film and animation with live action.  It was not an easy watch, nor was it meant to be, as you sat on a sofa doing nothing as a young girl's innocence was stolen from her, and she was drawn into the world of prostitution.

As we left the tenement at the end of the play, it transpired that our bus had been vandalised (not an act!) which seemed to add something to the experience.  Various little knots of Muslim women stood in the street as fifteen white westerners left a flat which, for an hour or so, had effectively become a brothel were brutality occurred.  It was a quiet audience who disembarked from the coach back to the safety of our white, western lives.

This play was sponsored by, among others, the Scottish Refugee Council  to help raise awareness. The Christian organisation CHASTE (Churches Alert to Sex Trafficking in Europe) a few years back recommended films like Lilya 4 Ever and Sex Traffic which portray something not dissimilar, albeit confined to a small screen, and worth watching if you want to consider this subject (they aren't 'nice' believe me).

The play will be showing in the Edinburgh Fringe and then return to Glasgow.  Worth going to see.. but not for the faint-hearted.

NB certain words in this post mean it could attract undesirable comments, for which reason it will be posted with comments not allowed.

As part of my quest to find something useful to say during our 'animally' theme at church, I have been reading Creaturely Theology (Celia Deane-Drummond and David Clough, eds. London, SCM 2009).  It is proving a fascinating and wide-ranging read covering all sorts of diverse topics, and I am looking forward to reading the remaining few chapters.

It began with a summary of Aquinas' views on the created order, and a reminder that he had a relatively low view of humanity, as the lowest rank of creatures with intellectual ability (all the cherubim, seraphim and angels being higher) and assigning some sort of soul to all forms of life, human, animal or vegetable.  Of course, you need to know what Aquinas meant by 'soul' which wasn't the same as the popular 21st century western idea.  Plants had simpler souls than animals which were simpler than humans.

Other chapters focus on the frequent reference in the Bible to 'all flesh', remind the reader of Noahic covenant, which included the animals, and of the frequent references to animals (and plants and life-less objects) praising God.  Ideas of animal metaphors for God (something I had already planned to use in my preaching series) are mentioned and prompt questions about whether or how the Imagio Dei might be glimpsed in animals.

The chapter I've just read observes with regret that it is not people of faith who are leading campaigns against the intensive farming that sees chickens (the example the writer uses) kept in appalling conditions.  Somewhere along the line we have lost something very important in our understanding of what it is for us to be made in the image and likeness  of the Creator and have instead become exploiters.

All very fascinating and potentially quite challenging.

Will your geranium go to heaven?  Go and read Aquinas, then you decide!

Yesterday I went to a presentation at Glasgow University hosted by the chaplaincy and featuring two men form Nigeria awarded honorary doctorates for their work on mediation between faith and/or racial communities in some of the most violent parts of Africa.  You read more about the DVD they showed us here.

The story was an inspiring one, if far from unique, showing how two men from pretty conservative faith perspectives and each having been involved in religious militia had found a way to overcome their hatred in order to work for peace.  I'm not entirely convinced the nature of interfaith dialogue was clear from the film, though it was more visible in the Q&A that followed, nor did this DVD illustrate how the mediation or reconciliation worked.  A second DVD, not yet on sale, called An African Answer (here at time of posting) moved this on somewhat with an example from Kenya and showed how a racially (tribally) divided Christian community was helped to rebuild relationships.

It was an interesting session, with very personable speakers.  It has taken them around 15 years to reach the trust they clearly share... this has been no quick fix but a long and sometimes painful process.  I couldn't help feeling that the images that most powerfully illustrated what had been achieved were those of the two wives.  The pastor's wife with bare arms, legs and head wearing fairly low cut top walked hand-in-hand with the imam's wife, whose sparkling eyes peeked out from head-to-toe black clothing.  Neither had compromised on her beliefs or practices but each had learned to love the other.

I'm not sure I learned anything new about dialogue or about reconciliaton, but it was good to see it in action.

This morning it has been quiet enough to do some reading that is way, way overdue, so I've been reading about the history of reading, which is important for my dead-slow-and-stop research.  If I have no clue about the context into which 17th century writers wrote, how can I reclaim their work for the 21st century readers?  It has been useful to revisit stuff I sort of learned in school about Gutenberg and Caxton and the impact of the printing press on the availability of material and the seeming voracious appetite people had for the printed word.  The information explosion that resulted - with the loss of control over content, interpretation and verification - sounds not dissimilar in impact to the web.  Pirate publications (those published without authorisation) seem to have abounded, quite whether these were dodgy copies of legitimate works or dodgy works in the first place, is less clear from what I've read, but some sort of early Del Boy could probably have offered you a cut price copy of the Bible - such as the 'wicked Bible' or 'Baskett' translation I recall from my teenage GB project on Bible translation!  No doubt publications in plain covers were sold in shady alleys, whilst other people tutted and wondered what the world was coming to.

One of the big concerns for the 'powers that were' was that the masses might form their own interpretations of scripture that differed from the official, received wisdom... including those pesky Baptists, it has to be said.  For all that, the apparent practice of communal reading, without following along in your own copy, finds resonance with the way I am led to believe base ecclesial communities in part so Latin America approach the Bible, and which liberation theologians especially try to encourage western churches to do.  Even though I love preaching, and the challenge of finding something new to say week by week, the absence of a communal engagement with the text can reduce the sermon to little more than received wisdom in a society where views on authority no longer reflect that practice.

There is obviously a tension between reducing readers or congregations to passive recipients and leaving people to read ancient manuscripts with no guidance whatsoever.  So how do we take things forward?  Quite a few churches I know 'down south' are moving away from the book-led guided Bible study (such as Lifebuilder series) to a more open-ended approach where people are free to ask questions or discuss things that arise for them.  This carries a lot of risk, at worst it becomes the peddling of ignorance and the 'paper-doily-ing' of the Bible whereby hard or scary bits are cut out and cosy, fluffy bits embraced.  But at best, it allows 'more light and truth' to emerge.  A couple of years ago, I was at a ministers' conference where such approaches were discussed and it was suggested that prior to each meeting one member of the group should do some research using commentaries on the passage(s) chosen in order that she/he could act as a knowledge-pot (my word) to help handle questions.  Certainly this seems helpful, though of course she/he is limited by their own choice and interpretation of materials - there is no absolute position.

So where does all this go?  Even I the last couple of years I have attended Bible studies (so-called) which consisted of a leader working verse by verse, or even word by word, through a passage and telling her (the leaders were always women!) hearers what it meant.  For these folk, the move to the guide-book approach seems a massive and helpful step forward; and certainly over the years I've made use of many such books.  Many folk who've used the books for a while realise they probably know all the 'right' answers to the questions and want to dig deeper: 'I know the answer is 'love your neighbour but...' kind of thing. Courage to depart from the list of questions and willingness to leave some questions unasked allow people to explore more deeply the questions that are real (and don't go back next week to 'finish it off'!).  From this in time emerges the confidence to engage directly with a text, in all its complexity, to live with questions that find no satisfactory answers, to allow 'more light and truth' to emerge from the familiar and to grow up in our discipleship.

This autumn I am due to start a new Bible study group with a disparate set of disciples.  One of the questions I need to explore between this and then is where they might be on this 'spectrum' from passive to active, and how confident or comfortable they are to move along it.

The 'reading revolution' begun by Caxton et al didn't really happen overnight anymore than the 'IT revolution' of our day; as I ponder the practical implications both my church and my research I do well to remember that.