The current in-phrase in BUGB so cringe if you must.  Twelve pages of ideas and intitiatives that churches - large and tiny -  have been up to, to provide cross-over between church and not-church (two-way traffic), including dear old Dibley.  If you know which one is Dibley, enjoy but don't name them if you comment here - their privacy within wider blogworld is to be respected.

Check it out here

Seen today on a poster advertising an upcoming mission to Dibley and District:

Thursday: Grill a Christian session, lunchtime in the cafe

Would you like sauce with that...?

Thus spake the secretary of D+1's women's meeting when I rang her to confirm the hymns for tomorrow's meeting where I am covering for the scheduled speaker who broke her ankle (a bit desperate as a means of avoidance really...).  Not really what I wanted to hear when I had decided to recycle my prodigal son narrative from a few weeks back, have two services still to write this week and am frantically rewriting and editting for word count (my nemesis/bete noir/something or other) a paper which I have to post on Friday.

So, I think I'm going to ask them what their favourite Bible stories are and take it from there.  Maybe I'll ask them which character they most relate to and why and how they'd tell the story from that perspective.  Maybe I could then tell the prodigal son from the perspective of the fatted calf...?!

No, honestly I'm not trying to show off my rusty language skills by titling two posts in one day in non-English.  Truth is I never did learn any Latin other than odd phrases in even odder contexts.

Yesterday one of my musicians commented to me that when I depart, along with my data-projector, they probably won't sing anything out of Mission Praise or Songs of Fellowship anymore (let alone Common Ground which they've resolutely not bought but have odd photocopies from!).  I looked into the cost of buying them a set of word books for any of the above, and decided it was too dear, so am currently collating "Dibley Praise" a collection of diverse hymns and songs we have sung over the six years I've known this church (it is roughly six years now since I first met them) along with some they sang long before they'd heard of me and had on a collection of tatty sheets of paper.  Of the roughly 200 on the list about a third are in BPW (no, I don't know why they put them on sheets either) about a quarter are drivel and the rest are slowly being transcribed - via Hymn Quest, via SOF discs and in a few cases by typing.  The supplement will end up, I anticipate at around 100 items including a few in Khosa, Spanish and Latin and from Iona, Hillsong, Vineyard, Kingsway and Pratt Green Trust.  What this say about us/me is debateable -  though I think it reflects a healthy openness and flexibility.  Not every song that is included would be my choice, and there are lines in some of them that make me squirm, but I am big enough, old enough and ugly enough (as my Dad would have said) to distinguish between what I sing and what I believe, and whilst my theology is inevitably shaped by the things I sing, it is't determined by it.

Lex orandi, lex credendi? Well, I've never been convinced that I do, but as others may be less discerning/questioning it pays to think what is a healthy balance in our supplementary song collection.

Anyone else do Longman Audio-Visual French back in the 1970s/1980s?  I am currently doing 'Teach yourself Glasgwegian' with my copy of 'The Complete Patter' and rediscovering phrases my mother used to use, before almost half a century in England replaced many of them with southern equivalents.  At the same time, there are many phrases listed that my Dad, born and brought up in the west midlands used, and not a few that were common parlance in Northampton (where I spent most of my childhood) and the north west of England (most of my adulthood so far).  Given that my mother's parents hailed from east London and and Plymouth, and theirs from as far afield as France, Holland and Spain, it is perhaps no wonder that the idiom I use is rather polyglot.  Maybe I need to write the Wandering Aramean's Phrase Book?

In the meantime, I am back to my daily round of learning to pronounce 'loch' correctly!