A new year brimming with opportunities

Happy New Year! 2011 dawn with a heat wave - well it's above freezing for the first time in a couple of weeks - and a rush of opportunities. We had a great Christmas, catching up with family, celebrating with friends and generally chilling.

I'm looking forward to watching the complete seasons 1-4 of Dr Who and Inception, reading Michael Wood and playing the CSI board game (all found in this year's stocking).

I shall be spending the first month of the year tidying up my dissertation for submission by the end of the month and then pondering life out of the first century for a while. My Lion book - on the same topic as my research - will be hitting the shops in March. It will be interesting to see how that is received. I've done a couple of presentations using material from the book in churches and they have gone really well, suggesting an appetite for a bit of ancient history/New Testament context among ordinary church goers which is very encouraging.

Anyway here's the cover to look out for in your local Wesley Owen or Waterstones.

2011 promises to be a year of challenges on many fronts. On one front, it'll be the year when we see whether the Big Society is just hollow rhetoric or can rise to be a cushion to those dashed on the rocks of austerity. So, here's a thought from Basil of Caesarea to sustain you through the year's ups and downs: 'when someone steals a person's clothes, we call him a thief. Should we not give the same name to the one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to those who need it; the shoes rotting in your closet to the one who has no shoes. The money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.'

Breaking the back of my dissertation

I've put the final full stop at the end of the final sentence of the third substantial chapter of my dissertation. So my supervisor now has 37,715 words to chew over (though the first chapter will need recasting and will probably come out a little longer).

All that remains is topping and tailing with an introduction and conclusion plus the slightly tedious compiling of the bibliography (hopefully in alphabetical order) and it's done.

And as if that's not good news enough ahead of a holiday... today I heard that John Drane has written a lovely endorsement of my forthcoming Lion book to join the one that Peter Oakes has already written.

I can lay back in the warm glow of achievement until work rears its ugly (or do I mean lovely?) head again in a fortnight...

Applying the lessons learned at the latest conference

Back home from NAMs to a day of sermon preparation. In the light of Steve Holmes' reflections on the sermons - which were very thought-provoking - this task will be an interesting challenge.

This Sunday we're kicking off our series on Ecclesiastes, reflecting on how this enigmatic author urges us to see that life is not a rehearsal. Steve's central case is that the sermon is for inspiration not information; it is for inspiring the listener to live up to the call of the gospel, rather than informing her of the content of the gospel.

Perhaps this is what Qohelet was doing: looking life squarely in the face and calling his hearers/readers to live life out of what they know to be true about the world and God. We'll see.

Having completed all the corrections on the manuscript of The World of the Early Church, I returned home to an email asking another set of questions of me. Hopefully, these will be straight forward. I have to say that I'm really quite pleased with the way the book's turned out; I think it looks and reads really well.  All being well, it will be in bookshops next March.

On the finishing of a great undertaking

Ah rejoice, rejoice, rejoice for the great undertaking is complete!

I have just put the final full stop to the manuscript of The World of The Early Church.

Coming in at 50,679 words, it's a tad too long (about 2,000 words) but the excess will come out in the wash.

And I think I'm really quite pleased with it. I think it reads well and tells a good story. But the proof of that will be when I read it again next week or the week after.

Even more so, will be the verdict of my publisher. it is in her inbox now. Watch this space...

Hearing the Bible as it really is

Well I have just completed the fifth of eight chapters of the book. So i am on track to finish by the end of February.

It's been a challenge but I think what I've written so far is good. Hopefully the publisher will agree!

I have to say that immersing myself in the culture of the Roman empire - albeit pretty superficially - has made me more aware of the need to see how the gospel earths itself in our culture.

we had a fascinating gathering at church last night. it was the first of three sessions on money matters. Last night was looking at the New Testament world and I shared the fruit of that day's writing.

What intrigued me about the questions was how they all came out of a Christendom heritage and not the New Testament as rooted in its culture. That's not a surprise I guess since it's how people have been trained!

It'll be fascinating to see what happens next time as we tackle issues that people are concerned about in the light of our understanding of the gospel. I guess my hope is that knowing a little of the context will help us to hear the New Testament as it was heard by its first hearers.

Of course, we'll never be able to do that perfectly but I'm hoping that its message will gain a fresh clarity and a fresh purchase in people's lives as a result of what we're thinking about.

We'll see...

A healthy dose of scepticism

It's an interesting week for the news.

I'm listening to Simon Jenkins on Radio 4 telling us how the media were all swept along by climate change hype that is now being exposed as less credible than we all thought. Does that mean we should all be climate change skeptics now?

At the Church of England Synod, a Ugandan bishop has confirmed his support for legislation in his country outlawing homosexual behaviour with the death penalty being proposed for repeat offenders. Are we all going to sign up for the government's proposed equality laws in revulsion at such a view?

I guess what this tells me is that what the media increasingly leads us by the nose into how we should feel about things. Jenkins, not a man I always agree with, has just said that the media should always be sceptical. And I agree wholeheartedly with that.

Scepticism is essential for evaluating the truth of anything. It's how science works and in many ways it's how faith works too. The trouble is that we seem to want to be told what to think, so if the media changes its mind, so do we!

I'm currently writing about the economic location of the early Christians for my book. One of the distractions historians need to be aware of is the tendency of Roman writers to speak of a binary economy in the Roman empire - a few very rich people at the top and everyone bumping along the bottom, one missed crust away from penury.

Such a view is reproduced by some historians and NT scholars. But the evidence of it is slim indeed. They appear to have fallen of the hype of the empire's reporters. Reality is always much more nuanced and interesting.

When I was being trained as a historian, I was always taught to run a sceptical eye over the evidence looking for those nuances, the bumps on an otherwise flat sheet that lets the light fall on the era under study so that we see it as well as we possibly can.

Then when I was being trained as a reporter, I was told to ask the how, what, where, when and why questions always backed by the prove it riposte. Would that our media did that more often.

Of the making of books (revisited)

Well, the good news is that my editor liked the first chapter very much.

And the even better news is that chapter 2 is written and the writing is flowing better than it has for quite sometime. I should get it finished by my revised deadline of mid-February.

The warm glow of achievement

Success!!

Chapter one of The World of the Early Church: A social history is written, a chapter on cities in the Roman empire. And I am quite pleased with it.

Hallelujah! Assuming my editor likes it, the other seven chapters should be a lot easier than that one. If she doesn't like it, I.......

the best laid plans...

Well, it's been a good day - and I haven't yet done any thing that I was planning to do this morning! Clearing the decks takes so long....

I'd forgotten that it's the next installment of the Apocalypse this Wednesday, so I need to do some preparation for that. it's been a blast doing it - though I'm not sure what it's added to sum of human happiness and well-being.

So, I've recast my week to take account of it.

I've been reflecting on what James says about making plans in 4:13-5:6 - in preparation for next Sunday afternoon and evening - and it's brought a wry smile to my face. Not that I was planning to make any money today as a result of my planning but, you know what they say, 'if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans'. I wonder if that's a sentiment James would have endorsed...

Remembrance in a busy week

So, a new week. Life's been pretty full-on over the past few days. This is partly because we took a week off. Now, the principle that works here is that when you take time off all that happens to your work schedule is that the first three days of a week away get crammed into the two days prior to departure, while the final four have to be squeezed in to your first two day's back. Consequently, you end up feeling knackered and in need of a holiday...

So, with Remembrance Sunday and the next installment of James to prepare plus meetings relating to the youth charity I'm a trustee of, my three days back in the hot seat last week were pretty full-on.

I find Remembrance Sunday tricky. For some in the church there are personal memories of distant conflicts - especially the second world war and national service in the 1950s - for others there is a sense of wanting to honour a history that we've only really accessed in school. But for one family in my congregation yesterday, the day was especially significant as their son was deploying to Afghanistan that very morning.

A couple of people spent the summer researching the names that appear on our two war memorials in church and yesterday Janice reported on who these men were. It was fascinating but more than that, it put our remembrance in a very real context: here were men who were our brothers in Christ - Sunday school teachers, bookstall managers, players in our church football team - who'd been lost at the age of our older young people (late teens into twenties).

It made our two minutes silence profoundly moving.

This week, I am mostly writing. I want to get a chapter of my Lion book dispatched to my very patient editor and polish off a draft chapter of my MA. Even as I type these words, I think that sounds ridiculously ambitious... We'll see, I guess!

To keep me company, I have the Fever Ray album, Editors and Moby - all pretty wonderful - which reminds me that I will soon be compiling my festive top ten... Now, I need some coffee, I think.

Eager students

Started the day today with a group of schools workers who'd asked me to go and give them an overview of Mark's gospel on which they are basing all the assemblies they're doing this term.

It's the kind of thing I love doing - sharing the fruits of scholarship with an audience that doesn't usually read scholarly material.

The best part of it was a conversation I had afterwards with a young women who asked where I got my information from because she really wanted to follow ideas up and get answers to some of her questions about how we read and understand the Bible.

It confirmed that I want to write the social history of the New Testament book that I'm still negotiating on because as I was suggesting things for this woman to read, there was nothing that covered the waterfront for a mid-level audience.

She also confirms that there is an audience for this kind of material among people in our churches. This suggests not only that we need more books for such folk (and web sites and interactive learning aids, etc) but also that our preaching needs to tackle these issues in a slightly meatier way. I think we sometimes feel that our congregations are afraid of facts, history and debates about how to read texts. In fact, many of them are eager for such stuff and we owe it to them.

So, I'm going to start writing it anyway...

Actually, I've got to start because I'm teaching the course on which it's based in Sri Lanka this summer and I need to revise my entire set of notes - so I can kill two birds with one stone.