Gathering and listening

I'm just back from a stimulating church weekend away with a neighbouring church. I was leading the conversation on how we live as Christians and do church in Mcworld. As well as me talking, the church worked in groups applying the message from Philippians to their local situation.

So much, so common - it happens at church weekend up and down the land.

But I started wondering half-way through the weekend - in the light of the discussion on this blog about membership and church meetings - how this process differed from a regular church meeting where God's people gather to discern the way ahead.

Stuart from Kirkintilloch Baptist Church (hi Stuart - really nice to hear from you - greetings to everyone there!) points out that church meetings are more than a check and balance. They should be places of creativity and insight. He suggests that leaders ought to be creating a culture of participation and teaching participation as a spiritual discipline (I like that phrase very much).

I think the spiritual discipline of participation was on view over the weekend I've just returned from. People seriously and intelligently wrestled with what the Scriptures were saying to them in their particular context. And it was not just general stuff. Some of the feedback from the groups indicated that people were really seeking to apply insights to decisions the church has to make about its future direction, structure and organization.

It was like being at an exciting, extended church meeting.

Of course we were away for a whole weekend, eating together, walking and playing together, laughing over coffee and chocolate late into the night. Out of these relationships came honesty and engagement. That can't be replicated in an hour on wet Wednesday in the church's back hall.

But the group work part of this can. What if church meetings become just part of a consultation process that also includes home groups and other small group gathering where people share out deepening relationships. Creativity and insight can be encouraged there far more easily than at church meetings. Participation can be taught and modeled over a long period of time. People cane share in the security of knowing they are doing so among friends (sadly, not always true at church meetings).

Perhaps no important business relating to the direction or the mission of the church should come to church meetings until it has been thrashed out in home groups over a couple of sessions. Would that improve participation and decision-making?

Who are we?

I'm off to Ashburnham in beautiful Sussex later today to do a weekend away for a neighbouring church. Yesterday it was 28 degrees, deep blue skies and summer; today it's grey and wet and 10 degrees colder. I was looking forward to afternoons on the lawns, discussions by the lake; now I envisage groups huddled round the central heating. Oh well.

I'm working with my Christians in McWorld material based on Philippians - I love that letter. I've revamped it a lot (the material that is, not Philippians!), added a whole session and, I think, made it a lot better. I'm wondering if there might be a book in it. I might trail some of it here through the autumn.

One of the key things I'm looking at is Christian identity in McWorld - who tells us who we are? In Philippi the empire told people who they were, the Jews had a separate identity and people found a sense of belonging through cults and associations. How did the Christians fit in?

It struck me that having opened by calling his first hearers 'holy ones' (saints, 1:1), his usual greeting, he goes on to remind them time and time again that they are 'in Christ'; 20 times he uses that phrase (or the related 'in the Lord'). Such a concentration of spiritual-geographical boundary markers in such a short letter indicates something about Paul's intent, I think.

I suspect it's no more than this: he wants to remind them that whatever pressures they're under from the surrounding culture, their neighbours and possibly the political authorities (though there's not much evidence of any official interest in the followers of Jesus on the part of the governing powers in Philippi), they are to see themselves as citizens of heaven whose true identity is found in Jesus.

This accounts for the amazing poem about Jesus in chapter 2, introduced with the call to think about our lives as Jesus thought about his and the equally amazing testimony of how Paul has modeled his life on that of Jesus and invites his hearers to do the same. Our identity then is found in our destiny - 3:14, 20f - and our location 'in Christ', a suggestion that Christian identity is simultaneously individual and corporate.

And that individually and corporately, we live out our citizenship - politeuesthe (1:27) - in a way that honours Christ. This speaks of the kinds of communities we create in McWorld and the kind of politics in which we engage.

I'm looking forward to having a stimulating time...

Belonging and membership revisited

'The challenge is to encourage people to be congregants rather than consumers.' So says Wulf and I think he's put his finger on a key issue.

We come at most things in life these days as consumers. But belonging to a church requires that we come with different expectations. There's nothing wrong in wanting to get something out of belonging. But there has also got to be a desire to give something of ourselves. I suspect this is what lies behind the term 'congregant' in Wulf's post.

I think he's also right to question whether church meetings are about discerning God's will from scratch. I think he's suggesting that their role is to discern whether leaders have themselves correctly discerned where God wants to take us. In that sense they operate as a check and balance against excessive ministerial domination of churches - and are probably a good thing.

Baptists have often seemed uncomfortable with 'leadership', feeling that every decision must be made by the gathered congregation. That is, of course, a recipe for paralysis and an invitation to the loud to dominate proceedings. It puts a lot of people off participating in meetings. I've spoken to a number of church members who stay away from church meetings because their voice wouldn't be heard in the hubbub and the clamour of those who always feel the need to express themselves - whether or not they have something useful to say.

If some members view the church meeting as a place where they have the right to speak, are they acting as congregants or consumers. Sometimes, I think, they are acting as the latter.

Gareth Davies-Jones

We had a gig with Gartehr Davies-Jones at church last night. It was a blast. He is a great guitarist, very good somgwriter and gifted comunicator. If you want to check him out then visit www.headingwestmusic.com

Choosing to join

Wulf's comment highlights an important point in the Baptist understanding of church and that's that belonging has to have a measure of 'demonstrable consent' on the part of each person who wants to belong. So this means, he suggests, that not everyone affected by the ministry of a church is a stakeholder.

I'd certainly agree with that - though I'm interested to know where stakeholder-dom starts in relation to a church.

But I do wonder whether the church meeting as currently set up can be the only way we gather to determine where God is leading us a congregation. It would certainly be good if people sent their apologies for not attending - it suggests two things: they know there's a meeting and they know they should be there.

But I really wonder whether we need to think in terms of having a variety of forums where views can be expressed and God's will discerned. Is it very unbaptist to suggest that God might lead two separate gatherings of the members of a single baptist church in the same direction? After all, we tend to take 1 Corinthians 2 as determinative for what's happening at a church meeting (at its best) and yet that was written to a community that for the most part met in small, scattered groups across the city of Corinth.

belonging and membership (part 2)

If what I said in my previous is anything like accurate - and I think it probably is - it raises a number of fundamental questions about membership of our churches.

Here are a few I raised with my leadership team at recent get-together by the seaside.

Many people feel they ‘belong’ to our church but they don’t see any need to become ‘a member’ – and they might walk away if ‘membership’ in the formal sense were pressed.

At the same time, many long-standing ‘members’ feel that they no longer ‘belong’ in the way they once did because the church has changed in ways they aren’t sure they like they like since they joined it.

Then, more and more people are coming from traditions that practice Christian initiation in a way different from Baptists. After all, denominational loyalties appear to be decaying. So how do we help such to 'belong' and come into 'membership'?

Lots of churches are finding that many members are unable or unwilling to come to members’ meetings for a whole variety of reasons. If only 70 out of 400 come to a church meeting, what is the quality of the decision-making? How might members who can’t/don’t come be heard?

Many who ‘belong’ but haven’t become ‘members’ feel disenfranchised, even second class, because they are not allowed to come to members’ meetings. How do we involve newcomers in helping to create the kind of church that keeps them (having attracted them in the first place) and attracts others like them when it is only ‘members’ who can vote at church meetings?

And maybe the most pressing - though invariably unasked question - is this: what does financial giving do to a person's relationship with the church? If I give on a regular basis because I feel as though I belong but have not become a member, does that give me the right to a voice in how that money is used? Those who live in a consumer culture would suggest that it does. Those wedded to the traditional baptist view of membership might think the question to be in very poor taste indeed.

I wonder if John Drane might not be on to something when he suggests that we use the language of stakeholding to talk about involvement in church.

If we understand stakeholders to refer to ‘all those inside or outside an organization who are directly affected by what it does’, Drane asks ‘who are our stakeholders?’ And he offers this list – God, people who come to church, their friends and relatives, church members, Sunday school teachers, ministers, leaders, children and young people who come on Sunday or mid-week, people who come to mid-week activities (parent and toddler groups, social projects, lunch clubs, etc). It’s a big and diverse list.

And it brings a fresh set of intriguing questions: are all these people really stakeholders? If so, in what way? And, maybe most importantly, how do we hear their views and take them into account in our decisions about how we develop the life and work of the church?

Answers on a postcard please...

belonging and membership

In common with a lot of baptist churches we are having a think about what it measn to belong and what that has to do with being a 'member'. Chatting with a mate this afternoon, he told me his fiance - an anglican - was extremely puzzled by our baptist way of doing things. Well, join the club, love...

Here are some reflections on where I think we are and what the implcations are. They'll appear in a couple of posts - just to keep it manageable.

Some suggest we live in a low-commitment culture and that this has had an effect on people’s willingness to commit themselves to anything. We see it in the shortage of volunteers for church programmes and offices; we see it in the patterns of attendance at church – twicers used to refer to people who came twice on a Sunday but now tends to refer to those who come to a service twice a month. Many lament the passing of a generation – now in their 70s and 80s – who were very committed to the traditional structures of our Baptist churches and who are not being replaced the generations rising behind them.

So-called ‘low commitment’ is seen in all kinds of areas of life. Will Hutton uncovered it among shareholders who have no commitment to the long-term health of companies but only an eye to a quick return and a desire to keep their investment options open. Others point to the divorce rate and, more significantly, the falling number of marriages to indicate that we have a different attitude to long-term relationships than previous generations. On top of that, cohabiting couples are four-times as likely as married couples to split up. A study of choirs and music groups in Milton Keynes showed declining membership in all of them and even steeper declines in the actual attendance of those members at rehearsals and performances. And in Bromley, Community Links has lamented recently how difficult it is to get volunteers for all sorts of groups that used to be well-supported.

No wonder churches are struggling, then. In common with other organizations, we are affected by changing patterns of commitment which themselves are products of wider and deeper changes in the way people live their lives – longer working hours, greater travel times to work, more diverse and widely spread families, greater participation in all kinds of entertainment (cinema, gigs, theatre, eating out, working out – all of which have grown more popular over the past generation).

One of the key cultural shifts in the past 30 years has become something of a cliché. It is called consumerism. Once this described the practice of shopping and applied to a few wealthy people who had the levels of disposable income that allowed them to shop for fun. Since the 1980s such consumption has become the focus of the British economy – spending in the high streets and especially on our homes and gardens has become the bell-weather of economic health; property values have become the prime measure of individual wealth and investing in our properties is not only a key leisure activity but also an industry employing many thousands. One of the key facets of consumerism is that it suggests anyone can become an expert, anyone can determine what is best for them and their family, choice is king.

And consumerism has spilled over into the way we regard other areas of life that once would have been talked of in terms of ‘service’. For example, opticians used to be part of the health sector, providing a ‘service’ to ‘patients’; now they are shops selling glasses and other devices to customers. Such a change has happened in all areas of public service – health, education, social services, housing, etc. We increasingly want these services to meet our needs not an agenda set by others. We used to say ‘doctor knows best’, now we demand that doctors do what we ask them; the health services is said to be more ‘patient-focused’; the doctor as ‘expert’ has been replaced as the doctor as provider of what the patient – who has become the ‘expert’ (no one knows me like I do) – wants. Likewise in schools we’ve seen the rise of parental choice; they are the consumers of educational services for their children. This might or might not be a good thing, but it is a product of a consumer mentality.

Not surprisingly this change in the way we think about these core activities, affects how we think and feel about other commitments – including religious ones. The rise of new spiritualities through the 1990s is indicative of a desire to have a spiritual dimension to our lives that is driven by the same desire to have something tailor-made, that fits me like a glove. The authors of the major study of the town of Kendal published last year under the title The Spiritual Revolution, subtitled their work ‘why religion is giving way to spirituality’. In their view religion was an organized activity where the agenda and rules were set by religious hierarchies and especially by experts known as priests, whereas spirituality is an individually-tailored response to the transcendent.

Does this have any bearing on church membership? I think is raises some pretty fundamental issues. What do you think?

Simple strategic questions...

It was really to good to catch up with people at church this morning. My mate Steve, in particular, was there. He's a missionary in North London and it's always a joy to see and pray with him. He's bringing a group to our church in October to do a bit of training.

In the course of our conversation about strategies, it dawned on me that we need a strategy that deals with three key issues we face as churches: visibility, credibility and the what's-in-it-for-me? factor.

Most people in our communities don't see our churches. How often have you described where your church is and people have said 'oh I didn't realise there was a church there.' I often used to say to Christians that people outside the church don't see the church as irrelevant, they don't see the church - fullstop. I still thinks that true.

Over this summer we've done a couple of things to raise our profile and make us more visible. One was to put a bouncy castle in the high street and invite kids to play. This was led by another church in our community but we were glad to join in. The other was to run a holiday club for senior citizens. Both these events were about getting the church seen. And a few more people saw us.

Then, there's our credibility - when we do things are we competent, do we do what we advertise, do we deliver what we claim we're going to? This is vital in today's world. I think it means churches ought to do less, but to do the few they do really well.

finally, there's the dreadful consumer question - what's in it for me? We might bemoan the fact that we live in a consumer society, but we do; it's one of the circumstances in which we have to do mission (I'll be blogging about circumstances later in the week because I'm thinking a lot about this word at the moment).

So everything we do has to meet a need of some kind if it's going to attract people who think the church is both invisible and incredible.

Does this sound like a good trio of factors to consider every time we do something in our communities? I think so. Maybe it would lead us to do things that are both more fun and more relational. And who knows, we might find ourselves meeting real needs and seeing people come to faith as a result.

Catching up again...

I've been doing some planning over the past week for the autumn - summer is often less frantic in churches (though my colleague, Brian, had a really busy week last week running a holiday club for 60 or so senior citizens).

I'm doing two weekend aways for churches - one in September, the other in October - and I've been pondering themes and getting some stories together.

We're really looking forward to Gareth Davies-Jones visiting Bromley Baptist on 16 September. He's a really talented Christian singer-songwriter with a keen eye for issue of justice. He'll be kicking off our harvest weekend - and hopefully will go down a storm. If you're in the neighbourhood, drop in - kick off is 7:30pm...

Been watching the extensive coverage of Reading on BBC3. Looks to have been a good festival. Inn particular sets by Kaiser Chiefs and Arctic Monkeys were excellent. But I was also impressed by Feeder and the Spinto Band. Franz Ferdinand were also pretty amazing headlining on the first night. My daughter's actually there, so I'll have to see what she made of them all.

Meanwhile on the decks I ave the new Bruce Cockburn album - Life Short Call Now. Check it out, it's great - his best for a while. Great playing including the introduction of solo brass instruments on a couple of songs which are particularly effective. He treats his usual themes - global politics, love and spirituality - with his usual mixture of insight and wit. But there is a gentleness and warmth about this collection that seemed to be missing on his last outing.

Sri Lanka reflections (part 2)

One of the surreal things about Sri Lanka is to visit the tourist resorts on the South West coast. We spent four days in Hikkaduwa at a really well-appointed hotel. The pool was beautiful and warm, the view from our balcony was of the breakers of the Indian Ocean rolling on to a palm-tree lined beach, the service was excellent, the sun shone...

The surreal thing was that the hotel next door was still a pile of rubble from the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. Indeed as you walked around from Hikkaduwa to a temple with a little island chapel, the effects of the tsunami are still plain to see: ruined buildings, half rebuilt homes, shattered boats, even flip-flops and toothbrushes lying in the grass indicating the presence of people until catastrophe came.

Everywhere you go in Sri Lanka - and especially along the coastline - there's evidence of the tsunami and its aftermath. And yet it's hard to get your head round just how enormous it was.

There's a memorial on the road out of Hikkaduwa to the 1200 passengers who died on an express train that was hit by the wave. Opposite and across the road, the railway line has been relaid and trains rumble by pretty regularly. But all along the line, piles of rubble indicate where homes stood on either side of the tracks.

Before going to Hikkaduwa, we'd spent a day with a friend who's a pastor in the Colombo suburb of Moratuwa. He'd been involved in providing immediate relief to hundreds of families left destitute and homeless by the tsunami and more recently in helping fishing communities along the coast to rebuild and get their lives back to some semblance of normal.

As he walked us around one of the redevelopments, I was struck by how basic it all was: wooden buildings, outside toilet blocks and rudimentary sanitation. Our church had helped towards the cost of all this and it was great to see families rehoused and delighted with their new homes.

But one of the frustrations that William and his team faced is that the government and local authorities refuse to run any utilities into the area because it's too near the sea. The government is insisting that all rebuilding take place getting on for a kilometre from the coast. But many of the fishing communities have lived for generations just yards from the sea from which they earn their living. They do not want to move inland. So they would rather live in new wooden houses (brick houses aren't allowed so near the shore-line) with only basic services than the brick homes being built inland.

The nonsense of the policy is that right next door to where William and his team are building wooden homes for fishermen, the Chinese government is building a huge concrete and brick port development which will include moorings for these fishermen and a fish market. Ah well!

What impressed me about William was the easy and calm way he went about undertaking the enormous task of helping these families put their lives back together. He is a model of Christian service - assessing need, listening to people's concerns, seeking their welfare and wanting them to experience the love of God in a tangible way.

It was humbling to see him in action.

Sri Lanka reflections (part 1)

Well, life's been busy since getting back from Sri Lanka. Here's the first of my reflections on our trip.

Part of the reason for going was to teach a course at the Lanka Bible College. Its main campus is beautifully situated just outside the city of Kandy. So the climate's better than Colombo - not as humid. The campus itself is very well designed with a series of buildings clinging to the hillside. The lecture rooms and study areas are excellent and the library is improving - though it lacks the resources to keep pace with the plethora of good theology and biblical studies coming out.

I had 25 students in my BTh group. The degree course is taught in English and all the reading is in English. It's clear that some students struggled with this. For many English is their third language - after Tamil and singala. We mitigated the language problem by producing my lectures - which I'd fortunately written out pretty fully - as notes at the end of each day. I also guaranteed that the exam would be based solely on the notes. I shall be marking that week, so we'll see how people got on.

The students themselves were a fascinating cross-section of people - some well into retirement doing the course out of interest and to make themselves more useful to their churches; others young men and women who held down demanding ministries, often involving quite extensive travel in some difficult places.

Christians make up about 7% of the population of Sri Lanka - about the same proportion as Muslims. The majority of the population is Buddhist. There is a fair amount of low-level harassment of churches - burnings and ministers being beaten up - and there are parliamentary moves to outlaw conversion.

So the students tackling the social history of the New Testament - looking at such things as the influence of emperor worship on the religious environment of the first century, the size of congregations and where they met and the social position of the early believers - were doing so in a context that a number of similarities with the first century. We had some interesting conversations about those connections.

The college is trying to raise the standard of education among Sri Lanka's ministers, seeking to equip them to face the demands of ministry in a changing world. For the most part it does an excellent job and deserves the support and prayers of those in the more fortunate West.

In particular, it needs two things. Firstly, people willing to teach courses as visiting lecturers. As one who's done it, I can say it's a richly rewarding experience and I'm looking forward to going back and doing it again. Secondly, they need resources - books for the library in English and the material and money to translate good English material into Tamil and Singala. The college has its own publishing arm and is able to produce good resources in the local languages with the right levels of support.

It's a good work - do pray for them.

Back from paradise island...

I'm back!! Have you missed me.

Sri Lanka was amazing - lots of experiences, wonderful people, awful sights, eye-popping beauty... I'll try to unpack some of it over the next week.

I finished John Irving's A Prayer for owen Meany sitting by the pool in Hikkaduwa. What a truly terrific book it is - I think Irving's best (though I've just got his latest, so we'll see). The character of Owen Meany is heartbreaking, compelling and utterly magnetic. The novel charts his effect on those around him with a surgical skill - you can see and feel lives being cut up and not really being reassembled as he cuts a swathe through the community he grew up in.

If you've not read it, I urge you to... It's great beach reading but you will need a bit of space to digest the final scene - it's extremely powerful.

Diving into difficult texts

Frantically preparing for Sri Lanka - hence the lack of blogging recently. We're also doing a series on 1 Timothy at church, preparing for which is enabling me to finish lectures on the later period of Paul's life.

This Sunday we're doing 1 Timothy 2 and tackling head-on what this means for women in ministry.

It is fascinating to see how scholars on both sides construct their arguments - either that Paul's prohibition is temporary and linked to the false teaching in Ephesus or that Paul's prohibition is permanent and based on creation principles laid down in Genesis 1-3. I favour the former view for reasons that seem all-too obvious to me (but I would say that, wouldn't I?)

One key bone of contention is whether 1 Timothy 2 has to be read and interpreted in the light of other NT texts that are deemed to be more normative - for example Galatians 3:28 - or whether 1 Timothy 2 is itself normative for understanding other apparently more permissive cases.

I have always worked on the principle that we must somehow account for Paul's practice - hints and examples of which are layered through the whole Pauline corpus and can be read only to mean that Paul's team of co-workers (those who preached, led and supported his work) contained both men and women operating equally. One has only to look at Romans 16, Philippians 4:2f, 1 Corinthians 11. Add to this 2 Timothy 2:2 where Paul clearly means faithful people entrusted with the teaching to pass on to others, the fact that Timothy himself was taught by his mother and grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5f) and that Priscilla seems to take the lead in training up Apollos in Acts 18:24-28 (by virtue of the fact that she's named first - unusual in first century texts about husbands and wives).

So my view is that Paul's prohibition in 1 Timothy 2 is temporary and called for because women (possibly wives - the words could mean either) were unduly influenced by a heresy that appears to have been derived from the female cults all over Ephesus which, when mixed with esoteric Jewish readings of Genesis 1-3, led to a teaching that suggested Eve was Adam's mother as well as his wife and which taught the women of the city to trust Diana, the goddess who was mid-wife at her twin brother, Apollo's, birth when they were in labour. No wonder Paul said what he did.

His aim throughout 1 Timothy is that people learn the true Christian message, are mentored in the faith by those further along in the Christian life than they are, before they assume a role as teachers, mentors and leaders in the Ephesian house churches. This applied as much to men as women but Paul needed to highlight the particular problem of women because of their role in spreading the false teaching. This seems to be the implication of 2 Timothy 2:2

The clincher for this, it seems to me, is the reference to young widows going from house-to-house (1 Timothy 5:13) and talking of things they shouldn't be talking of - ie spreading false teaching. The word rendered 'gossip' doesn't mean tittle-tattle but rather nonsense or foolishness - a word close in meaning to the way Paul describes the false teaching in 1:6f; 4:7; 6:3f. They are idle purveyors of false teaching, as Gordon Fee puts it in his excellent commentary. And possibly that false teaching centred in their talk on how to approach giving birth - do we hang on to ancient superstitions or allow our new faith in Jesus to sweep them away?

And this is before you get the unusual Greek vocabulary of the passage - notably the word 'authentein' (meaning authority but used elsewhere with the sense of illegitimate or usurping authority, even murder in some Greek plays!) and the present tense of the verb 'permit' which suggests a temporary rather than permanent state of affairs. One excellent study of the passage by Richard and Catherine Clark Kroeger suggests that the primal deity of Ephesus was a female god called Authentia - does that have a bearing on Paul's choice of words?

One of the problems of this whole discussion, of course, is whether we believe there is an enduring creation ordinance that means women are permanently subordinate to men - at home, in church and in the world. If you believe that, then taking the English of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 at face value is the obvious thing to do. If you don't, then you need to look behind the English and ask searching question about what Paul could possibly mean in the light of his usual practice and the particular circumstances in Ephesus.

No prizes for guessing which view I take on that question! As with a number of these things, the debate over this text would be better if people recognised that their interpretations were driven by their underlying view of the world as well as by their understanding of a set of a words in a particular context. It is this that makes New Testament studies so important and such fun.

Rediscovering treasure

I've been busy this week sorting my thoughts for Sri Lanka. I now have 26 lectures outlined; all I have to do is write them - that's next week's task!

In the meantime we're kicking off a series in 1 Timothy on Sunday evening which (by coincidence) raises fascinating issues of Pauline chronology which I will be covering in lecture 20 - just when did he write the pastorals (if he indeed did write them and they weren't composed after his death by those who continued to carry the torch for him - Luke, for instance)?

In the course of my reading, I turned to John Robinson's Redating the New Testament. This was the first work of serious academic theology I ever read. It was recommended to me by my then rector, Hugh Sylvester, back in 1978/79. It had an enormous impact on me. I remember feeling that two aspects of my life - my Christian faith and my love of history - were brought together by a writer of immense skill and historical imagination.

Reading Robinson's words again reminds me just what a good and sadly neglected book this is. His arguments are still compelling, 30 years after the book first appeared. It strikes me that scholars of all hues have found its thesis too difficult to integrate into their view of NT history and so it has been sidelined and ignored. Very few works seem to engage with it at all

It deserves better. His case that the whole New Testament was written prior to 70AD is certainly controversial but it's made with such gracious and clear-headed logic that it needs to be reckoned with in a way that most NT scholars shy away from.

When we know so little for certain about the history of the period from 33 (the resurrection) to the fall of Jerusalem in 70, it seems reckless to be so dogmatic about what can and can't have happened in those 37 years. It seems equally cavalier to dismiss as entirely untrustworthy the only narrative source we have, claiming to come from and cover those years (namely Acts - Paul Barnett in his recent book The Birth of Christianity - the first Twenty Years makes a good case for taking Acts seriously alongside Paul's letters as a source of reliable information)

And it seems overly dogmatic (as Robinson points out) to assert that Paul couldn't have written certain letters that bear his name on purely linguistic grounds. We have such a small corpus of writing from him that saying what is characteristically Pauline and what isn't, is tricky. We also don't know enough about his writing practices - how much did he dictate and how much leave to his secretaries to fashion his ideas into words for particular audiences? It's possible that because the pastorals are more personal, they are more not less reflective of Paul's normal turn of phrase.

Anyway, if you're looking for a good academic theology tome to take to the beach along with Dan brown this summer, I strongly recommend Robinson's Redating the New Testament.

Speaking and listening

It's Pentecost. We celebrate this as the birthday of the church, the coming of the Holy Spirit and rightly so.

Yet at its heart, the Acts 2 account is about God speaking to the world. The commotion of the early verses drew a crowd which is the focus for most of the chapter, the audience for Peter's explanation of what's going on and what it means.

God propelled his people out of their comfort zone - at some stage the disciples left the upper room where they felt safe and ended up in the temple where the opponents to Jesus had their base - so that people from all over the world could hear God's story in their own language (with Galilean accents!)

I wonder what would happen if God visited us in our churches in such a way that we had to take our singing and speaking out of our buildings and into the street - not because it appeared to be a good strategy and we'd got the PA organised, sought permission from the council to hold an open-air meeting, but simply because our buildings couldn't contain us in our excitement at encountering God.

Well, Joel did say 'you old men will dream dreams...'

Ending the week with a rush

I've finished going through my Galatians manuscript - most of my editor's comments improved things, though I ignored/disputed one or two - and my notes on Ecclesiastes are posted on the church website (www.bromleybaptist.com - just click on the sermon notes tab and it's there under the title Qoheleth - wit and wisdom among the people of God)

And I've prepared for Sunday (pretty much)

All this clears the decks for street pastoring tonight and street pastor training tomorrow.

Isn't life a blast!

Writer's pride

I was right about my editor's red-biro-marked copy of my Galatians manuscript. It's very depressing for two reasons. One is he's made a lot of suggestions and the other is that he has tiny, spidery handwriting that I find hard to decipher!

Many of his suggestions are making the text clearer and easier to read. But some are subtly changing the sense of things. I find myself bristling with a sort of writerly angst that changing a word or phrase is going to materially and substantially alter the meaning of what I've written.

So I have been very gingerly working through the suggestions made and questions raised, weighing each one carefully and then accepting most of them - editing usually improves things in my experience.

But seeing so much of one's writing crossed out, reworded or, even worse, underlined with a comment 'not clear what this means' inserted in the margin is a sobering sight for a writer. I'd chosen the words so carefully (mostly), thought what I was saying was crystal clear - as well as brimful of insight and wisdom - and feel my hackles rising as I consider so many changes.

Ah the writer's pride... Get over it!

I'm a third of the way through, so I should have it finished next week - given that I've got to fit it in with preparation for Sri Lanka - though because I'm using Galatians as the basis for one day, editing the book is good preparation in itself - reminding me what I think of Paul's most wonderful and passionate piece of writing.

passing on the news...

'Neighbour...I've got so much to tell you in so little time'

Editors were wonderful. It's the best gig I've been to this year. The playing was tight. Tom Smith's voice was angelic. And the lights were out of this world. It ws a flawless performance of passion and energy. If they are not a serious contender for biggest British band of 2006 then there's no justice.

The line's from Someone Says on the Back Room - a song of aggressive longing, fractured relationships and loss of community. 'If no one can help you/then how can I?'

My notes on Ecclesiastes are almost finished and I've just got back my Galatians manuscript with my editor's red biro all over it - it looks rather depressing but I'm sure he's been kind!

We had a very productive breakfast meeting yesterday thinking about a foyer in Bromley. I thought foyer's were yesterday's coming thing, but the good people at Broomleigh and Oasis made a powerful case for having one as a landmark project that puts the needs of homeless young people at the centre of our attention.

I hope something comes of it

Catching up

Off to see Editors at Brixton Academy this evening. They are one of the cream of last year's break-through bands - sharp riffs, intelligent lyrics, plangent guitars; wonderful.

I used them a dialogue partner in my thinking about Ecclesiastes. In their song All Sparks, they have the line 'you burn like a bouncing cigarette on the road/all sparks will burn out in the end' which I think perfectly captures Qoheleth's view that life is short but wonderfully beautiful. It also has great advice for people sharing their faith 'you're answering questions/that have not yet been asked...'

The Ecclesiastes series finished last Sunday and I think went pretty well (all things considered). Good conversations resulted and hopefully people will make use of the study guide which will be posted on the website at the end of the week.

I'm now focusing on getting ready to lecture in Sri Lanka. I think it's all taking shape. I have a month to create notes flexible enough to take account of every eventuality (at least the ones I can think of)

In my chill time earlier, I watched the first episode of Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past - part of the box set that was a birthday gift earlier in the year. It's TV at its best. The story concerns a picture library about to be closed by an American multi-national. So it's really a meditation on the power of photographs. One of the strengths of the programme is that Poliakoff uses the pictures and his musical score to move the story on rather than conventional moving images and dialogue. It's truly mesmerising.

Pentecost on Sunday - a reminder that God speaks to us in fresh ways and often doesn't use words himself.

Decoding Da Vinci revisited

So on the afternoon after the evening before, did we decode Da Vinci?

We certainly had fun - many teams competing in our prize quiz. We had a good few texts raising interesting issues and asking sensible questions. And lots of people wanted to join in.

Concerns focused on two main areas. Firstly, the history - especially the Gnostic gospels and formation of the Christian canon. I've never been asked after a service to recommend quite so many history books!

Secondly, why the book is so popular. This is harder to answer but I suspect has something to do with Dan Brown capturing a mood. There have been lots of academic tomes questioning Christian origins - you have only to think Hugh Schonfield's The Passover Plot or john Allegro's book on scared mushrooms (I forget the title) or Barbara Tiering's Jesus the Man and a host of others. These came, caused a mild flutter and disappeared into the libraries only to emerge in footnotes in learned dissertations.

Brown's book landed in altogether different times. Institutions are no longer to be trusted so their version of events is automatically suspected. He capitalised on the success of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and a host of other books bedecking the mysteries and mind, body and spirit sections of our bookshops. Our culture is looking for new myths from the cult of celebrity and big brother to the sacred feminine. The Da Vinci Code is just one more

Maybe it's just good marketing.

What I want to know, though, is why messers Baigent, Leigh, Lincoln, Brown and Teabing make no mention of the writings of the Apostle Paul in their reconstruction of Christian origins. While dating the gospels is tricky, dating Paul's letters - especially Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians and 1 & 2 Thessalonians - isn't. They all come from the fifties and sixties of the first century and they all affirm three things about Jesus - his humanity, his divinity and his resurrection from the dead.

So there you have it, 275 years before Constantine and the Council of Nicea, Paul told us that Jesus was God's Son, human and divine, raised from death for the salvation and re-creation of the world and that joining his Kingdom made us part of God's solution to human folly.

What we think about Jesus appears to matter a great deal after all, Sir Leigh...

Decoding Da Vinci

Today we're devoting our cafe church to the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, so last night a group of us went to see the film.

I guess it's true to say that I had low expectations - and they weren't disappointed. The cast struggled with a leaden script and director Ron Howard's decision to play it absolutely straight rather than camping it up a bit. So the cardinals behaved like board members of dull multinational and all the policemen were plods who couldn't see what has happening in front of their eyes.

It all meant that Hanks and Tautou as the two leads spent the entire movie running, driving or catching their breath with a look of complete bafflement on their faces. I'm not sure if they were baffled by what was happening to them or why they were being asked to serve up such clunking dialogue.

Needless to say interest in the book and film has focused on what it alleges about Christian origins and in particular the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the suppression of any reference to that relationship by the Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea.

It's a theory so full of holes that one barely knows where to begin in refuting it. Many more intelligent Christians have done the job very well. The best things I've read are the two Grove booklets by Steve Hollingshurst and Tom Wright (available as ebooks from www.grovebooks.co.uk) and Robin Griffith-Jones The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple. Griffith-Jones is master of the Temple Church in London, one of the locations of the book and film.

The book's power is undoubtedly rooted in our culture's taste for conspiracy, coupled with its distrust of institutions and their 'official' stories and explanations. The more the church defends its position, the more the conspiracy theorists argue 'they would say that wouldn't they; it's evidence that they've got something to hide.'

It's the laughable treatment of the history of the early church that really irks me, the suggestion that it was a powerful, all-conquering institution able to suppress documents and movements it disapproved of. The Roman church really wasn't in this position until the high Middle Ages - say from the 12th century.

The suggestion, for instance, that the council of Nicea settled the date of Easter is rot. It was an issue still being debated between various parts of the church in the early 7th century, at the synod of Whitby for example. It still wasn't really settled when the schism between the Western and Eastern Church happened in the 10th century which is why Orthodox countries celebrate Easter at a different date from Western Christians.

It's a small point, I know. But it's indicative of a slipshod handling of history by Dan Brown and his sources - especially Baigent, Liegh and Lincoln in their hugely entertaining and in places hysterically funny The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail.

It struck me that the film - for obvious reasons - simplified the 'history' to the point of making it a strident and harsh-sounding propaganda for an anti-Jesus movement. Leigh Teabing, as played by Ian Mckellen, is a deeply unsympathetic character, motivated by a settled hatred for the stories of orthodox Christianity and prepared to do anything to bring down the church that preserves that story. He was more subtle and complex than that in the book - not that any of Brown's characters have much depth or complexity.

Comments are always welcome. I'll tell you how cafe church went tomorrow.

In a glass darkly

Having managed to baffle a few people on Sunday evening with my second stab at Ecclesiastes, I thought I'd attempt clarification (probably a mistake!).

We were thinking about the nature of Qoheleth's faith (using U2's Zooropa as a dialogue partner). In particular, I drew attention to the writers understanding of God as maker and giver. And that this is the context in which we live and within with Qoheleth is trying to understand his life in this messy world.

So, the first response we make to this is fear (used six times of God in the short book). Fear is a key OT word of response to God that has something to do with faith and worship in the context of being held accountable by God for how we've lived. So, it's the perfect verb for Qoheleth - with his emphasis on death and judgment - to use to describe our relationship with God.

We see fear especially in 5:1-6 in relation to worship and what we do in the temple. Here Qoheleth is close to Isaiah and Amos in their denunciation of facile worship as a cover for unjust living (Isa 1:10-17; Am 5:21-24). And we see it in 3:11-14 where Qoheleth stares unnervingly at the mystery at the heart of the world - namely that God has put a longing in our hearts that our life in the world doesn't seem able to satisfy.

The way we live in the light of this is to enjoy our lives and acknowledge our creator (3:12-13; 5:18-19). Which brought us to 5:20 - a verse of tantalising ambiguity.

Is Qoheleth saying that some people are so full of living that they don't have time to reflect and so do nothing about the 'eternity' tugging at their hearts? This would certainly seem to fit with the recent report by Bob Mayo et al suggesting that young people are too busy getting on with life to have time to pause to think about their spiritual lives. Mayo describes teens and twenties inhabiting a 'happy midi-narrative' that suggests life is fine, the world is basically benevolent, all you see is all there is, so get and enjoy it. Ecclesiastes 5:20 suggests that God keeps these people busy with the here and now and so prevents them from thinking about the there and then.

Or is Qoheleth saying that people who receive everything in life as a gift from God don't restlessly reflect on the world, they just get on with living, grateful for all God gives them. In particular they don't exploit people to gain material advantage or political honour (in the way described in 5:8-17).

Or - and this is what threw some on sunday evening - is Qoheleth saying both these things and that how we hear this text is determined precisely by our answer to the question 'whose world is this?'

If we believe it's our world, that we make it, we decide what's right and wrong in it, then the first reading of the verse will tend to be true of us. If we believe it's God's world and that everything we have comes from his gracious hand and that we will be content to enjoy what he gives and not hanker for more, then the second reading of the verse will tend to be true of us.

Maybe, I'm reading too much into this, but I found this really helpful and have been continuing to so this week as I've continued to reflect on it and listen to Zooropa (and Editors The Back Room which I'm thinking would also be a good dialogue partner for Qoheleth).

Rocking with Hard Fi and Billy Bragg

Linda and I went to see the very excellent Hard Fi at Brixton Academy yesterday - the fourth of a five night stand by the band. They played most of the album plus a couple of new songs and a Big Audio Dynamite cover. They were loud and energetic, but still managed to hold the tunes - mostly.

Their stage presence was augmented by TV screens making good use of the CCTV image they've made their own and beaming an anti-war message to po-going fans.

The evening was made even better by the presence of Billy Bragg. The old red wedge rocker's back catalogue is appearing all digitally remastered, so he served up a 30 minute run-through his greatest hits. The songs stand up really well. He's not lost any of his old passion. He's even updated one or two songs - especially the wonderful Looking for the Great Leap Forward. It was stirring stuff.

He returned during Hard Fi's encore to do a spirited version of the Who's Won't Get Fooled Again - which I assume was aimed equally at the Blair Government and the British National Party.

One of the fascinating things about the evening was the emphasis on the old rock against racism themes (it was at a RAR gig that I first heard Bragg). The rise of the BNP is galvanising a section of the indie rock community to put its talents at the disposal of a campaign against racism. More power to 'em. Bragg said that it worked in the late 70s/early 80s and it can work again as cultures come together around shared love of music and common hatred of racism. We'll see...

A canon within a canon?

We're having a challenging time reading Ecclesiastes in our evening services at the moment. I know it's challenging when one of my members told me after last night's episode that she'd not got any of it!

It's certainly the case that ecclesiastes is a demanding read. That's why Christians don't read it much and churches don't teach it.

It raises an issue that scholars wrestle with, namely are some biblical texts more important and authoritative than others? Is there a canon within the canon? OT critics in particular argue over this one. Walter Brueggemann in his seminal Theology of the Old Testament talks in terms of Israel's core testimony and it's countertestimony and, just for good measure, Israel's unsolicited testimony. He doesn't use the language of canon within canon but this could be the outcome of his intriguing and suggestive division.

Ordinary church members do it by default. There are some parts of scripture they read and some they don't. And so their faith is based not on the whole counsel of God but on those parts they find convivial or at least comprehensible.

Ecclesiastes is a case in point. It's a difficult book, a demanding read - not just because the language and structure are tricky (though they are) but because it appears to be a challenge to orthodox understandings of God and the life of faith. But maybe that's precisely why it's in the canon.

Ecclesiastes was written late - maybe 350BC - and yet was included in the canon probably by the time of Jesus or soon after. It is one of the five books attached to the five Jewish festivals - ecclesiastes is read at the fabulously joyous feast of tabernacles.

It's inclusion and use indicates that it touches on something vital about faith, something believers need to take into account as they give shape to their faith in a world of contradictions and trouble. The danger of canons within canons is that it enables us to marginalise inspired texts - they are not quite as much the word of God as other texts that we take more seriously - and so our faith is distorted by default.

The challenge is to integrate this troublesome voice into our understanding of our faith. Otherwise we risk suggesting that Ecclesiastes is not as inspired as Deuteronomy or Romans, something evangelicals can't be comfortable with. But we also risk missing the insight and inspiration that Ecclesiastes brings to our faith and witness in the world. If we need help with this, U2's Zooropa album - opening with the title track exploring who makes the world we live in and ending with Johnny Cash singing the Wanderer, a song based on Ecclesiastes - is an excellent dialogue partner.

Penetrating life's absurdities

Qoheleth, the enigmatic writer of Ecclesiastes, would have a word for it. Apparently, Britain's young people prefer car boot sales to church. Now I could understand it if the research suggested they preferred trendy coffee shops or clothes shops, watching DVDs or chatting on MSN Messenger... But car boot sales?

Truly, I need to follow the advice of Ecclesiastes 2:3 (in the message version) - and it'll probably take a couple of bottles of decent vintage to help me get to the bottom of it.

According to this latest CofE findings, as reported in today's London Times, clubbing is not a spiritual experience, Buffy the vampire Slayer doesn't make teenagers think about alternative realities and September 11 doesn't seem to have led to any kind of religious musings.

The research was carried in part by Bob Mayo an excellent analyst of trends whose book Ambiguous Evangelism trailed some of these findings.

My immediate response was two-fold. First, I'm really pleased I'm not a youth worker! Though our church is in the throes of recruiting a minister for youth and young adults and it seems to me that he or she will have his/her work cut out if this research is true.

Second, I wonder how to square the findings with conversations I've had with young and youngish people over the past two weekends - in pubs in Brighton and outside pubs in Bromley. That experience suggests that young people - 18-35s - seem pretty clued up on the Christian Faith (and one or two other religions), happy to talk about it when confronted by obvious representatives of the churches (I was wearing a Street Pastors' uniform in Bromley and a Baptist Assembly lanyard in Brighton) and not hostile even if they did not believe.

Of course, I'd need to get hold of the report and read it from cover to cover to make sure that the lovely Ruth Gledhill of the Times is not leading me up the garden path. But then I'd need to get stuck into some serious thinking about what this means for our ministry as a church and individuals.

Oh, the Ecclesiates text says: ' With the help of a bottle of wine and all the wisdom I could muster, I tried my level best to penetrate the absurdity of life. I wanted to get a handle on anything useful we mortals might do during the years we spend on this earth.'

I suggest we all get down to Majestic and then get our thinking caps on (that's thinking with a 'th' at the beginning....)

Life after prism

The Baptist Assembly went really well - possibly the best for a long time. Richard Foster was awesome on the last night. Kate Coleman - our new president - was truly inspirational on the home mission evening. It was good to catch up with people and see Brighton clubland close-up.

I was there to lead Prism - the first alternative strand at the assembly. And all things considered it went well. Good numbers, good atmosphere, people joining in and fantastic music. Both Krystaal, our house band on Saturday and Sunday, and Gareth Davies-Jones, who graced our programme on Friday evening, were brilliant.

If you've not checked out Gareth Davies-Jones you really should. He's made two albums of intelligent, beautifully-played folk (with a funky-ish feel). You can hear samples and order product at www.headingwestmusic.com

And what can you say about Krystaal? Three brothers from the Congo, forced to flee following the university masacre in the dying days of the Mbutu regime, reunited in Canada through the commitment and support of Baptist Christians, they are a tight, funky outfit producing music that exudes life, hope and joy. Check out their album Keep on Standing. Another CD is imminent.

I'm now picking up the pieces back home, seeing what's happened and what the week holds. I'll be reflecting further on Prism later in the week. If you were there post a comment - I'd be really interested to know what you thought (good or bad)

Assembling in Brighton

First thing in the morning, I'm off to the Baptist Assembly in Brighton to be involved in Prism - which I think I'm looking forward to (I stocked up with a ton of art material and other stuff today to make the event go with a bang).

In the slack times I've got Robert Johnstone's Useless Beauty (his study of Ecclesiastes interpreted through the movies). I'm looking forward to reading this because all his stuff is good. Next Sunday we're starting a series on Ecclesiastes - just three Sunday evenings - called our baffling world. I think I'll be using lots of movie references so I'll be interested to see what films Johnstone finds throwing light on this enigmatic text.

I'll be listening to Imogen Heap, Eels, the Secret Machines and editors in the car on the way down. Should put me in the right mood!

I'll let you know how it went next week.

Responsible mission

I've been discovering what a wonderful mission text John 10 is. We all know that John 10:10 is a great summary of the good news about Jesus. But the whole chapter is actually a brilliant exposition of what it means to live responsibly in the world as God intended us to.

We think of it as talking about Jesus being the gate and the good shepherd - which, of course, it is. But in claiming that he was the way in which people entered God's salvation and was the model leader who embodied God's style of leadership, he was laying claim to the whole of life and not just people's religion - which is, of course, why the political and religious leaders of his day opposed him.

And as John makes clear, after the resurrection, Jesus sent his people to do as he did (John 20:21). So our mission is about exercising responsibility for the planet God is redeeming. This is why mission is holistic, concerned with clean water, work and welfare as well as the forgiveness of sins. Indeed if all we offer is a spiritual experience, we are offering less than the gospel of Jesus. For he came that people might know life in all its fullness and that is surely as much about health, work, independence, good government and freedom (just ask the people of Nepal if they're experiencing life in all its fullness at the moment) as it is about going to heaven when we die.

I thought these arguments were won and that all we needed to do was garner resources to ensure that God's people could do the mission he's called us to. But I was wrong. Just the other day I had a long conversation with an intelligent young person about the nature of mission who argued that it was only and solely about people's personal relationship with God and that social action was not really part of it - unless it gave opportunity to speak about their sin and need for forgiveness.

I think we all need to read John 10 a little more carefully...

Cafe culture

It's our anniversary cafe church on Sunday evening - we've been doing them a whole year. We started with a BMS Sunday focusing on Africa and this anniversary one is focusing on feet - standing on holy ground, going into the world with the good news (Exodus and Isaiah).

Our format has changed over the year, moving from looking at moral issues to a more liquid worship model, offering fresh ways of encountering God. From May, we aim to do another series of issue-based cafe services looking at conspiracy theories (the da vinci code, the gospel of judas, etc), gossip and the media, U2 and God. These will be aimed at people on the edge of faith, wondering what the Christian faith means in today's culture.

cafe services have been enormous fun but they are very labour intensive. I couldn't do them without my administrative assistant, who not only shops for a variety of bizarre items, but also gets props ready and increasingly has an input into how we'll deliver the theme. I also have a couple of others who offer creative input and help delivering the evening.

But these kind of events take a lot of putting together - so if you're pondering doing it, get a good team around you.

Back from a busy time at Spring Harvest. On the whole it was a good experience. A few good new songs - in a sea of increasing blandness, I fear - some good teaching/exhortation and some great fellowship (that's what I go for, really!)

I might be writing something for next year's Spring Harvest - watch this space.

Now I'm back for a weekend - BMS Sunday so it'll be great - and then off to the Baptist assembly where I'm involved with the new alternative strand called Prism.

Off to Spring Harvest

Finishing off preparing for Spring Harvest ahead of going away first thing in the morning to Skegness. So no blogging for a few days.

Have a great Easter everyone.

Isn't Jesus interesting...?

I'm reading Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan's The Last Week, an account of the final seven days of Jesus' life by two of the Jesus Seminar's superstars. It's brilliant and infuriating in equal measure, but well worth reading.

There's been no shortage of Jesus sories in the news over the past few days, such as the publication of the Gospel of Judas and James Tabor's new book on the Jesus Dynasty. I've not read the latter - though the book blurb and extracts that are online (get at them through Mark Goodacre's weblog at www.ntgateway.com).

The gospel of Judas tells us nothing about the events of the first Easter but gives us a fascinating insight into second century gnostic thinking.

All this comes in the wake of Dan Brown winning his high court action against the authors of Holy Blood and Holy Grail (or was that the other way round) and therefore keeping the Da Vinci Code hype going (and the tills churning).

Some Christians see this as a concerted attack on orthodox Christianity - and there might be some truth in this. Certainly the Jesus Seminar and the Westar Institute that set it up aims to raise questions about orthodox Christianity and show that traditional understandings of Jesus and Christian origins are plain wrong.

But this is also a great opportunity for Christians to talk about the historical origins of our faith and the credibilty of the records on which our faith is based.

For all the beauty of their writing, it seems to me that Borg and Crossan go out of their way to trash Christian doctrines that they disagree with but which the historical material they are dealing with (Mark's gospel) seems to uphold. In order to achieve this, they have to make theological judgments about which bits of Mark are accurate. Those judgments strike me as being extremely arbitary which makes me wonder if their assertions about other history are equally tendentious.

Hope puts a spring in your step

Last night we finished a series on What Christians Believe, rounding it off with hope - what is it that Christians are hoping for? And what difference does it make?

I think it's fair to say we had a good evening. The discussion was lively and the conversations I had after the service were very encouraging.

I think what pleased me most was the fact that people wanted to continue to think about these issues, read the scriptures I recommended and follow up other material. It's heartening when some are saying - I think rightly - that Christians appear less inclined to think about their faith, to find a group of people keen to have this kind of conversation in church.

What was most heartening of all were the numbers who indicated how exciting they found the Christian hope that we outlined. And what kind of difference it might make to the way they live their lives in a world teetering on the brink of despair.

Inspiring models

There are two particular projects on the expressions DVD which have set me thinking - in particular, thinking that we could do similar things where we are.

The first is Messy Church in Portsmouth, a wonderful child centred congregation featuring arts and crafts and food - what more do you need? The other is Nightshift at Hereford Baptist Church, in which the church opens late at night to offer hot drinks and conversation to people going home from clubs - what could be simpler?

Both these ideas seem obvious when you see them - but only when someone else has thought of them!

Anyway, I'm buying the DVD for my leaders and we'll talk about these and other ways of being church to see if there are things we could be doing here.

The shape of obedience

Listening to the Secret machines - good stuff. Reading Richard Hays' on Paul's use of the OT - brilliant, essential. Watching a DVD on new ways of being church - inspiring; lots of good models; plenty to think about (called Expressions: the dvd).

I've talked about this before, but there are so many things to keep an eye on in this job that it's sometimes hard to know where to focus.

We're about to go to Spring Harvest and after that I'm involved in the Baptist Assembly - so those things outside the immediate life of the church are pressing. Then there are meetings with people about getting a housing advice centre off the ground with other churches and statutory sector partners - so the mission of the church locally is pressing. Then there's the regular life of the church with the ups and downs of peoples' health, with niggles over roles and how we organise things, with preaching and teaching, leading worship, etc - so the internal life of the church is pressing.

It's all very stimulating and I know how fortunate I am to be in this position compared with so many who don't find their jobs as energising. I just wish there were 8 days in a week!

Yesterday I was particularly thinking about how we help people to think in a biblical way about the world we live in. Preparing for Palm Sunday, I've been struck about the competing expectations and understandings people had about the messiah and whether Jesus fitted the bill.

John paints a picture of different crowds ebbing and flowing around Jesus, welcoming him, badgering him, criticising him, wanting a slice of the action. And at the centre is Jesus, a still point in a swirling world, though clearly anguished at what lay ahead of him. His desire was to help those around him see things as he saw them.

Hays argues that this was Paul's intention in his letters. He calls it 'the conversion of the imagination' which I think is a wonderful phrase, encapsulating the need for us to to allow our whole thought process to be transformed by God, so that we look at, interact with and feel differently about the world we live in. Hays says that this happens through correctly reading the Bible. I agree. And I'd add that the Holy Spirit has a key role to play in taking and applying scripture to our thought processes.

The portrait of Jesus in John 12 is a portrait of an obedient Son under great pressure. He writes it to tell us what happened. But he also writes it to show us - obedient children - the shape of lives lived out of the still centre of obedience to God and his purposes. He writes to shape our thinking and hence our living. Jesus could only do what he did because he knew who he was under God, knowledge forged by the Word and the Spirit.

Good reading and listening

Picked up a digitally remastered copy of Jethro Tull's Benefit yesterday. Among the bonus tracks is Witch's Promise, the first Tull track I heard on Top of the Pops back in 1970-ish. It all still sounds surprisingly fresh, Ian Anderson's crisp diction and Martin Barre's rampant guitar making a very English sound.

I also acquired the remastered My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, one of the first albums to use samples - cut ups, I think they were called back in 1980/81. This too has weathered well. The guy at Virgin selling it to me wasn't born when it first came out and marveled that it had been re-released!

I have also discovered Gareth Davis-Jones, a Christian singer-songwriter from the English North East. He has an album out and another being launched at the Baptist Assembly in Late April. He's one of the musicians we've got lined up for Prism, the alternative strand of the Assembly. I'm looking forward to hearing him in the flesh. Meanwhile you can check him out at www.headingwestmusic.com

Having spent more time than is healthy on trains over the past couple of weeks I've also been doing some reading. Tom Wright's new one Evil and the Justice of God (SPCK £12.99), apart from being a tad overpriced is another example of first rate scholarship and spot-on apologetics. I'm also part-way through his Simply Christian - equally good.

I've just started Moazzam Begg's autobiography Enemy Combatant which is sobering stuff.

Freedom - much talked of, little enjoyed?

We rejoice with Norman Kember and his family that he's free and home. It is great news for him and James Loney and Harmeet singh Sooden. It's important that we don't forget Tom Fox and his family in our celebrations.

Many are puzzled by Norman's actions - the UK press reaction has been bewildering - but as the wonderful Bob Gardiner, his pastor, said at the weekend the gospel makes us all fools in the eyes of the world.

We are also concerned at the plight of Abdul Rahman, facing the death penalty in Afghanistan for converting to Christianity 16 years ago. He is one of hundreds if not thousands of Christians around the world at risk of losing their life simply because of their faith.

It's good to see that the press and governments around the world are up in arms about this. Let's pray that he's released unmolested. Sadly there are too many confirmed stories of converts from that part of the world who have been released by the courts only to be murdered by mobs on the courthouse steps.

Maybe we should expect the world to hate us - Jesus told us it would - and that its hatred in some places will result in death for members of our family. It shouldn't stop us calling for countries who are members of the United Nations to live up to their commitments - in particular the commitment to religious freedom and tolerance.

This commitment means not only that Christians shouldn't be on trial for their faith but that governments should be educating their populations in the principles of tolerance and acceptance of difference. One of the key marks of a free society - as our baptist forbears were the first to say (I think) - is freedom to choose which religion, if any, to follow.

Of course, such tolerance is a matter of grace. And maybe you need the Spirit to live in such a way.

Passing on the faith

Life is really hectic so I'm sorry for not blogging for a while.

I've been pondering how we pass the faith on to the rising generation. I love the new Cadbury's TV ad where a boy gives a girl a couple of chunks of his chocolate bar, marries her, has a son who is seen in the last frame giving a chunk of chocolate to the girl he fancies. It strikes me as being a wonderful picture of what the author of Deuteronomy might have been trying to convey.

Deuteronomy 6 - which we use in dedication services - talks of families speaking about God's Law when they sit down and when they go out. It's a picture of mums and dads passing their faith on to their kids.

As we were reflecting on mother's day this morning at church, we talked about the relationship between family, church and the children's and youth programme in raising adult believers. Gone are the days when Christians are bringing their children up in a sympathetic environment.

David Smith puts it like this 'Adjusting to this new context [exile, the marginalisation of the church in western culture] is incredibly difficult since the mindset of most Western Christians has been formed by centuries of tradition which has conditioned them to expect the surrounding world to constitute a friendly and hospitable environment for their beliefs and values.' Lots of us still live as if this weren't so. We especially think that old ways of doing Sunday School and youth work still apply, are still good enough. [By the way if you've not come across David Smith, check out his stuff, especially Mission After Christendom (DLT, 2003) - excellent.]

David Voas - whom I've talked about before - sums it up well: the church has a half life of a generation, two church going parents have a 50:50 chance of passing their faith on to their children.

This means we face a challenge. One of the most stimulating thinkers in this area is Pete Ward. His book Growing up Evangelical: Youthwork and the making of a subculture is a revelation. He basically argues that over the past couple of generations, youthwork has aimed to create safe havens, bubbles that protect our kids from the world beyond the church. As a result they have failed to convert a childlike faith in Jesus into an adult discipleship.

This is a real problem for the church. If even church goers only have a 50:50 chance of passing their faith on to their kids, we need to think very seriously about how we as churches support parents in discipling our kids. We need to give our children and young people the tools to navigate their way as Christians in the choppy and turbulent waters of school, friendships, university and jobs.

Any ideas?

Who we are (yet again)

Started Street Pastor training last Saturday - excellent. Today I wrote a piece for my church magazine. These are linked by a thought about Good Friday (stay with me...)

Les Isaacs, the founder of Street Pastors, suggested that people outside the church know lots of things that we're against, but very little of what we're for. Earlier today I was musing on how we celebrate Good Friday. A little while ago I was in the middle of a rant by a group of Christians about how outrageous it is that the shops are open on Good Friday.

Now I think it might be a generational thing, but I'm not sure I can't hot under the collar about shop opening hours. Sometimes I need to shop at midnight and am grateful for the corner shops and supermarkets open at that time. Sometimes I need things on a Sunday. I even admit to having gone shopping on Good Friday (in fact I have done so the last three years at Spring Harvest - the UK's premier Christian conference!)

As I mentioned a few posts ago, Paul urged his readers in Rome to live their lives in the ordinary daily round in an extraordinary way because they were indwelt by the Spirit of God.

There was no acknowledgement of Good Friday in First Century Rome. And Paul didn't seem to be lobbying for one. Rather he was lobbying for a people whose lives were shaped by the cross to be living in the midst of working, shopping and playing Romans and allowing the shadow of the cross to fall over their lives.

Is there a lesson in this for us? I think so.

Keeping the balls aloft

Life's been a bit manic (again) hence the gap between posts.

Have been listening to the Arctic Monkeys (excellent) and Sarah McLachlan (equally excellent), but the stand out music of the last fortnight has been Eels live album called Live at Town Hall. It's a great collection of songs - heavily weighted to the wonderful Blinking Lights album - played by E and string section, pump organ and guitar. It shows off his song writing skills and especially his ability to deliver a lyric.

In between I've been working. I finished my Galatians manuscript and sent it off to the publisher - I await the blue pencil response! We're more than halfway through a series on basic Christian beliefs which is proving quite interesting. Last night it was the cross and I'm not sure it went as well as I'd hoped - it's such a vast subject I felt like I was drowning in it at times.

I've been counting the number of balls I have to keep up in the air. My admin assistant (what a luxury it is to have one!) has produced me an action plan of my roles - in the church and beyond. It runs to some 15 separate items (many of which are multi-faceted).

Looking at it I wonder - does church have to be this complicated?

Who we are (revisited)

Had a good ministers' conference - lots of stimulating conversation. I also celebrated my 50th birthday on the second day.

Birthdays are always a time when you think about how life's going. That combined with the conversations at the conference have had me thinking this week further thoughts about our identity as Christians.

If we're right that Paul stresses to the Romans that our identity has to do with our call to be holy people (understood in the Old Testament sense of set apart), our adoption as children of God and our entry into a new family that we label 'the church' - and I think we are - what does this mean 'the church' should look and feel like.

I came away from the conference with the nagging feeling that ministers are still seeing themselves as CEOs of complex religious service organisations, that their role is to get all the pieces in place to ensure that 'church' maximises productivity in the form of making new converts and using everyone's gifts efficiently.

Now don't me wrong, both of those things are vitally important. But it strikes me that Paul would find all our talk of structures and programmes, groups for this, that and the other really rather puzzling.

Reading Romans again, I was forcefully reminded that Paul says almost nothing about how to do 'church', nothing about structure, organisation, leadership or strategy - even though, he does suggest that his ministry over the previous few years has been based on a strategy of reaching the major cities of the Eastern Med (though sometimes I wonder whether we are reading modern business-speak back into Paul's words in Romans 15:15-33 which have a much more confessional, liturgical and theological tone than most corporate annual reports!)

Even more, I was struck again by the fact that Paul doesn't tell those outseide 'the church' how to live their lives. Of course, he talks about the consequences of human sin and fallenness - only so that he can show how God in Christ has dealt with sin as a destroyer of creation as well as a personal character trait of individual people. But there's no pointing the finger at neighbours who are living together or governments who allow anti-Christian propaganda free-reign in the media.

Rather Paul talks about community, family, beloved friends and co-workers and welcoming all in the name of Christ. Paul talks about our identity in Christ as God's redefined people and speaks of us living out of that identity in a competitive empire. Paul talks about our community life being inklings of the new creation God is making through Jesus in the power of the Spirit. This is a challenge to Christians living in the rich west, living at the heart of an empire that seeks to impose its values on the world by economic clout and military might.

What would our 'churches' look and feel like if we focused on being community and left it to God's Spirit to use our life together as the means to infect the culture around us?

Who are we, then?

Next week I'm off to a ministers' conference to do the Bible readings. And I'm really looking forward to it - though I'm not sure I have anything particular to contribute to my brothers' and sisters' understanding of either the text or their jobs.

I've decided to read Romans 1 and 16, the opening and closing of Paul's great letter, and think about the twin issues of identity and inclusion. Who are we in Christ? How do we build genuinely inclusive communities?

These have always been key issues - they clearly were for Paul's first hearers. But I feel them to be particularly important for us today. Our identity as Christians in the West has taken a hammering with the passing of Christendom and the abandonment of the faith by so many of our neighbours. Who are we when so few think the Christian faith worth following?

I guess Paul's first hearers thought something similar for different reasons. There were not many Christians in Rome in the mid-50s when Paul wrote. Romans 16 suggests five house churches, possibly seven. Even if 30 people went to each - which would be pushing it, given the capacity of the homes these groups met in - that would mean a Christian community of no more than a couple of hundred people in a city of one million.

Furthermore, these believers would be people of little status or clout. They wouldn't even have had the presence that the Jewish community had through its purpose-built meeting places. The Christian community would have been all-but invisible.

So, what was their sense of identity? Paul clearly wants them to understand themselves in relation to the coming Kingdom: they are people of the new age rather than the age that is passing away. They are people of the resurrection, people who know the forgiveness of God and the renewal of their lives through his Spirit. In short they are holy people.

And they have this status not because they were born into it - which must have been a relief to those (a majority) who were at the bottom of the social heap and hence born to nothing but penury - but because God chose to give it to them as an act of grace. More than that, by making them holy and filling them with the Holy Spirit, God made them into brothers and sisters of his son, Jesus, he adopted them into his family (adoption into a divine family was the highest a Roman could imagine - it's what Caesar had a habit of doing).

Paganism in ancient Rome - as much as various new age spiritualities these days - offered ways for people - who'd never be adopted into the emperor's family - to discover the god within them, to realise that they were in some way already divine or had the potential to be. The good news of Jesus is that God adopts us into his family, makes us partakers of the divine nature, as Peter puts it, through our faith in Jesus.

That has to be good news in any culture, doesn't it?

Showing people Jesus

I was talking a guy yesterday who confirmed something I've believed for a while. His church is involved with a number of partnerships with outside organisations which enable it to meet a variety of needs in its local community.

So it runs a parenting course, a project to reduce youth offending, an after school club - each with a different partner providing funding or material or a worker.

As a result the church is growing and yet it does no programmed evangelism.

Why? Because the people who are coming to the projcts are being drawn into something that is 'blessing' them and they want to find out why. So all sorts of conversations happen and people who come to the building for one thing end up coming for others - including on Sundays to find out what makes these Christian tick.

That's got to be worth thinking about.

Earthing the vision

Had a meeting with the council yesterday to talk through how churches could be involved with the homeless in our borough. There are worryingly large numbers of them for such an apparently prosperous place - 180 under 18s a year presenting themselves with no roof over their heads; another 200 of all ages per month (though many of these are returners) who'd be described as 'sofa surfers' - people who live on friends' sofas for months even years at a time.

Social changes account for the rise in numbers - the breakdown of relationships leaving people in 30s or 40s homeless but wanting to stay near children; young people seeking independence but not having the wherewithal to fund it in an expensive town; mental health, drug and alcohol problems; the pressure on housing stock because of the numbers choosing to live alone.

As I listened to these numbers being delivered by stretched council officials who clearly cared about the human lives behind these statistics, I recalled Jeremiah 29:7. Yet again this verse is becoming a major feature of my life. It called me into ministry 30 years ago. It haunts my thinking about the shape of Christian community and the nature of our mission.

And it needs to be earthed. Why would we want to help people who are homeless or at risk of becoming so? Because we want to seek their welfare. Why spend time helping people to learn the basic life skills needed to run a home, pay their bills and establish themselves as members of our community? Because we want to seek their welfare. Why work with other churches and offer our premises as a base for an advice centre? Why put our own money and resources into this? Because we want to seek the welfare of the city where we've been exiled.

This is all the agenda we need.

PS... Apparently, there's a cricketer with my name who's the 9th sexiest man in the world. Perhaps I should demand a recount....

Mistaken identity?

According to page 7 of today's Independent newspaper, I am the 9th sexiest man in the world. Either that or I have been the victim of identity theft!

There was a great line on Desperate Housewives last night - my second favourite TV show of the moment (House being my favourite - so pleased it's back). Bree and her mother-in-law, Phyllis, do not get on and Phyllis was beginning to have convenient memory lapses that cast Bree in a bad light and even on occasion threatened her well-being. After a number of illustrations of this, the show's narrator said: 'her mother-in-law's memory is fine; it's her soul that was faulty.' Lovely.

We'll be thinking about human nature, who we are, why we are what we are, on Sunday evening. So I'll be weaving these things in somehow.

Thinking about Christian worship

That's the thing about blogs - don't get one for days, then two come along at once.

If you're looking for stimulating new year reading, then can I recommend Larry Hurtado's At the Origins of Christian Worship?

Hurtado is professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology at Edinburgh. Over the past 20 years, he has been exploring the whole issue of how monotheistic Jews came to see Jesus as divine.

At the end of the 1980s he published One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism. Then a couple of years he produced a massive tome called Lord Jesus Christ. Along with a collection of essays that came out ate last year called How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? this amounts to a formidable body of work.

Hurtado has an easy style for a scholarly writer and an eye for how all this affects Christian belief today. At the Origins of Christian Worship is a set of four lectures he gave exploring the religious environment into which Christianity was born and the nature of early Christian devotion to Jesus. He tackles questions like 'how did the early Christians come to worship Jesus?' 'what evidence do we have for their practices?' and 'what might early Christian devotion have to say to us in the twenty-first century?' It's great stuff.

Early Christian worship fed into early Christian thinking about who exactly Jesus was and the shape of Christian community - hence it's a key element in any social history of the early church. I'm thinking of devoting a couple of sessions to it in my lecture course in Sri Lanka.

Better on foot

I've had car trouble this week. And that combined with other pressures (the sheer volume of work) means I haven't blogged for a while. Apologies.

I was reflecting on my car's inability to go, while reading Mark Goodacre's NT gateway blog (excellent - but he's been blogging less than me recently; get a grip, Mark). He wondered how fast Jesus walked - as you do...

The reason is that James Dunn in his enormous book Jesus Remembered suggests that the young carpenter would have walked regularly to Seppharis - just 5km away from Nazareth - and might therefore have been involved in building the theatre as well as other projects in that highly Gentile-influenced town.

It's fascinating to think of Jesus as an ordinary working man - which he would have been for at least 15 years of his life. What did he make? In Gibson's The Passion, Mel has him rather anachronistically making a table of the kind westerners sit at for meals, with Jesus quipping to his mother that he's sure it'll catch on.

The likelihood is that he would have made furniture and agricultural equipment but would have spent more of his time helping to build buildings of all kinds - mainly houses, maybe, but also larger public buildings. And in doing that he would have been mixing with people of many faiths - Sepphoris was full of Gentiles attracted there by the strong Roman presence; and other parts of Galilee had significant non-Jewish populations.

It makes you think doesn't it? The Son of God sitting down for a midday break with chippies from Roman provinces north of Judea, dealing with site managers employed by Pilate and his predecessors, sharing the time of day with soldiers and officials, traders and imperial hangers-on.

It raises all kinds of questions about what languages Jesus spoke - his gentile colleagues wouldn't have spoken Aramaic, so he must have known enough Greek to get by; about how he lived - was he away from home for extended periods of time (The movie with Jeremy Sisto playing Jesus has a scene with him and his father away from home seeking work in a struggling economy). It might also help us to see where Jesus acquired his understanding of ordinary working life, his stock of images drawn that life that appear in his parables. It also roots the Son of God in a very specific place and time with all the pressures that brings.

I am having to think about these things as I'm teaching a course in Sri Lanka in July on the social history of early Christianity - a slightly more daunting prospect than I was expecting when I agreed to do a few lectures when I visit friends on the island!

It promises to be fascinating preparing for it - if only I can fit in with everything else! Now where's the number of my breakdown service....

New Year listening

Check out the new Strokes album - First Impressions of Earth - you won't be sorry (if you like this kind of thing).

It's taken a bit of a mauling from the critics but it strikes me it's everything we want from the Strokes - world-weary, guitar-dueling rock from the spiritual heirs of the great Television.

One track in particular struck me as I was preparing a sermon on 'the God who's speaking' last week. Called Ask me anything, it contains the wonderful line 'don't be a coconut/God is trying to talk to you/we could drag it out/but that's for other bands to do...' Singer, Julian Casablancas, going on to protest 'I've got nothing to say'

Great riffs and theological eloquence as well - what more could you ask?

Seeking our city's welfare

Just back from the Mainstream Conference. Good time.

In particular, Glen Marshall's Bible readings in Jeremiah were spot on. He dealt with chapters 1 and 29 and both studies were full of insight and wisdom.

Jeremiah 29:7 was a significant verse calling me into ministry when I was a student almost 30 years ago. It's surfaced at crucial times over the intervening years. This week, longing for a word from God, I was once again forcefully reminded how God has linked our shalom with the shalom of our neighbours.

For me, it means that my focus needs to be outside the church not inside. No change there, then. But Jeremiah's letter to the exiles contains some home truths we don't really like. For starters, he said the exile was to last their whole lives - that's the import of 70 years (v10). What about us? If it's true that the church in the UK is in a time of exile, how long will it last? Will we never see the end of it? Sobering thought.

Those exiles, said Jeremiah, need to settle into their new situation and seek God's shalom for the Babylonians. This was outrageous advice. Babylon had defeated Judah and carted half the population into exile. It was still menacing the remaining people. In just a few short years, its forces would crush Judah's rebellion, level Jerusalem and destroy the temple.

And yet... Jeremiah says seek the shalom of these people in their homeland. What are the implications of that advice for us in the secular, faith-ambivalent UK? What does it mean to seek the shalom of our post-Christendom, consumer culture?

Jeremiah 29:11, a favourite OT verse because of its promise, is closely linked to verse 7: God wants to bless us with his shalom. That's his plan for us. How will it happen? He's told us already. It'll happen as we seek the shalom of the city where we've been sent into exile. On top of that, shalom will come as we seek God in the midst of exile (v12-14). For Jeremiah's first readers this was confirmation that they can find God in Babylon and not just in the temple in Jerusalem. For us, it means that we can and should expect to meet God in the city whose shalom we're seeking, where we've been exiled.

Tough? Exciting?

Happy birthday

Hey, my blog's a whole year old...

happy birthday and blow out your candles nicely...

Happy New Year

Well, it's 2006. This blog is nearly a year old - amazing!

Happy New Year to all of you who read it. May God be more real and active in your lives this year than last.

I've had a quiet Christmas - except for the day at the Ikea sale (if ever you need a metaphor for eternal punishment....!)

I have also been writing some of the book on Galatians that I need to finish by the end of February - four sections in two days (not bad going).

The more I read and wrestle with Galatians, the more I love it - it's raw emotion, creative thinking, incredible grasp of the implications of the life, faithfulness and death of Jesus, its sheer radical take on what it means to be a Christian. Sometimes I read Galatians and then I look at the church and I wonder where the connection is.

I've also been finishing off a workbook for our major New Year series - What Christians Believe - without finding a snappier title for it. Perhaps I should call it the full Monty or true spirituality (but those titles have gone). I've been trying to capture the fact that the Christian faith is a relationship with God that's open to examination and explanation because God has spoken to us through his Word in both the Bible and in Jesus and he still speaks as his Spirit interprets his word to us in our daily lives.

For this reason, Christianity is less a religion and more a spirituality - and thus very trendy, according to the sociologists! But it's far more than that. If Jesus is God incarnate and if we can meet him in the power of his Spirit, then the Christian faith is a relationship that should lead to personal and social revolution.

So maybe our new year's resolution should be to get into this Christian faith so that we and our neighbourhoods are turned upside down.

Happy 2006.

Christmas greetings

The chances are I won't blog again until next week.

So may I take this chance of wishing you all a very happy Christmas.

I hope you get a chance not only to reflect on the Christmas story but to meet its central character. The wonder of Christmas is that God's word became flesh and moved into our neighbourhood so we could talk face-to-face.

Best of 2005

Christmas is the time of year when newspapers and magazines pick their best of the year - books, music, movies.

I always scan the lists for confirmation of my taste. I notice that I have five of the Word's top ten albums of the year and five of Q's - though they're a slightly different five.

The albums I've bought this year that I'm still listening to on a regular basis are Kaiser Chiefs, Coldplay, Gorllaz, Hard Fi, Arcade Fire, Dylan's No Direction Home, the Magic Numbers, the Blind Boys of Alabama with Roy Harper (or is that the other way round?) and Neil Young. These are all really fine pieces of work.

My top three albums of the year, however, are Eels Blinking Lights and Other Revelations, Elbow's Leaders of the Free World and Kate Bush's Aerial - these three are head and shoulders above the rest for originality, lyrical power and musical beauty. Each in their own way show that pop music can deal with profound and grown up issues and cast a new light of life's struggles and joys.

If you're still compiling Christmas lists, put these albums on them - you won't be disappointed