The Broth of God

One Week In

2012-01-26T15:14:00.003Z

I'm not quite sure what to do with "online me" now I'm a real vicar. Perhaps I need to tweet more, and tweet on holier topics than "funny things my three year old says" and lesser quotations of Batman. Maybe I should get a brand new shiny blog, or at least rename my old one away from a tongue in cheek poke at Calvinistic theology. Either way I thought I'd blog a few words which summed up the experience of my first week as a vicar...

Brilliant! Honestly, how lovely and faithful and inspiring is it possible for God's people to get? I've just come away from a meeting with the head of one of the local primary schools, who seemed equally brilliant, and am looking forward to a meeting with my two fantastic churchwardens tonight. Before things get too sickly sweet, I must state that I'm not expecting this state of heavenly bliss / nirvana to last forever, and I'm sure I'll be introduced to all the church's foibles in time as they are introduced to mine. A curate friend email me the other day and said "enjoy the honeymoon" which really sums the whole thing up. But, right at the moment, I'm quite happy to keep the enthusiastic smile going till my facial muscles give up, (try to) remember to thank God for all these blessings...oh, and keep going with the DIY mundanities till I can remember where I put everything.

And now for a prayerful encounter with iTunes, with my first attempt at choosing CD tracks for Sunday worship. Wish me well.

First Look at New Chuggers

2011-12-12T18:41:00.007Z

It's a fact - I never really grew out of kids toys - I just got to the age when they were no longer socially acceptable. And it's taken having a 3 year old to realise this.

Now, I was never into train sets much as a child, but I have to say I've quite enjoyed tuning into Chuggington with Asher for the last few months, so it wasn't just the nipper who was pleased to see three new chuggers, especially when one of them is a eco warrior which apparently runs on vegetable oil. Here they are, anyway - Decka, Piper and Skylar:

"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product."

2011-11-14T21:28:00.005Z

In a three year stretch where I have started working for one of the UK's most archaic institutions (The Church of England), become a dad and turned 30, I was always going to get to the point where I felt that I had to play catchup with the world. Now, these and other things - buying Q Magazine, listening to Radio 2 (occasionally), and berating all the mindless pap in the Pop Charts - are all things which have at various points made me feel like a dinosaur. But nothing quite so much as my relationship with new technology, which has been at best sporadic, and at worst resembled that bit at the end of "one potato, two potato..." - you know what I mean.

I never had a SNES, was the last of my mates to get a mobile phone and listened a bit too much to my grandparents in my youth, but on leaving University I quickly became a new man, getting properly PC literate and even ending up in a job in web design (sort of). All this made me feel a little more down with the kids.

But since leaving the world of work to become a theology student in 2005 I've pretty much been in catchup mode since. It's not being slightly behind or ignorant which has made me feel the most out of touch, though, as being able to articulate some sort of half-baked argument against the philosophy of the thing.

Am I the only one, for example, who finds it a little creepy that one day I can do a Google search for a couple of bedside tables, and the next the very same tables appear alongside a portrait of Geoffrey Boycott on cricinfo.com? Or maybe I'm a little bit antisocial not being entirely interested in each and every song my friends are listening to on Spotify. I certainly don't want people from church to know when I'm playing Bejewelled Blitz, in any case.

However the weirdest, and slightly scariest one, recently has been Klout. Klout is an idea which not entirely unlike Nazi Germany appeals to some of one's least redeemed characteristics. In this case it's need to feel important or significant. It seems to me like the sort of logical outcome of Facebook, a linking up of all social networks, tracking the sorts of people you know and how many to give you a score of how much clout (Klout) you have.

Fair enough. I mean, I assumed it was one of those online tests, which would give you a score, and you'd go - oh, well, I thought I was a bit more important than that, and then move on to the next one. So I signed up, it gave me a pretty rubbish score of 10, and then I forgot about it. Only to find out in a few weeks that I was still signed up, my score (miraculously) had increased to 50, that there was no way of deleting my account, that Klout had access to all my friends and was most likely using them for marketing purposes, and was most likely in contravention of the data protection act.

I deleted my account. Apparently they had decided to add the function. I can rest easy in my bed now. Not just that I'm no longer being exploited, but because in some sense the world of social networking has found its limit of acceptability and that my uneasiness was not entirely down to my increasing alienation from popular culture.

Read more about the evils of Klout here:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/evil-social-networks.html

This is the one we've waited waited for

2011-10-27T19:30:00.004Z

In the last week two things I have waited for for a very long time became a reality.

The first is that I've finally managed to secure a job as a real, bona fide vicar. After a couple of unsuccessful interviews I finally found a place I really like where the people seem to like me too (based on the slightly unreal context of an interview day). So, St Mary's Wythall and Hollywood, here we come!

When I say it's taken a long time to happen, that could apply to the six weeks between the interview and finally being allowed to make the announcement, or the three months notice period I've just started. But what I was really talking about was the 10 1/2 years between actually beginning to pursue this and it happening.

In summer 2001 I walked into St Paul's, Leamington, found the incumbent and said simply "Hello - my name's Rich - I want to be a vicar." Having been a free evangelical for three years but still sensing a call back to the C of E I grew up in, the only thing I could sensibly do was find a suitable Anglican church, bed down in it and see what happened. Two years later Rev Jee sent off a nice letter to the Bishop agreeing with me, and after a couple more years of questions, essays and a selection conference Mel and I were off to college. For another three years. And then, there was the curacy - having learned in theory how to be a vicar I had to learn again, this time in the real world. And this summer I finally got the bishop to also agree, so here I am at 31 doing some last minute practice on teethy smiles and limp handshakes so Birmingham, here we come.

Perhaps the only thing I've been waiting for longer has been the resurrection of the Stone Roses, and after tuning in to their press conference last Tuesday and spending a frustrating hour on ticketmaster websites on Friday, I now have four shiny tickets for one of the world's greatest bands. What the world is waiting for - indeed.

Spring Harvest Reunited

2011-04-20T20:20:00.003Z

Just returned from a trip to Spring Harvest - my 6th in total (I think) but my first week at Skegness since I was 17. A good time was (largely) had by all, including the 23 strong posse we took from St Mark's. For the record here's a few best bits and one or two 'could do better's

Best Bits, in no particular order:

Inspiring worship in the presence of several thousand other Christians, making me forget myself and become a proper happy clappy (again) for a week
Excellent preaching keeping me captivated for a whole hour
The 'think zone' - the opportunity to listen at length to and learn from an excellent communicator, even if I didn't agree with him on everything
A wholehearted and inspiring commitment to social transformation, at home and overseas
Catching up with a friend I haven't seen for a decade, who is now married and has two children (just like me)
2 year old Asher absolutely loving the all age worship, and his Gran too

No so good bits, in no particular order

Shabby accomodation for some of our friends, including exploding toasters, bare wires, manky stains, smelly rooms, sticky carpets and a broken oven - sort it out, Butlins!
Underlying assumption that a commitment to biblical inerrancy is the only real option if you call yourself an evangelical (not universal but nevertheless annoying)

Overall we'll definitely go again, but maybe we'll wait till the kids are a bit older...

Folk Rocks!

2011-02-12T18:46:00.002Z

Recently, buying new music has become fairly predictable. Not in a bad way - I just look at the review section in Q every month and have a listen on Spotify. Then whatever I really like gets on my Amazon wishlist. It's a fairly clinical, and almost middle-aged, system, which efficiently takes me to the new music I like most without ever having to buy a bum CD or stand at the listening post on Our Price (remember that?)

What I also realised recently is how little old music I was getting into. Gone are the days of 'discovering' whole new genres, like hip hop, dance or reggae. In 2011 I still don't really understand classical music or like jazz very much (with a few exceptions), and I'd pretty much got to the point where I thought I knew as much as I needed to know about the music which has gone before.

How wrong I was! I've been gaining more of an interest in folk music in recent years, having gone to Cambridge Folk Festival whilst living there and gaining an ear for artists like the Pogues and Seth Lakeman, and more recently Mumford and Sons and Laura Marling. Well, a recent trip to my parents had me taking their huge 80s stereo to the tip, and with it their entire (terrible) record collection - Ronnie Barker, Leo Sayer and Bruce Forsyth, anyone? Well, they had an old folk compilation too, which I duly listened too...and among the floral dances and Celidh music there were some real old gems, and I've managed to find myself not one but two brand new favourite bands.

So, between my ears at the moment, late 60s works by Pentangle and Fairport Convention are literally the best thing since sliced bread, or Funky Kingston by Toots and the Maytals, or Blur, or whatever. Rock on, in a folky sort of way!

How's about a bit of paternalism?

2011-02-06T15:58:00.001Z

Quick post - a fancinating article today by Alain de Botton on the BBC news website, highlighting some of the limitations of our libertarian society and, so some degree, defending the idea of a nanny state. He talks about our 'laziness' in doing good and the lack of voices in our society who dare tell us how to live our lives.

Nice paragraph below and a link to the whole story:

"If we tend to think so often about eating crisps and buying cars, but relatively little about being nice or just, the fault is not merely our own. It is also that these two cardinal virtues are not generally in a position to become clients of Saatchi and Saatchi. Only the more negligible of goods presently have the resources to insist that we keep them foremost in our minds."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12360045

And then there were four

2011-02-06T15:49:00.003Z

Well, isn't this turning out to be a fun 2011!

On 21st Jan at 2.15pm my official hero Melanie J. Burley (my wife) gave birth to our second son, Joel Matthew, weighing 7lbs 3oz. Hats off to the lady for (it seems) subconsciously delaying the birth until our eldest son Asher was safely out of the way with our friend Lucy.

Other than struggling between us to get the four of us dressed and ready before midday every day, it's been a fairly successful and enjoyable fortnight of paternity leave, with the real fun starting on Wednesday when I'm back at work.

Other than that, I've been told I can start looking for a new job (and duly have...started looking I mean), preparing for my boss's 3 month sabbattical and wondering how I'm going to finish my MA dissertation in time. We're going away to Belgium for a fortnight in early June, and if I'm not dead by then I'll probably be a better man.

Don't call it a comeback...

2010-12-07T12:29:00.002Z

...I've been here for years.

I think I'm back. Or at least I've got a new wind of interest in social networking, following a talk me mate Andy did at a conference I went to a couple of weeks ago. So, scout's honour, I promise to
- respond to Facebook messages and friend requests promptly
- learn to express myself in 140 characters (Twitter), and
- find a good use for this blog, which is very likely to be a record of what I'm thinking, reading, watching, etc, which I can look back on for sermon illustrations in future.

Well done blogger - I managed to upgrade the look of said blog in about 5 seconds, so it now looks a bit like my stufy, only without the messay desk. Better get on to that, actually...

Twit

2010-12-01T22:08:00.000Z

Just started using Twitter properly after signing up for it a year and a half ago, and then forgetting about it. Almost exactly the opposite of this blog, come to think of it.

Anyhow, I signed up to follow Stephen Fry (as everyone does) to find he's just blogged about getting his 2 millionth follower (Jonathan from Dundee, not Rich from Rugby) and thought this bit was eminently quotable.

"I first heard about Twitter a month or so after it had been launched on the world and with my usual perspicacity mentally consigned it to the dustbin of history. ‘What a simultaneously hysterical, banal, footling and useless idea,’ I remember thinking. Be honest Jonathan, you almost certainly thought the same when you first heard of it. Everyone does. Those with long memories will remember when people said exactly the same about email. “Don’t get it. What’s the point? Strictly for the geeks.” I remember trying to convince everyone I knew that email was a brilliant thing: my agent, my accountant, friends, the director general of the BBC – they all thought I was mad. I say this not to boast about my powers of prophecy and insight, for they are truly feeble as my original contempt for Twitter shows, but to remind us all that when technological breakthroughs and social game-changers come through, almost no one recognises them. The messiah gets just one John the Baptist for every hundred thousand stoners, jeerers and nay-sayers."

Had a baby

2010-03-18T22:18:00.003Z

Been trying to reduce the number of Bookmarks I have in Firefox and couldn't quite bring myself to remove this one, it theoretically being my blog, so I thought I'd better at least write something.

Since I last wrote on the jaw-droppingly entertaining subject of finding a small scorpion in Cawston Grange I have become a dad, a priest and turned 30.

Oh, and I've also gained a proper hobby, playing drums in a Smiths Tribute Band, which is hardly headlining Glastonbury but I'd swap it for writing witty aphorisms about insects to an imaginary audience any day.

Now, back to the emails until I can think about something worthwhile to write about.

Scorpions in Rugby

2008-10-14T17:29:00.002Z

Mel and I went for a walk round our estate the other day and saw what looked very like 2 scorpions on our journey. About 2-3cm across, complete with raised stinger thing.

I looked it up and apparently the British ones don't sting very often. I was surprised to find out that we had them at all.

The Joys of Scrumping

2008-09-13T21:52:00.004Z

Being Yorkshire I've always been keen on free stuff, especially food. Today Mel, Mum, Dad and I managed to grab an assortment of blackberries, crab apples, sloes and elderberries, to make enough jam and crumbles to last us until Christmas, and festive drinks to go beyond it.

Here's to the Great British footpath and all the joys it yields.

Ontological Change

2008-09-11T11:57:00.001Z

Since being ordained I have
- Become, on the whole, much better at remembering people's names
- Had sweaty pits much more often

Bit of a curate's egg, that.

All fall down

2008-06-03T22:11:00.002Z

Yesterday, in a lecture about death, stood in front of a class of 25, in apparent comedy timing, I inexplicably blacked out. The first thing I said when I came to 20 or so seconds later and realised what had happened was "That's so embarrassing."

I hope it doesn't happen again.

Kettle's Yard

2008-06-03T22:05:00.002Z

As one of the many things we're trying to cram into our last few weeks in Cambridge, we visited the art gallery cum house Kettle's Yard last Friday. I didn't enjoy all the art but what I did like was the relaxed atmosphere of home mixed with art, which the one time owner Jime Ede had as a philosophy. The leaflet says:

"At Kettle's Yard Jim finally realise dhis vision of art as part of everyday life, alongside natural objects and household items. He hoped that in the house people would 'find a home and a welcome, a refuge of peace and order, of the visual arts and music...a continuing way of life...in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture' are arranged 'in light and space'."

Quite inspiring, really.

2 down 1 to go

2008-05-13T17:09:00.002Z

Nice feeling to hand in 12,000 words yesterday. A 'no but just' job as my mum would say, though. Handed in at the last available moment, as always.

The next and final major one is due in in 2 weeks - postmodernity and ethics. I'm watching the Jeremy Kyle show as research for it - honest!

What is emergent?

2008-05-07T14:44:00.002Z

Nicely done 10 minute overview of the emerging church (above).

What do I think of all things 'emergent'. My short answer at present is that I don't know. I've heard and read some inspiring things - particularly about effective ways of reaching young adults beyond the church - but I've also heard a few wishy washy, theologically lazy things as well.

People from a more 'conservative' background, like Don Carson and John Piper, have been trying to define and critique the movement, largely as a threat, and in some cases they may have a point. But I worry that this sense of needing to have two neat boxes to put everything into - 'sound' or 'dodgy' - is kind of missing the point a bit.

I rejoice when I see Christ being preached in ways that relate well to people, and I draw inspiration (and nick ideas) where I can, but I don't agree with everything I hear. People who have been put off by a negative experience of church might need a label like 'Emergent' to run to, but I hope after a while people can learn to stop defining themselves by what they're not, and that goes for everybody.

Alun Weel!

2008-04-15T12:15:00.006Z

Last Friday two things happened. One, I braved my first trip to a scrap yard, and two, I saw Alun Cochrane at the Junction. As is often the case with comedy, the second experience interpreted the first pretty well.

Alun introduced us to the concept of 'twat tax', the levy self-imposed by doing something incredibly stupid. In his case this was filling a diesel people carrier up with unleaded petrol. The result: £188.50 in 'twat tax'. In my case it’s usually getting parking tickets through losing track of time, but recently it was skidding my car in the snow and buckling a wheel.

Last time I there was something wrong with the car I was annoyed to find it cost over £100 for something I could probably have done myself if I’d been a bit more of a man. This time I decided both to invest in manly qualities and try to get a ‘twat tax’ reduction by going to a scrappers.

Strange place, really. A farmers field in a village in the fens, with tractors and mud and all, only full of cars rather than cows. I managed to pick up a new wheel with a good tyre for a tenner which was a pretty good result all round. It left me thinking how much other car-related stuff I could spend less on if I invested a bit more time and interest into things mechanical.

For example, my Dad says servicing your own car is a doddle if you know what you’re doing, and would probably save me about £100 every six months or so. Over a few decades that kind of money mounts up.

But what about the time involved, to learn as well as do? And will I turn into one of those blokes who’s permanently tinkering around in the garage rather than watching TV or writing my sermon? Back to Alun Cochrane, whose mate’s catchphrase is ‘you can do it yer sen!’ Why pay a decorator, a Corgi approved engineer or a man in a boiler suit when you can do it yer sen?

Where there’s muck there’s brass, they say – the question is how mucky do I want to get?

Beat Box Chef - who's the funk daddy?

2008-04-03T11:29:00.000Z

Holiday-ay

2008-04-03T10:59:00.003Z

It could be, it could be so nice. Well it could have been, if it hadn't been so flippin freezing. Mind you, who goes to Clacton on Sea in March anyhow? In fact who goes to Clacton on Sea at all?

Actually it was a nice break, all the better that Mel's parents paid for a free upgrade from tent (which was going to be our residence) to hotel. It might be warm this week, but last week was still hat scarf gloves waether even when the sun was out. Nice to visit one of Mel's old childhood haunts, too.

A week of nostalgia all round, as it happens, as I went to a corridor reunion at Warwick Uni - the last event no less before they knock the place down. Nice to see everyone, catch up and down my first strawpedo in nearly a decade (actually I had 3 - didn't know they still sold Reef.)

Then back to St Paul's on the Sunday - nice to see lots of new faces among the familiar ones. Not long now before the return to Warwickshire.

Here Beginneth Phase 2

2008-03-21T13:02:00.002Z

...thinking it might just have been an internet fad, but...

...keep thinking of things I'd like to put on here...

...has to be a more worthwhile use of time than Age of Empires, Ebay and cricinfo...

More about Hell

2007-08-09T12:28:00.000Z

Actually "More about Hell" is a lie, because I've not blogged about it before - Jon Potts has.

Mark Wood (recently married - yay!) emailed me a link to the website helltruth.com and asked for some comments on it. Basically it's a really cheesy site (plus online pamphlet) talking about the "biblical truth" about hell in a pretty fundamentalist fashion. However what's really interesting is that it opposes the idea of hell being a place of everlasting torment, arguing instead that "the bible says" it's only heaven which is eternal.

I can think of 4 pretty distinct positions you can take on hell:

Ultra-Liberal: hell is a made up place as is heaven - Christianity is about transformation in this life, which is all we have
Universalist: Jesus' redemption was for the whole of humanity, and therefore we all join him in heaven
Mediaval Catholic: Hell is a place of everlasting torment for those who have been particularly bad, or for the unevangelised. Most people get to have but have to work pretty hard after death to get there.
Evangelical Protestant: Hell is a place of everlasting torment for those who have not accepted Christ as personal saviour
Annihilationist: God judges us all, but the punishment of those who have not accepted Christ is eternal death, i.e. they cease to be.

There's also the question, of course, about whether you get any influence in where you go after death, but we'll leave that for another day. 1 we can reject if we call ourselves Christians. 2 is a possibility, but it doesn't seem to do justice to the need for justice with God. 3 and 4 are pretty similar in some ways, but if we look at somewhere like Britain today it's way harsher for most people! 5 is what the website is advocating. It doesn't do it in a very convicing way, but that's the one I'd go for.

Here's what I've been thinking. Greek thought thought of body and soul as separate things, the first temporal, the second eternal. When you die, the soul becomes free from the body, but cannot cease to exist as it is eternal - it has to go somewhere. The church eventually took this thinking on board and came up with "the great divide", some going to eternal punishment, others to eternal bliss.

This doesn't seem to be there very much in the bible. There is very little mention in the OT of heaven or hell – it seems that before Jesus immortality and eternity are things which distinguish God from humanity. Eternal life is something which comes as a promise with Jesus, inviting us to participate in the life of God. Instead of being created immortal, we are created with the potential to become immortal, which is realised fully through faith in Christ. Christ thus both models our ascent to God and makes it possible through the resurrection. I think this is what Paul is going on about in 1 Cor 15:42-57.

That still leaves a few difficult passages in the gospels to have a think about, but it seems there is a path between forgetting God's judgement completely and damning everyone to eternal torment. Hurrah for that!

Rich is...

2007-07-16T21:58:00.000Z

...pondering why he really can't be arsed with blogging at the moment, but is sure he'll rediscover his interest the next time he gets really narked off about something.

I guess that means things are generally ok in the Burls camp.

Good old summer festivals

2007-06-27T17:43:00.001Z

V or Leeds, Leeds or V? In years gone by V festival and Leeds/Reading were quite similar kettles of fish. Whilst at one extreme V would have the odd Kylie or Dido, and at the other Leeds would make up for it with Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails, in the middle all the bands were pretty similar.

This year, having seen who was headlining, we decided to go for Leeds, but once the full rockin' line-up was announced we realised we might have made a bit of a mistake. Since I last went the dance tent has become a hardcore punk tent, and, avoiding everything emo and nu metal (obviously) the only thing left to watch seems to be a relentless list of guitar bands which all sound the same.

Key V. Whilst for someone reared on Britpop the idea of watching Ocean Colour Scene, Jarvis Cocker, Happy Mondays and Primal Scream consecutively on the same stage sounds fun, some of the best new bands are there as well, plus a bit more variety, with Corinne Bailey Ray etc for Mel too.

What I want to know is - which line-up would you plum for? Am I just getting old and middle of the road, or has Leeds/Reading gone a little bit too far this year?

Click below for more details:

Leeds or V Stafford?

Balti with the Burleys

2007-06-23T21:50:00.000Z

Boring post, but potentially useful for Cambridge dwellers:

Since coming to Cambridge, in a sort of quite geeky way, Mel and I have been on a mission to eat at every curry house in the city. There's 3 we haven't got to yet, and 14 we have (I think).

For anyone who's interested these are the best and the worst:

Top 3:

Curry Garden (Regent Street, on corner near Catholic church)
Curry Queen (Mill Road)
Pipasha (Newmarket Road, opposite football stadium)

Bottom 2:

India House (it's near to Ridley but going somewhere else is worth the effort)
Nirala (city end of Milton Road)

What was particularly fun was going to Nirala and Curry Queen within a few days of each other and ordering the same dish. One genuine Nagpur, the other authentic Netto's.

Thou Shalt always Kill - Dan Le Sac VS Scroobius Pip

2007-06-15T11:25:00.000Z

Paddy showed me this at the weekend. Quality!

Sidebottom!

2007-05-28T19:08:00.000Z

At Ridley's first cricket match last week there was a bit of banter in the changing room about which (semi)famous people we'd played against. I said I used to play for Holmfirth U17s with Ryan Sidebottom. The main response was 'who?'

To my joy, he not only made a shock recall to the England squad this week, but actually nipped James Anderson to a place in the team and proceeded to take 8 wickets.

Can't say as that I ever got on with him, though. He was 2 years older than me, 6 inches taller (plus hair!) and was pretty full of himself, as was everyone else I knew who was connected with Yorkshire cricket at the time.

Also he was, as you might expect, pretty good, and I wasn't. Still, I managed to beat my top score ever (7 not out) and get 12 in the match last week, before getting caught out by my own captain Ian Pallent (sub fielder), and took pleasure out of knocking my current vicar for a few runs. All good in the gentleman's game. Now for some exam revision...

The Power of Blog

2007-05-28T13:45:00.000Z

The other day I was looking for some info on what's going on at our sister theological college in Oxford, so I put "Wycliffe Hall crisis" into Google, and was surprised to find Gavid Green's Blog in the top 10 (not least because one of the posts about it mentions me.) Good blog it is, with lots of releant info and opinions.

Mel and I went to a pretty dire gig on Monday: Matt Berry and Jonas 3. Mel caned it on her blog and was surprised to find random people commenting on (and insulting) her review, until she realised that her post was in Google's top 10 for "Matt Berry and Jonas 3".

How those spiders and crawlers work, I'll never know, but viva la democratic revolution for now.

One night, 3 cans of Red Bull and 10,000 words

2007-05-18T10:06:00.000Z

In May 2001 I wrote up my dissertation from my first degree at Warwick in one session of 27 hours. This time I didn't finish quite so frantically, but I still needed to stop up the night before and got the thing in with less than an hour to spare. 6 years later and it's still only the impending deadline which motivates me to work - maybe tells me something about what my future ministry's going to look like.

Revision's just getting going now - three weeks and the degree's over. Roll on 8th June.

Ham and Parsley Sauce

2007-04-30T21:00:00.000Z

Made what I thought was the best meal I'd cooked in ages today. Mel didn't like it. You can't win 'em all.

Help the Police

2007-04-25T22:15:00.001Z

One of the ironies about being white, English, middle class and liking Hip Hop music is how much I don't identify with where it's coming from. That's the main thing U Heroes was all about, but here Adam Buxton does it way better.

I'm not generally a fan of gangsta music, but you've got to have NWA's first album, don't you?

Oireland

2007-04-22T20:49:00.000Z

Great holiday across the Irish sea, my first trip there courtesy of Ryanair's 1p flights.

Slightly skanky Houth Hostel in Dublin, then a lovely B&B in the sleepy Monastic 'city' of Glendalough. Nice. Managed to get in some walking, ruin visiting, Guinness drinking, stand-up comedy seeing, traditional music listening. Altogether a right good craic.

Shame I forgot my coat on a holiday in April, but the luck of the Irish must have been with us as it was sunny and hot the whole time.

Another Online Quiz

2007-04-22T20:40:00.000Z

Having done a couple of courses on the Church's early theologians it was fun to do an online quiz to work out which one I most resemble. The result:

You are St. Justin Martyr!

You have a positive and hopeful attitude toward the world. You think that nature, history, and even the pagan philosophers were often guided by God in preparation for the Advent of the Christ. You find “seeds of the Word” in unexpected places. You’re patient and willing to explain the faith to unbelievers.

I'd never heard of most of the Fathers before last year but Ive gained a lot of wisdom from them since then, especially this one.

Incurable Love of the Underdog

2007-04-14T01:16:00.000Z

Bill Bailey says that as a Briton he craves disappointment. That's why we like Kinder Surprise, he says. Horrible chocolate, nasty little toy, a double-whammy of despair and inevitability.

This particularly goes for sport. If there's no 'home nation' playing I work out who's supposed to win and support the other one. Generally, by the end of the match I've got my inevitable fix of disappointment, but it's worth it on the odd occasion when that big guns (usually Australians or Americans, but recently the Indians) get their noses rubbed in it.

I think this, and the world at my fingertips on the internet, is what's got me so interested (in a really quite geeky way) about all the minor nations (Associates, minnows, etc) at the cricket World Cup. Over the last two months Kenya has become my second team, and I almost caught myself supporting Ireland playing England the other day.

Only time will tell whether this minnow joy will continue, or fade as another internet-based fad takes its place in the next few months. But at the moment I'm loving this bumper World Cup, with some new teams among the old ones, some upset results, and some proper characters. The Brian Johnson champagne moment of the Cup so far for me had to be Dwayne Leverock's stunning one-handed catch at slip and the following celebration. You simply wouldn't have got that if only the 'big 8' were competing. Let's toast to the expansion of the gentleman's game throughout the world!

As Betfair says, it matters more when there's money on it, and the little £1 flutter at 10 to 1 I had on Ireland beating Pakistan a few weeks ago made the Blarney Army's victory all the sweeter. Shame they couldn't put up much of a fight against the Aussies today.

Anonymous Bloggers

2007-04-12T19:40:00.000Z

For the nth time a friend's blog has been invaded by an anonymous idiot. Whilst I'm not against randoms reading blogs - they're out there to be read, I've decided I'm going to delete any comment written by someone I don't know which is either insensitive, judgemental or generally ludicrous. Here's the justification:

Everyone I know who has a blog uses it primarily to keep up with friends and share thoughts and feelings with them. They may be on the internet, but they're not generally intended as public forums. As a result posts are rarely "rounded off" in the way that articles in publications are. There are always gaps in explanation, sometimes intentional, sometimes accidental, filled by the understanding the reader already has about the author.

It takes forever to fill those gaps in with someone you don't know. Most of the time, after hours wasted, you're no closer to getting to the bottom of whatever you're trying to discuss. So don't bother. If you haven't got the time or don't want the hassle, ignore 'em or delete 'em.

Over 2 months late

2007-03-09T15:13:00.000Z

Q magazine wouldn't get away with publishing their top 10 albums of 2006 in March 2007, but then, thankfully, I'm not Q. Here in no particular order:

Graham Coxon - Love Travels at Illegal Speeds
Guillemots - Through the Windowpane
Gnarlz Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
The Kooks - Inside In / Inside Out
Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers
The Fratellis - Costello Music
Ghostface Killah - Fishscale
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones
Hot Chip - The Warning

I most enjoy listening to Coxon, but does that make it the best?

Dentist Paranoia

2007-03-09T09:04:00.000Z

I'm quite good at putting things to the back of my mind and forgetting about them, particularly unpleasant things. Like going to the dentists. I hadn't been to the dentist for 5 1/2 years. Over this time paranoia had set in. Every time I got mild toothache I'd imagine another cavity in another tooth, and the pain, silver teeth and even possible dentures I'd have to face when I next met the bearded man in white (the dentist, not Jesus). All I had to do was forget about it and everything would be ok.

But recently, chewing a piece of Thorntons special toffee (that old chestnut) one of my fillings fell out. I finally made that call and booked an appointment. That morning I had no breakfast and spent about 20 minutes scrubbing my teeth (as you do.) Then I went.

"Your teeth are very clean, Mr Burley. No new cavities, we'll just replace that broken one for you."

Praise the Lord! Not only am I now on the list of an NHS dentist and my teeth ok, but now one of the main sources of irrational worry in my life has disappeared.

Up bright and early

2007-02-27T08:01:00.000Z

At 5.10 this morning our crazy neighbour knocked on the door to inform us that she had died. Apparently she was the latest victim of the Cambridge rapist and was bleeding profusely from her wounds. Her nightie was obviously concealing these very well as I could see nothing.

I rang the police for her, who took just over 2 hours to come, by which time she had been screaming hysterically for 1 1/2 hours "help", "call 999", "I don't know what's going on".

When the police arrived, who she'd been waiting so long for, she wouldn't let the officer in so he kicked the door in (again), and called for another police car and an ambulance. By this point she was screaming like a camp kettle.

They've all gone now, but we're not quite sure whether they've taken her with them. We hope so. She's been back at the flat for 2 weeks now after beiong away for nearly 3 months, and it hasn't taken long for her to go completely psychotic. I spent yesterday afternoon on a mental health ward and didn't meet anyone with symptoms as bad as this.

Something to tell your kids about, I suppose.

Rich in a self-reflective mood

2007-02-15T10:57:00.000Z

There has been discussion in Christian circles recently over the ethics of blogging. After being prompted on Harry's blog to think about this, here's what I've come up with.

Blogs are my favourite way of keeping in touch with friends I no longer see from day to day.

I never had the discipline to do a journal every day, but now I'll have a record of what I was doing and what I was thinking of to look back on in years to come. This is particularly true with our holiday blog.

In conversation (and in my head) I tend not to think things out very well. Writing them (and having friends sift them) helps me to work out whether I have a point, or whether I'm just talking rubbish.

I value getting insights into other peoples' thought processes, too.

Blogging is helping me learn to write better by doing it regularly.

But, on the other hand...

A (transient) belief in my own self-importance sometimes leaves me dreaming about whether my words will ever be wise enough to be published in books. Surely creating a blogging community of people who respect and listen to me is an important step along the road to this. But then I think "what rubbish!" I write my blog primarily for me, with a few friends in mind. Nobody else is really interested, quite rightly, and if a "random" ever comments on my blog it's usually to criticise me. Should I ever get permanently hoodwinked by my own pride and insecurities, I trust that there will be someone who reads my blog who will be ready to give me a proverbial, or actual, kick up the arse.

Cartoon Church

2007-02-12T13:32:00.000Z

I thought this was a pretty good trajectory of my spiritual journey, from Cartoon Church. I think I'm currently about 2nd from right, but I'm about to start an attachment at a big charismatic church, so I may well go back to the one on the left! How about a mixture of both ends?

Shopping Around

2007-02-07T10:56:00.000Z

Car bills are bad news. They arrive all unexpected and they're always more than you thought - just when you thought were saving up for that new computer, guitar, holiday, the bank balance bottoms out again.

But, for the first time ever yesterday, I actually felt good about handing over my trusty debit card to the man in blue overalls. Here's the story - the clutch broke, I took it to the garage, they mended it, they found a hole in my exhaust as well, they quoted me just shy of £200 for a new one. I agreed... Then I had a think and called Kwik Fit, got a price, rang the other garage up, cancelled the exhaust job, picked the car up, took it to the next garage, got the exhaust fixed, went home.

Approximately 50p in phone calls and about half an hour of my time and I've saved about £110. As Smokey Robinson and the Miracles sang:

"My mama told me...'you better shop around'
(Shop, shop around) a-whoa-yeah."

Running in the family

2007-01-24T21:16:00.000Z

A classic time-wasting-on-the-internet exercise revealed to me today that I won't be the first ever Rev Burley. The guy opposite was a Methodist minister in the US in the 19th Century.

It may surprise you to know that I'm not a direct descendent, though!

Speaking of wasting time on t'internet, click here for a cartoon that sums up everything I could ever express on the matter.

Stay

2007-01-19T23:07:00.000Z

I've just watched the worst, most pretentious film I've seen for a long time. Mel put it on the Love Film rental queue because it's a thriller with Ewan MacGregor in it. It is. But it's also shit. I checked some reviews out just to make sure I wasn't asleep during all the bits that were either interesting or made the rest of the film make any sense. I thought the following one line reviews made good reading:

"A steaming compost heap of high-art pretense and half-cocked psychoanalysis."
LA Weekly

"Stay has all the signs of a 'look-what-I-learned-in-film-school' movie."
Kansas City Star

"The brain power you expend making sense of it is better spent elsewhere."
Denver Post

Somehow I found this view most convincing, although probably not in the way Jim Chastain from the Norman Transcript intended:

"Works best as an intellectual cinematic essay on the veiled subject at hand (and a director-driven art film at that), rather than as a narrative drama."

If a hand gesture tells a thousand words, you know which one I'm using at the moment.

Can I get a witness?

2007-01-15T17:42:00.000Z

There’s a brief discussion which has developed on Anna’s blog about preaching. As with many posts, this started out life as an attempted comment and has kind of grown obese. It’s about whether preaching needs to be done primarily by those with gifts of communication, or those in leadership within the church.

Lots of people want to preach. Why? Certainly in the evangelical gang it’s usually seen as a high calling, perhaps the highest, most elevated task. Some of us have been idolising these people since we were wee nippers at Spring Harvest. Imagine meeting Nicky Gumbel today. Would you be a bit star struck? I would. He’s not even that brilliant a preacher.

If you love the status you get from preaching you shouldn’t be doing it. People at Ridley (including the vicars) talk openly about the mental strain in preparation, the painful vunerability in delivery, the mental exhaustion afterwards, and the frequent criticism. If you’re putting your preacher on a pedestal he’s either habitually milking it or you really need to get your idea about the upside-down world of Christ sorted out.

Lots of people want to preach, many because they’ve got stuff they want to say and they want to be heard. Just like the rest of society. Those of us Christians wired this way daydream about preaching the killer sermon to thousands – tears, altar calls, changed lives… I did, and still do. Except when I’m actually asked to preach it’s very different. I’m acutely aware of my unworthiness and hypocrisy, my arrogance and presumption, held against the huge responsibility of apparently speaking for God, whilst knowing that most people will have forgotten everything I say within half an hour.

That said, God can take and use those daydreams. If you want to preach, what’s going on underneath to feed this desire? If it’s not primarily conversion, the work of an evangelist, the chances are it’s the desire to effect godly change in people’s lives, to build them up in their faith. These are pastoral desires, the things that make us want to lead house groups or churches. Pastoring and Preaching go together.

Preaching, I think, is primarily about bringing scripture to people by encouragement and challenge, although this does encompass a teaching element. I don’t think, really, anyone has the right to publicly tell people what they should do. Your appointed position as shepherd of the community, your life of service to your congregation and parish which feeds your awareness of their needs – these are what give you permission to preach. That’s why I don’t think I’ll really be comfortable with it until I become a vicar, although of course I needed the opportunity to test gifts and calling out by doing.

That said, what I’d like to do in the future is introduce some kind of distinction between the weekly sermon and a more overtly teaching-based kind of talk/lecture/seminar. The qualifications for bringing a particular issue or biblical theme/book to people are knowledge of the subject area and good communication skills (especially for a longer presentation), and not primarily position within the community of faith.

Preaching isn’t just for the ordained, but there is a definite link between preaching and leadership. If you’re exploring God’s call to one, you might think the same about the other.

19th Century Enculturisation

2007-01-08T23:27:00.000Z

I'm doing my degree dissertation on Charles Simeon, probably the most renowned Anglican evangelical in history, and have been reading aroud the subject to get a better feel for church culture of the time. Some of the opinions are pretty dated but there are some classic soundbites from the great figures of the day. Here's one from a vicar called Richard Cecil of Lincolnshire:

“It is no difficult thing to attach a man to my person and notions. It is no difficult thing to convert a proud man to spiritual pride, or a passionate man to passionate zeal for some religious party. But to bring a man to love God…to hunger and thirst after God in Christ, this is impossible. But God has said it shall be done.”

I've Been Tagged

2007-01-04T00:40:00.000Z

I'm sure everyone knows the score - someone tags you on their blog, you write 5 things about yourself and you tag 5 more people. Slight complication in that I've been tagged twice, but I'm, no going to expand to 10 things. Here we go:

When I was 11 I was on Sky TV with Michaela Strachan and the rest of my scout troop. It was Michaela's Map on the Sky Children's channel, so I doubt whether anyone will be able to unearth it. My highlight was leading everyone in a rousing acapella version of 'On Ilkley Moor Bar Tat'. Oh, the shame... Still, Michaela was every bit as fit in the flesh as on the box
Again in scouts, I once ate woodlice, sheep's testicles, maggots, a pig's head and worms on a special 'backwoods' camp when I was 12. No ill effects, though.
Remembering point 2 at one point in my 3rd year at Uni, I convinced 12 people to eat a worm omelette with me.
In my teens I avidly collected coins. I had a look at them recently and couldn't think of a possible reason why, but there you go.
My first word was "Oggon", apparently - referring to the water as it went down the plughole in the bath. Ahhh, how sweet!

The following people, consider yourself tagged: Martin, Paddy, Mike, Tiffer, and one other friend who reads my blog, who doesn't have one of their own, but who should!

Q

2006-12-21T18:10:00.000Z

I've never really liked Q magazine - I've always thought it was the kind of thing I'd read whenI was a dad. The trouble is, I'm 26 now, far too old to be reading the NME, so I thought I'd give Q a try this year.

The Christmas issue takes the biscuit. Most of the issue is taken up with name-dropping and semi-interviewing lots of famous drunk people that turned up to their recent awards event, and their top 100 albums countdown is a joke. Apart from sticking several albums in the top 50 they absolutely caned at the time, I can't think of a single album in the top 10 (except number 1) that's really that good.

What a waste of £3.90 - except I'm pleased to find out that although I may be sporting a few grey hairs nowadays, I'm not quite old enough for Q yet.

I'm Only Dreaming

2006-12-20T12:36:00.000Z

Yesterday morning I was awoken by a sharp pain to my nose. I immeditaely went back to sleep. Mel later admitted to having mistaken my facial appendage for the alarm clock, which she was trying to switch off.

Not quite as funny as Mel's mum Marion, who once rolled Mel's dad Trevor out of bed because she was dreaming she was a long thin red bit in Tetris and needed to get over to the other side of the screen.

Still, not quite as funny as making up your own children's songs in your sleep, eh Joe?

5-7-5

2006-12-17T19:58:00.000Z

I've been rummaging round in old 'special boxes' recently, shoe boxes filled with old gig tickets, letters, memories, and found the Haikus which people wrote at Cafe Create 3 (the one where Slybob played). Here are my favourites:

Chilling to Music
Mellow sounds washing away
The cares of the day
(Sandi - summing up the Cafe spirit)

Monkey not wastage
Discarded remains were once
Protective Armour
(My darling wife - inspired by nibbles on tables)

For most Hawaiians
The favoured food really is
Ham and pineapple
(anon)

..and my one, addressed to DJ Jamin (Ben Tilley)

See that Steve Tilley
Acting half his age on stage
That’s your dad that is

The greatest argument for the existence of God

2006-12-15T17:35:00.000Z

Richard Dawkins may well be taking on the whole of Christendom in his recent book The God Delusion, but has he ever thought about the implications of the existence of chick peas?

I had some for tea last night - it felt like I was tucking into a gargantuan Lilliuputian feast. They've got breasts on top, legs underneath and even that weird flap of skin where the head used to be. It's an amazing similarity, as good as you'd get from any dolls house shop, for me not only conclusive proof that God exists, but also that's he's got a great sense of humour.

Whoever said risibility could only be predicated of humans?

New Name, Same Great Taste

2006-12-15T16:55:00.000Z

Ever since I began my blog I've been aware of just how awful was the name I'd given to it. I think most people feel a bit weird starting to put their thoughts online - if you want evidence of this check out people's first ever entries (including mine), it's usually some kind of semi-apologetic mumble, but fun nonetheless.

I was fine giving my name, email address, star sign (!), but asking for some kind of terribly witty name precipitated that same kind of awkwardness you get when someone asks you to tell a joke on the spot. Knowing the internet session would time out before I could think of something good I just typed any old thing in - a bit like my Ebay user account which is now forever stuck with a character from He Man in the title!

Not that my new title is going to get me a script-writing job for the BBC. The best one I've seen so far is Ridley Mate Tiffer's All the fat belongs to the Lord which has got to be taken from some random Levical instruction, although all the better for it.

And no, I'm not a Calvinist. And I don't work for a Christian soup kitchen, although that would be an interesting name for one...

Work avoidance post 1 - Pegging

2006-12-01T16:57:00.000Z

I've been hearing about an espionage society at Cambridge University where members are set targets to 'kill' by poking them with a pencil. Apparently the game lasts all year with the final member left alive winning a big prize.

It reminds me of 'pegging' which we used to do at Warwick Uni. It's simple - peg someone without them noticing. Have been thinking about introducing it at College. Best opportunity: the principles cassock sleeve, so when he raises the chalice during communion the peg is on view of everyone.

Looks like my parents had a similar idea when I was a wee nipper (yes, it is me!)

The last push

2006-11-29T09:27:00.000Z

I have 4 essays to do in the next 2 weeks before the end of term. Any futher postings until then should be seen as a direct method of work avoidance (just like this one.)

The Ashes are upon us

2006-11-22T16:15:00.000Z

15 months of waiting are over - the first match is underway at midnight. I have to say I'm becoming slightly obsessive in anticipation, but with play going from 12 midnight to 7am on Sky and only 40 minutes of highlights at 11 the next night, this series surely can't dominate my time like the last one.

Come on England!

P.S. Note to Duncan Fletcher: Pick Panesar not Giles.

Emerging Type Thoughts

2006-11-17T20:45:00.000Z

I was quite inspired by a lecture in college yesterday from our new minister for Fresh Expressions / Emerging Church. He's just moved from Huddersfield (!) where he was minister of a new church called 'The Net' and chaplain of Huddersfield Town Football club (!!)

If we roughly divide the nation into 3 categories, the churched, the ex-churched and the unchurched, research shows that most of our 'evangelism' is directed towards and attracts people from the second group, whilst the large majority of Britons are almost completely out of reach of our churches.

I was encouraged to know that the Church of England seems to be directing attention and resources towards the third group, with some degree of success, inasmuch as it's a drop in a very large ocean. Whilst most 'Fresh Expressions' seem largely to be for the benefit of existing church members, there are a good many which are genuinely making reaching out to the thoroughly unchurched their main priority.

One point which came out of the lecture which interests me is the role of the bishops in all this. Bishops have always been seen as encompassing two New Testament concepts, oversight of the local church and apostolically sending out missionaries into the culture. From what Dave says, at least some Bishops seem to be utilising this second part of their ministry in relation to Fresh Expressions. These new forms of church are bypassing the Parish structure, which was itself invented in a missionary context, but are still tied into the structure of the church. Hopefully as Fresh Expressions become a larger part of the Anglican structure they'll help us all to be a bit more outward looking.

Until now all this 'Fresh Expressions' stuff has largely passed me by - partly through being in a large Evangelical Anglican church bubble. Check out their website if you want to know more about them. Me, I think I'm primarily called to the first group (above), trying hopefully to get them to relate to groups 2 and 3 a bit better.

Am I a heretic?

2006-11-13T22:20:00.000Z

Thankfully not, quite probably aided by my Patristics course last year.

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451.

Chalcedon compliant

100%

Nestorianism

67%

Apollanarian

33%

Adoptionist

33%

Monophysitism

33%

Pelagianism

33%

Arianism

Socinianism

Monarchianism

Docetism

Donatism

Albigensianism

Modalism

Gnosticism

What's Your Theological Worldview?

2006-11-13T21:27:00.000Z

Clicked the link, did the quiz - not too surprised with the results. Most interesting thing will be comparing with other people's!

You scored as Neo orthodox. You reject the human-centredness and scepticism of liberal theology, but neither do you go to the other extreme and make the Bible the central issue for faith. You believe that Christ is God's most important revelation to humanity, and the Trinity is hugely important in your theology. The Bible is also important because it points us to the revelation of Christ. You are influenced by Karl Barth and P T Forsyth.

Emergent/Postmodern

75%

Neo orthodox

75%

Roman Catholic

57%

Evangelical Holiness/Wesleyan

57%

Reformed Evangelical

36%

Modern Liberal

29%

Classical Liberal

29%

Charismatic/Pentecostal

25%

Fundamentalist

21%

Cafe Create

2006-11-03T21:12:00.000Z

There are very few things in life which are a complete joy. Take this essay I'm doing for example (not the same one I avoided writing to blog about a few days ago, the next one). There were bits of time doing the reading when I was genuinely enjoying soaking up the finer points of Mediaeval Trinitarian theology, and after handing the essay in I'll not only be glad I've done it but will value the time I've spent pondering the subject matter. This is whilst doing a degree I really enjoy, funded completely by the Church of England. However at the moment not only can I not be arsed but I've been sitting blankly in front of my computer all day and frankly I'm absolutely sick of it.

Cafe Create was the one thing I've ever been involved in which taken as a whole was a complete joy. Yes it was slightly stressful having to do PA when Mike couldn't make it once, and assembling the projection screen was a real hassle. I also lost my rag once when I couldn't find my rather fetching moustache for the last Contemporary Theology sketch. But generally I loved it - seeing the place full, drinking wine, DJing, performing, booking bands, watching bands, choosing films to play in the background, writing material, designing flyers. It was flippin wicked. Given that most of my closest friends used to go, it's the thing I miss most about Leamington.

Maybe I managed to delegate most of the annoying jobs, maybe I forget getting home late after working hard to pack everything away and stressing early in the evening because no one had turned up yet. Guess there's no joy without the associated grind, but my brain has a funny way of remembering things like that.

Long live Cafe Create! Anyone been recently?

Essay Blues

2006-10-30T19:53:00.000Z

I've lost my words. I can't construct an intelligent sentence, never mind a 2000 word essay on the use of parables in the synoptic gospels.

Being a student again has plenty of plus points - £12 entry to see Huddersfield Town get whipped 3-0 at home on Saturday rather than the usual £18.50 - bargain! Amazing summer holiday. Fairly generous grant this time.

But your time is never your own. What I loved about work was you could leave it at work. Now the living room is my essay-writing office and there's nowhere to get away from MS Word or the constant pile of books on the dining room table. No matter how hard I'm working, there's always something I should be doing so I'm never fully content or at rest. (Poor me, eh!)

Well, I seem to be writing in sentences now, so maybe I'll get back to Jesus and his message. So long.

Note to self:

2006-10-22T16:10:00.000Z

Never eat a Flake in bed.

Good Album

2006-10-19T21:48:00.000Z

What would have happened to the Sex Pistols if they'd recorded 5 albums? Or Jim Morrison was still strutting his stuff today? Would the former have faded out in a decade of irrelevancy, and the latter be scrabbling around for fame like David Hasselhoff? Maybe, maybe not.

My point is, if Dodgy had not released their third (rubbish) album Free Peace Sweet, they would have been remembered as being a good, Byrdsy, Kooksy, quality band, not as a cheesy bunch of Britpop no hopers. Something I realised when I bought their second album Homegrown last week. It's really good. Honest. Available for 99p + p&p from any good Ebay seller.

Theological Education

2006-10-08T19:21:00.000Z

Going to theological college last year hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn't have one of those "losing faith and finding it" experiences - I just realised how little I knew about theology, and in particular, the bible. At age 25 I'd thought I was pretty well thought out, but it turns out there was a huge gap between what I was exposed to in the pew and in the popular books I'd read, and academic theology.

Why do we need academic theology - isn't that just a bunch of professors stuck in ivory towers, coming up with wildly fanciful theories which just pull the bible to bits? Sometimes, yes. But what the academic discipline does to the bible is open it up to be questioned in a way that many evangelicals won't countenance - but I think it's really important that we do question our understanding.

Some theologians are pretty skeptical. Ed Sanders, for example, thinks Paul's theology is a complete mess and changes to fit every situation he finds himself in. He presents a coherent argument for this. Tom Wright thinks Paul's theology is perfectly consistent, but he can't just give people like Sanders an emotional dismissal from the pulpit - he has to come up with a coherent argument of his own. What happens, in effect, is that over time the academic community agrees a kind of spectrum of opinion within which it's possible to hold a position with integrity. This spectrum changes over time, sometimes in quite drastic ways, but you find it's impossible to dodge the difficult questions - you've just got to face up to them.

Take 1 Timothy for example. Most scholars don't think it's written by Paul, but some do. As a Christian, and as a person in general, I need to weigh up the evidence one way or another and decide for myself. Those that hold Pauline authorship for 1 Timothy do this, taking all their opponents' viewpoints into consideration. Saying , like some do, that Paul must have written the letter because it says he does and the book is in the bible is just not an acceptable line to take in academic theology. Of course you might argue that it doesn't matter who wrote 1 Timothy - what really matters is the message, and you'd be right. But asking searching questions about context and authorship, seeing the bible as the word of man as well as the word of God, can often help passages make a lot more sense.

Going back to my original point, I'm passionate to help people to understand and apply the bible, but many of the "entry level" books are reluctant to engage with critical questions. (A friend remarked this week that most basic commentaries are written to a conservative understanding because conservatives are the only group of Christians in the UK who take bible study seriously - he may be right.) I find the "Bible Speaks Today" series particularly bad for this because their focus is on application rather than purely understanding the text - differing viewpoints are usually sidelined as of little concern or scoffed at (read the footnotes!) Tyndale commentaries, also published by IVP, are quite a lot better, with extended introductions and quotes from other authors - if you're from more of a conservative background these are a better place to start than BST. But then again, I'm not a conservative. In my opinion Tom Wright's new New Testament series is the best thing that's happened to popular writing in years - getting into theology? That's your best place to start.

A Letter to Kenwood

2006-10-07T10:07:00.000Z

Dear Sir / Madam

I am writing to inform you of my displeasure at the poor quality of one of your food processors. My wife and I were given the Kenwood FP698 Multi Pro by my grandmother as a wedding present in summer 2003, at the time, I believe, one of the most expensive on the market at £150. All the other electrical appliances we were given at the time (most costing less than £50) are still in perfect working order - I wish I could say the same for the food processor.

Over the last three years we have used the unit perhaps once a week on average, and have taken good care of it, however this has not stopped it from quite literally disintegrating on a number of fronts. If there was just one thing wrong with it, I would not be so aggrieved, but this fact is, almost every part we have used has fallen to pieces. The whisk attachments broke on their first outing, the handle on the jug broke, as did the jug itself; the same happened with the main processor, and the rubber seal perished. Then, after being held together with gaffa tape and intermittently breaking down over the last few months, yesterday evening the engine waved a little white flag and died for good.

Needless to say, my wife and I will not be rushing to buy Kenwood products again. One suggestion to send to your product design department – in future if you invested a little less time developing dozens of “bonus” attachments that no one ever uses, and a little more time working out how to increase the build quality you would certainly keep customers like me more easily. Food processors are bought primarily to chop, grate and liquidise food, not wash salad, poach eggs or make kitchens look like futuristic chemistry laboratories.

Yours faithfully

Richard Burley

Pride...

2006-10-04T18:33:00.000Z

...is often a very bad thing, but Mel and I are very proud of the following 3 photos, which are now hanging, A3 size, in our lounge. You can do a lot with 7 megapixels!

If 'Friends' was launched in 2006...

2006-10-02T20:47:00.000Z

..it would be set in Starbucks, and Starbucks would pay millions for the privilege. That's the opinion of a top US marketing consultant in a documentary I watched recently.

TV has been the mainstay of advertising for decades now, but with new technology allowing programmes to be taped minus the adverts and people streaming over t'internet, Marketers are going to have to be even cleverer about how they get the message across. The idea's been around for a while - remember 'Castaway' with Tom Hanks, who delivers a FedEx parcel four years late after being shipwrecked on an island with it. Advertising is going to be worming its way into over stream of consciousness we have before long.

Which raises some interesting issues.

1. Since Warhol (and probably before) art has been recognised not just in the gallery but on the street and in the home as well. Good pieces of graphic design adorn our homes probably as extensively, and probably as pleasurably, as fine art pictures. No problem with that in principle (what would Friends have lost if it had been set in Starbucks?) but I'd like to think I can live in this world comfortably and choose to opt out of this barrage if I wish.

2. It's the next clever step in the evolution of Marketing. Back in the 60s and before Marketing was centred pretty soundly on the product and what it could do. (Beanz meanz Heinz). TV and graphics in advertising changed that a lot, marrying words with image, or simply leaving out words altogether, to create a more subjective appeal. (Georgie Best flogs aftershave cos he's a good nut.) In the 1990's the 'lifestyle' brand developed, with major companies spending billions beginning to try to change culture itself by creating a space for its product. (Starbucks becomes the place you go inbetween home and work.) The idea is simple - we no longer just like or even love products - we begin to live our life through them. Once branding gets into TV there's no need to create a cheesy Nescafe serial centred around a suave English type, just pick a suave English type in an existing serial and have him drink his brew from the trademark red mug.

It's funny that we can see a linear evolution from decades back to now. Whatever happened to Gen X? That's the thing, Generation Y are savvy consumers by nature; they've had enough of crap, cheesy marketing. The trouble is that top class Marketing is very good at convincing them (us) that we've had enough of Marketing altogether. We're individuals, a fact that we demonstrate by our eclectic music tastes loaded onto our iPods.

As a church, as The Church, we've got to come up with an effective critique of the culture we live in. iPods are probably the best portable music players around, Heinz definitely make the best ketchup, and I'm quite happy to advertise those facts about my person and on my table. Consumerism is, in fact, neither from above nor below, but something worth understanding for what it is and what it does.

The big question, donning an emerging hat, is how we model this in church. If we're trying to compete with Apple Mac for the hearts of the nation we'd better do it well or they'll be laughing all the way to the footie. That probably means lots of resources - people and money. Or we could just ignore consumerism completely and try to model a different way to live. In reality we know we've got to do a bit of the first to try to get the second across. But how much?

Back in the groove

2006-10-02T20:38:00.000Z

Well almost.

Back in the UK, back at college, lectures start on Thursday. But lastly, and most importantly, got something to say on my blog after staring at it for a week!

Nice Video

2006-09-25T14:26:00.000Z

There's a band called Ok Go, who are ok, and who I saw once - again they were ok. But a recent pop video of theirs is ace.

Click here to watch it.

Hmm

2006-09-04T11:11:00.000Z

Thought I could do both holiday blog and normal blog whilst away, but there just ain't time. Lots of time on long journeys to think, though. Thinking of writing a "Christopher Robin's Bible Study" monologue, each character bringing their own brand of Christian normality to the big book, and realising I need to learn a lot more church history. Also thinking a lot about the place of biblical authority in the postmodern church. A disorganised mind which needs a blog conversation or two to achieve a measure of clarity.

Ciao

We're all going on a Summer Holiday

2006-08-14T23:57:00.000Z

Hi everyone. I'm sitting at home in Cambridge writting this post but in 3 days I could well be sitting in an internet cafe in Singapore doing the same thing! Not trying to brag - just advertising mine and Mel's holiday blog if you care to keep up with us on our travels.

Dark Materials and the Fall

2006-08-12T22:40:00.000Z

I've spent most of the week immersed in the "His Dark Materials" trilogy by Philip Pullman. Apart from getting lost in the great story, I found myself drawn to its "theology" in a way I can't help any more.

It's the standard first generation atheist kind of philosophy, pretty similar to the Da Vinci Code. Good is on the side of the independently-minded and evil is personified in the closed-mindedness of the Church. Here's the paragraph that sums it up most clearly, a speech by the bearer of the Subtle Knife:

“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and submit.”

The thing that most interests me, though, is Pullman’s idea of the Fall, which he weaves into the centre of the plot, the main characters reconstructing its events in a kind of redemption for the universe. He’s even re-written Genesis 3 for a different world. To Pullman, the Fall represents the freeing of human minds from the bondage to God’s will by the birth of consciousness, the genetic leap which scientists (in the real world) say led to a rapid development in human society thereafter.

As I read Genesis I can’t help but think chapter 3 is describing that event exactly, only it puts a very different spin on it to Pullman. After Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, God closes Eden to them, saying, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.”(v22) God is not denying the fundamental change, but He’s opposing it, setting his mind to frustrate the pride of humanity’s independence and convince them they need Him.

As much as I think Pullman is wrong to characterise the Church as controlling and stifling, obedience and submission to God is an essential part of the Christian faith. We’re agreed on defining the principle, just divided on whether it’s good or bad. But take a look at Revelation 2:7b, a blessing to the church in Ephesus: “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God ”(2:7b). The very thing which God was holding us back from is now a future promise, because of Jesus, stooping to our humanity and raising us to eternity. What those two verses means together I’m still working on…

Thoughts on Stuff

2006-08-12T16:16:00.000Z

Last week Paddy, Lucy, Mel and I played a game using only dice and mugs. It made me wish that the only games we had were a pack of cards, dice and maybe a chess set, instead of a cupboard-full.

Our loft is getting fuller and fuller of things we don't need and never use.

The other day Andy and Bella emailed me and others with a list of stuff they were generously looking for a home for.

These things got me thinking about "stuff".

When I was a kid the Argos catalogue was my bible - "the laminated book of dreams" as Bill Bailey calls it. With my meagre pocket-money I aimed to save up and buy everything I wanted in it. The trouble was, every 6 months there was a new catalogue with new things to buy; the start of a never-ending treadmill where the destination got further and further out of sight.

I was brought up with an eye for a bargain (Dad Yorkshire, Mum Scottish, nuff said.) Trouble is, you usually have to hunt for a bargain - bargains are cheap but they're not always just what you want; you end up getting things that might come in handy in the future. Some people need bargains to live within their means; not buying a camera from the first shop you look in is good stewardship of money. But the bargain-hunting my mum has always done is a form of consumerism in itself, getting more things for the same amount of money by spending lots of time shopping. The more time shopping, the more desire, the more purchases, the fuller the house...

Getting rid of things is good. Ebay is a great way of both making a bit of money (!) and supplying a demand, without producing anything new (except of Jiffy Bags). Charity shops and freecycle are great too, although the heart of consumerism is really at the point of purchase. It's no worse to have a cluttered house than a minimalist one with half a landfill site piled up with all your old stuff.

I'm trying to be more careful about what I buy, but that's not some pious notion about trying to avoid pleasure. I'm trying to work out a way of being content with the way I live without either drowning in self-pity or drowning in stuff. Anyone got any advice.

One to watch

2006-08-02T15:41:00.000Z

Great news about Monty Panesar beginning to resurrect British Spin Bowling, but there's a new boy who looks pretty exciting.

Adil Rashid is 18 and is the first Yorkshire-born Asian to play for Yorshire. Significant in itself. He's a leg spinner. Great. He bats number 6. Even better. On his county debut 2 weeks ago he took 6/67 in the second innings and today scored 114 in an under 19's Test match against India.

Rashid for England, you heard it here first (probably).

World's worst albums

2006-08-02T14:57:00.000Z

After a moment of madness on Ebay last week meant I was greeted yesterday with a Jiffy Bag on the doormat containing Menswear's only album Nuisance. As the Britpop whipping-boys only signed because they sounded a bit like Blur, I was expecting the worst album I'd ever bought. I was wrong. Of course it's not really that good, but is at least mildly pleasurable to listen to, compared to the following shameful list of ill-advised purchases:

EMF: Stigma (A second album with no redeeming features)
Jesus Jones: Perverse (ditto, but third album)
Sleeper: Smart (Inbetweener was worth ITunes-ing but no other tunes partly because the woman simply can't sing)
Catatonia: International Velvet (toss up between Cerys and Louise of the band above for the worst voice in pop)
Stereophonics: Just Enough Education to Perform (Witty social comment gone terribly wrong / Shameless sell-out of re-releasing the album with a cover of the song from the Office cos no one was buying it. Never owned this one, just was forcibly lent it at one time)
Cast: Mother Nature Calls (The grim reaper turned up instead, it seems)
Space: Spiders (Turned up back in my CD collection after marrying Mel)
Reef: Glow (Place Your Hands, Come Back Brighter plus 10 tracks of tuneless drivel)

Frankly I'm embarrassed, but most were 50p from various Leamington charity shops making a brief sojourn on my shelves before returning there. Anybody else like to confide some CD slip-ups?

Getting better at holidays

2006-08-02T14:48:00.000Z

Returned yesterday from a whistlestop tour of bits of Britain, including the Scottish Borders (to see my Nana), Cornwall for a wedding, and a couple of days in Morecambe (lots of people, nothing to do, crap beach).

The thing is, Mel and I still aren't that good at doing holidays. We opted for a "trying to make driving fun" approach this time and "explored" the Cumbrian coast. Trouble is, we ended up spending far too long in the car and getting stressed about not finding a campsite. I'm sure we'll get the balance right in the next few years, enjoying lots of chilled, stress-free holidays, just in time for little nippers to come and move the goalposts!

"Rear View Mirror" Thinking...

2006-07-21T16:33:00.000Z

...Definition by Marshall McLuhan of "an assumption that a new medium is merely an extension or amplification of an older one; that an automobile, for example, is only a fast horse, or an electric light a powerful candle."

Had an interesting discussion with Paddy about DVD's: are they just slimmer versions of video cassettes with better quality picture, played from a slightly smaller box located just under the TV? Certainly that's how they started off, a perfect upgrade and an opportunity for people to buy all their favourite films again, just like CD did for LP lovers in the 80's.

Paddy says "bonus features" are quite a major new phenomenon. I agree. Interestingly as an "only for the most keen" extra, their rise coincided nicely with the death of its musical equivalent, the B-side, as people swap buying 3-track CD singles for downloading just the A-side for 79p on I-Tunes. Also, combing this new technology with another, namely broadband, could well see the end of Blockbusters video stores as we start hiring online. Essentially, though, the car seems pretty much just like a faster horse at the moment.

What really interests me is the way that new technology begins to make us behave, even think, differently. And predicting where it's going to go in the next few years. Any suggestions?

And now for something completely different

2006-07-20T12:35:00.000Z

Interesting comment by Johnny Borrell, lead singer of Razorlight, in a recent interview on the BBC Sport website about his love of cricket.

"It is the otherness of cricket that makes it so appealing...There is good reason why a Test match lasts five days - that's how long it takes for the theatre to unravel. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing."

Apart from wholeheartedly agreeing with Mr Borrell, I was left thinking how in this fast-paced soundbite culture of ours how appealing something completely "other" can be. Am left musing about the consequences of that for the church.

The Fall

2006-07-18T10:46:00.000Z

For a little poem, the importance of Genesis 3 in constructing the church’s theology has been massive. Forget bible v science for a minute; pop theology has taken these three chapters as the complete anthropology of humanity in a nutshell. Here’s what I think is a common view:

“Before the fall everything on earth was perfect; there was no sin, death or destruction. Satan lied to Adam and Eve, deceiving them into eating the forbidden fruit, an act which represents humanity’s pride, a wanton desire not to be subject to God’s will. As a result humanity becomes mortal and the balance of all creation is upset, causing amongst other things the natural disasters we see today.”

But try a ‘plain’ reading of Genesis 3 and lots of things we’ve traditionally attributed to the story aren’t explicitly in the text, whilst lots of the imagery which is actually there we just tend to ignore. Here are a few half-baked musings on the subject:

1.) There is no mention of curses caused to nature except in regard to man’s difficulty to till the land. I think this idea has sprung up by people trying to imagine a pre-fall “perfect” world where nothing bad (like earthquakes or floods) ever happened. If we trust Geologists to any degree we know that the world seems to have come to be how it is through a lot of destruction (movement of tectonic plates, etc), and particularly decomposition of plant and animal matter (including, of course, inside our own bodies).

2.) Evidence for humanity’s immortality before the fall is sketchy, centred around a particular reading of Gen 3:19. But in v22 God’s will is for Adam not to reach immortality, implying he didn’t have it before. The reason for this idea is the same as above, I think.

3.) The serpent doesn’t seem to lie at all: “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” This is exactly what happens (v7, 22)!

4.) What is the significance of the tree being of the knowledge of good and evil anyway? If there is any ontological shift in humanity it would seem to be here, becoming like God. Also, if we didn’t know right from wrong before, perhaps this is the moment where humanity assumes culpability for its own actions. Paradoxically, could eating the apple have been a sin if Adam and Eve didn’t know good from evil? Perhaps this is the act which both makes sin possible and is of itself the first sin.

5.) This all makes pre-fall humanity look a lot less like humanity at all, some semi-evolved half-humanity, certainly something so abstracted from our current experience as to be totally inaccessible to us now. Perhaps what Genesis 3 is essentially doing is describing the imbalance autonomous human beings have brought to creation, something which worries God (3:33). The solution, of course, is Christ; not to take us back to a pre-fall existence, but to move us upwards towards God, co-creators and heirs with him. In this case the creation of humanity is not yet complete; the fall and redemption are just stages in its evolution, whether for good or bad.

6.) Adam and Eve’s sin is caused by pride, wanting to be equal to God, but Christians have often taken sin to be purely this. In fact most things we consider as sins are not motivated by lust for power and independence, but stem from our failing to combat the animal urges within us, lust, gluttony, etc. Some sins point us downwards to a sub-human existence, some upwards but in a misdirected kind of way. Neither of these is God’s plans for us.

7.) In “The Birth of Tragedy”, Friedrich Nietzsche sets out two conflicting views of “fall”: the Hebrew, viewing it in weak and negative terms, and the Greek, seeing it as a triumph over the gods, a demonstration of the might of human strength. We can see this power and might in the Tower of Babel story, an example of humanity working in its own (considerable) strength. God, as he always seems to do, pulls down the proud and exalts the humble. The paradox is this – both the Hebrew and Greek stories of creation are correct, depending on your standpoint. Nietzsche celebrates the power of humanity’s independence; Christians imitate the King who was a servant and who embraced weakness to the point of willingly going to his death.

8.) Experience seems to tell us that there’s a lot of chaos and a lot of order in the world, a lot of pleasure and a lot of pain. In this world they seem to be inextricably linked so that we can’t have one without the other, no flower not grown from the compostion of other flowers, no courage without adversity. This is just the way of the world as we experience it. In contrast we see in the scriptures a sovereign God who saw that what he created was “very good”. How these work together we’ll probably never fully work out, but I think we can do better with our understanding of scripture than we often have!

Astral Weeks

2006-07-18T10:40:00.000Z

Seminal LP by Van Morrison, said last year's Observer poll which placed it number 4 in its top 100 British albums of all time, so I thought I'd get it and broaden my mind.

The blurb went something like"We know what you're thinking, but this really is completely different from his usual cheesy, whingeing toss".

It isn't.

Musings 1 – Conservatives & Fundamentalists

2006-07-13T17:02:00.000Z

As well as a record of stuff I’ve done / seen I’m going to use my blog to journal some of my theological musings; I feel like the writing things down is allowing me to be more focused than before. Please feel free to pick me apart, though – it’s all part of the process.

My first thought has been provoked from Jon’s "Proclamation Propaganda" post and concerns my experience of conservative evangelicals in the last decade or so. They’re an important group in the Church and I’ve known quite a few, from preachers who helped shape my faith to people more extreme who contributed (unwittingly) to nearly destroying it. Nowadays I’m reasonably happy to call myself an evangelical, but not a conservative – here are a few things I want to say about why.

Jon’s post raises some interesting points about “The Cross of Christ” by John Stott, probably the best known British conservative theologian of recent decades. Over the years he has exemplified the conservative mindset, commendably setting an example of detailed, careful bible study, which produces “no nonsense”, relatively clear-cut doctrine. Often underlying this belief system is an assumption, as Jon nicely points out about John Stott, that if you engage honestly and seriously with the scriptures, you have really no choice but to agree. Then, when there is disagreement in the church, for example over women’s ministry, conservatives often contend that other Christians are compromising clear biblical teaching, usually by accepting uncritically beliefs held in the wider culture.

Over the last few decades conservative evangelicals have been instrumental in shaping an interdenominational ‘evangelical’ consciousness, a framework for theology based on the belief of the bible’s sole authority in matters of salvation, morality and church order. Conservatives have often been seen as the scriptural experts in the evangelical world, both challenging those inside to be faithful to the bible and opposing those outside who do not hold to the “authority of scripture”.

Whilst this conservative framework has yielded a lot of positive results, I’ve found myself disagreeing with quite a few of its main scriptural emphases, for example the essential nature of “the gospel” as a set of propositional truths (rather than the person of Jesus Christ), the predominance of penal substitution as an understanding of atonement and the centrality of “justification by faith” to our message. (I’ll go into each of these in more detail in later posts.) In short, this framework for understanding the bible is not quite as biblical as those who hold it would like to believe, at least in my view.

In addition I think the doctrine of scripture as “sole authority” can mean we ignore the complex interplay of other factors which make up the way we come up with our theology. In reality we know that our understanding of scripture is always culture-bound, mediated by our human reason, the tradition of interpretation and our human experience, both as individuals and as the Church. I’d like to see evangelicals talk more about the proper relation of these four factors to each other. However, what I’m seeing from some of the conservatives I’ve met is a move away from this kind of question altogether towards a greater certainty in scriptural inerrancy – I think this in the main is a reaction to postmodernism.

At a basic level postmodernism denies the assent to any sort of objective truth, however in reality few people hold to this consistently. In fact many evangelicals have welcomed the freshness that a new set of interpretive tools has brought to understanding of the scriptures. By comparison, with their traditional emphasis on systematic and propositional truth, conservatives have struggled to accommodate postmodernism at all. To many of them it’s just a symbol of a global meltdown in values which is making its way into the church. The first reaction, then, is to stick to old guns and repudiate postmodernism altogether; however it’s difficult to stay the same when everything around you is changing. What I’ve seen in a number of friends and acquaintances is a worrying move towards fundamentalism.

The move, I think, is both one of attitude and theology. The attitude shows up most clearly in areas of disagreement with other Christians, where conservatives have usually been the most willing to hold to traditional doctrines, often in a very hostile secular environment. However, as the group becomes a smaller minority, even within evangelicalism, the perception of being a persecuted minority becomes even more important. The group takes pride in “unashamedly” holding to “biblical truth” when everyone else has “sold out”. In the extreme I’ve seen people begin to take great pleasure in holding what others take to be the most pernicious of doctrines; almost the worse it sounds, the truer it is.

This has a theological backdrop which I find equally worrying. Whereas conservatives have traditionally held reason and experience as useful channels of God’s communication with us, subject of course to the bible, this group regard them with increasing suspicion. Reason becomes the sort of pagan philosophy which Paul chastises in 1 Corinthians 1-2, whilst experience is unreliable because of the distortion which or moral depravity gives it. In contrast our understanding of the bible becomes the one absolute certainty, but it no longer has to make sense either to us or the ones we mission to. As a result we no longer have to justify our faith, simply proclaim it as God commands.

How common all this is I don’t know. I just hope I ended up spending more time with the first gang I described rather than the second.

3 Musical Sites

2006-07-13T13:05:00.000Z

For anyone interested, here are 3 websites I find pretty useful:

Bang CD - Any chart CD, £6.99 delivered. Nuff said.

Metacritic - Compares album reviews from most of the important papers / music magazines.

TOTP - Unlike MTV, watch videos of all the new singles you actually want to see. Good way of keepin up wiv da kidz, innit.

It's a Jolly Holiday with Melanie

2006-07-09T14:23:00.000Z

Forgot to mention (how could I forget?) - just booked the holiday of a lifetime with Mel - 5 1/2 weeks in Australia and New Zealand with stop-offs in Singapore and Hong Kong. Come on!!!

Ezekiel 2:1-5

2006-07-09T13:58:00.000Z

...was the Old Testament reading in the Anglican Lectionary today, which I chose to preach on. A difficult text (what in Ezekiel isn't?) but I gave it a go.

Difficult when you see a passage that has been used to back up a theology you feel strongly against - you can almost feel someone else's voice at work in it. In this case it's the Proclamation Trust sort of thinking.

This is the rationale - fixed message from God (Ezek 2:4), of mourning and woe (i.e. wrath, Ezek 1:9) proclaimed to people persistently whatever their reaction (Ezek 2:5) and the blood of the hearers is on their heads if they fail to do it (Ezek 3:16-19).

Trouble is, simply enough, we are not Ezekiel. Our message is supposed to be good news, persistence doesn't mean heartlessness and nowhere does the New Testament talk about blood of others being on our hands.

It's amazing how different you can make New Testament mission look by relying on a few cleverly chosen passages from the prophets.

Irony

2006-07-06T11:02:00.000Z

Oh such an oral form of fun. Getting irony into words is irritatingly difficult. Like the subject of my blog. Under pressure (from myself) to come up with something terribly witty and failing I called my blog those very words. I'm not sharing my posts with anyone else yet but if antyone saw a blog entitled "Something Terribly Witty" they'd either be very disappointed or think I'm a bit of a dick. Or both.

We hear of text and email SHOUTING. Lots of exclamation marks!!!! I once tried to invent sarcasm marks writing letters to a friend (Ebby) , basically little triangles at either side of the comment, but it didn't really work. I guess different forms of communication have their strengths and weaknesses. We can spend ages thinking over how to express ourseleves perfectly in words but nothing quite beats the breadth of meaning that tone of voice brings to conversation.

Compline by Candlelight

2006-07-06T10:16:00.000Z

Went to our church's weekend away (in a field), having been charged with "keeping an eye on the youth in case they get too bored". Until the evening barbecue and barn dance there was barely a yoof in sight, but a small gang appeared as the evening went on.

At Bassingbourn church youth worship mainly consists of lots of loud, charismatic songs (which nobody sings) and the hitting of many percussive instruments. Thought I'd try something different and led them in Compline, the monastic-style night prayer, in the corner of the field by candlelight. Was quite worried they'd hate it or talk through it, but they seemed to enjoy the space and even, dare I say it, the silence.

Left me thinking thoughts that I think quite often. Historically evangelicals have often been very good at reinventing themselves to adapt to the culture of the day, styistically speaking. You'd think that would be especially relevant in 2006. But what is it to be relevant? "Contemporary" Christian music usually sounds like nothing most outsiders would ever choose to listen to, any more than Carols from Kings at Christmas. Let's just say that all kinds of Christian worship are potentially weird to people who aren't used to them; the style we have in our church is simply the style we like, and that's not just the singing.

So what does our worship need to be like? Just a few thoughts. Deep - more than we can fully understand, drawing us further in. But most importantly, both divine and human. Allowing the almighty to reach down into the depths of our humanity (the humanity we share with all human beings) and raise thou us heavenward. In a sense the relevance is how much church enagages with ourselves, our issues and frailties, but exhorts us to reach for something ever so much higher.

Nowt wrong with charismatic worship songs, but for this gang of teenagers they don't seem to scratch where they're itching. Maybe we'll try Compline again, then.

Too Gorgeous!!!

2006-06-30T14:15:00.001Z

No, it's not the taste of the "Bombay Bad Boy" pot noodle, we've just joined the new century and bought a digital camera. Like a little kid at Christmas I've got all the bits and pieces spread out on the carpet in front of the TV, trying to work out where all the leads go and what they all do.

Is it true that the first picture blokes take is of their privates, or is that just camera phones? Don't think Mel will be too impressed if I do, especially with 7 megapixels resolution. That's clearer than I can see from 12 inches away!

Da Vinci Thoughts...

2006-06-29T11:16:00.000Z

Everyone's talking about Da Vinci, confirmed all the irrational skeptics' worst nightmares, Christians up in arms, Dan Brown raking in some serious dollar, blah-di-blah. Here's what I thought for what it's worth.

Read the book a couple of weeks ago, good page turner but after spending months deep in academic theology I felt just a little dirty reading something so Jeffrey Archer-like. Knocked it off in 2 days, though, so it can't have been that bad. Film was a different story, well actually it was the same story just done very badly. Nuff said.

Interesting though that the film had a very different feel to the book. Part of the book's appeal is how factual everything feels; every opinion is backed up with some textual or archeological evidence. You're left wondering how it all corresponds with reality. Had a good chat with Anna Potts about whether Dan Brown believes it all or not.

On the other hand the film doesn't feel 'real' at all, and it makes its claims in a much more subjective way. This comes out especially in the discussion in Teabing's study. If I remember right in the book Langdon lets Teabing tell the conspiracy story cos he's the best story-teller and the expert, but basically they agree; in the film the two have a bit of a tet-a-tete where Langdon comes across all skeptical. Some of the facts change as well; 50 million witches burned becomes 50,000. It's a slightly more 'acceptable' version of the story which leaves room for faith at the end (inserted chat between Sophie and Langdon) however shaky the historical grounding for it. It's the classic Hollywood resolution which makes us feel nice as we leave the cinema.

Bit of an aside, we got a 'regular' Cineworld coke to take in with us. It was massive! More of a bucket than a cup. 800ml apparently. Guess the sugar and caffeine rush kept me awake during the film, though.

Stop...Carry On

2006-06-29T11:02:00.000Z

Just wrote a long post about all the TV I've seen in the last few days and what I thought about it. Bored myseld silly reading it - I'll get used to this blog writing at some point.

The Life of a Student

2006-06-26T09:26:00.000Z

Ok, so I've spent the last 9 months working like never before to try and get through the Cambridge Theology Tripos, and now they give me 3 months off. That's more holiday than I had in 2 years before starting theology college! So what am I going to do with it?

The thing is, unless you've got a boss / superviser breathing down your neck, your brain (or at least mine) ends up on something of a go-slow. A nine-o-clock start becomes a nine-o-clock alarm clock, half an hour snooze and then a lazy shower, breakfast, etc. Before you know it it's midday. I have a long list of jobs to do and I don't feel like doing any of them, I'll be lucky if I get 4 hours of something productive done today (does that include watching educational programmes on the TV?)

On long holidays I feel a lot like the main character from "About a Boy", splitting his days up into half-hour slots, like watching countdown et al, to make it feel like I'm doing at least something with my life.

Right, enough mucking about - Google, the phone number for Coventry tax office please.

Joined the Revolution

2006-06-24T09:07:00.000Z

What is a blog? I've been told I've got to have one, but I can't really work out what I'm meant to do with it. Am I writing thoughts for me, like a diary, or do I put myself under pressure to write terribly witty comments in the hope that I'll make like-minded friends?

I don't feel comfortable writing about myself but I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Hey ho, let's go - then, as the Ramones used to say.