Gadgets For God...

I can't help it, here's another post from Ship of Fools...



A Ship of Fools health warning: Not one word of the following sales blurb has been altered...

Cradle the memories of your lost loved ones within a rare jewel of artistry and song! A tender tribute to those who have gone to their eternal reward, this Peter Carl Fabergé style musical egg is available only from Ardleigh Elliott. It is handcrafted of fine Heirloom Porcelain® and opens to reveal a symbolic jeweled stairway, topped by a shimmering cross.

This collectable Holy Cross Christian religious music box sparkles with platinum accents, Swarovski crystals, and more than 100 sparkling hand-set rhinestones. It bears a heartfelt inscription and plays "Amazing Grace." Imagine giving yourself or a friend the comfort of this limited-edition bereavement gift – what a lovely way to welcome the healing touch of faith!

Price: £34.98 – click here!

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My Favorite Christian Joke...

I got this from the Ship of Fools, though it has been reprinted various places...
Written by the comedian Emo Philips.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump. I ran over and said: "Stop. Don't do it."
"Why shouldn't I?" he asked.
"Well, there's so much to live for!"
"Like what?"
"Are you religious?"
He said, "Yes."
I said, "Me too. Are you Christian or Buddhist?"
"Christian."
"Me too. Are you Catholic or Protestant?"
"Protestant."
"Me too. Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"
"Baptist."
"Wow. Me too. Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"
"Baptist Church of God."
"Me too. Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"
"Reformed Baptist Church of God."
"Me too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?"
He said: "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915."
I said: "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off. (source)

-t

J.C.'s Girls

Here's an interesting story: there is a ministry in Los Angeles called J.C.'s Girls. A former stripper turned evangelist has created a ministry reaching out to strippers and their clients. Heather Veitch is also trying to change the culture of local churches to accept sex-workers who are looking for the Gospel and brave enough to risk rejection by congregations.

My favorite quote:

And I came to [my pastor] and said, "Matt, um, I want to go into strip clubs and tell strippers about God." And he said, "Heather, go make it happen."

So part of this story is the empowerment of lay ministry to do unconventional evangelism into cultures that are alien to mainstream Christianity. At first I was a bit suspicious because this looked like a bait-and-switch kind of approach, but as I've listened to Heather's story a bit more I see that her approach is actually much more loving and open-hearted than that. She is the real deal.

No doubt her visibility will be raised even more by the documentary film about her, "The Pussycat Preacher," but she has already been on the talk show circuit.

Something else about her is worth noting: her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury that left him disabled. So she is raising her kids, taking care of her husband, earning the money, and do this ministry on top of all that! More power to her.

-t

Tabernacle

When I first came to COTM I noticed that they had the practice of reserving the Sacrament from Sunday, but didn't have a proper place to do so. I tried to find a spare tabernacle lying around the Diocese without any luck, so I've decided to go ahead and commission one to be made by a local furniture maker. It will be a simple oak box with a lock and an adjustable peg system for hanging icons on the front. It is possible to buy something like this already made from a church supply store, but they are nearly twice as expensive out of a catalog than custom made. The mark-up on church stuff is unbelievable!

It will take a couple of weeks to do it--at that point I'll post some pictures. I'm not 100% certain where to put it. I'm thinking in either the Vestry or the Sacristy to start, and then I may move it in to the Chancel at some appropriate time. I'll also have to figure out how the handle doing a presence lamp of some kind...

-t

The Present Moment

Bede's blog is particularly good this week. Flooding in the church is fodder for a discussion about the nature of spiritual attentiveness to the present moment....

So if, in retrospect, I go back to that moment, what can I recover? What was the Present Moment, if I had been willing to be there? Well, there was a lot of frantic dashing about, some of which was useful and some of which was merely using up excess energy. There was the feeling of tension and anxiety. There was some feeling of hopelessness while the powers of nature roared outside our door and we couldn't do anything about it. And, if I'm right, there was a rather cosmic chuckle behind things at the thought that we could build a Church on this hillside and forever escape the powers that govern the law that says that water flows downhill. And there is also that freedom that does come with practicing the present moment: the sense that the best and most lasting things about life are behind and beyond and within all that is going on in this present moment. The present moment in fact can liberate or bind us, and sometimes it does both. But, as the old hymn says: "Underneath are the everlasting arms." (source)

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The Runaway Bunny

The previous blog entry reminded me of The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. It's an illustrated children's story from the 1940's. Margaret Wise Brown also wrote Goodnight Moon, and both are great religious allegories. Goodnight Moon is, in my opinion, a meditation on death and spiritual detachment. Note the progressive loss of self as the attention focuses inward until a state of emptiness is achieved. (Cf. The Cloud of Unknowing, etc.)

As the movie Wit points out, The Runaway Bunny can be read as an allegory about God's unbounded love for the soul. As far as we can run, there God will find us. It's great poetry! I think I might use it a sermon sometime.

You know, it's rare that I hear I death preached well. I mean, I've heard plenty of good funeral sermons, but it's rare that a preacher really digs his or her hands into the dark soil of grief. I think there are a lot of reasons for this. For one thing, few preachers are comfortable getting truly vulnerable in front of their congregations. For another, it means opening up a box of emotions that may be difficult to close. Yet there is some incredibly powerful spiritual work to be done with grief preaching. I tried my hand at this a couple of times at St. Mary Magdalene's with good results.

Part of the reason I wanted to preach through grief at SMM had to do with my discernment that it is a parish that is still grieving the loss of Christendom. It's a place that still mourns the loss of pervasive Christian influence in Canada. There are a lot of parishes that feel that way (I've even experienced some of that at COTM).

I remember particularly the sermon I preached after I got back from the funeral for Douglas Brown, OHC. I went to that grief place with the congregation and they came with me. Several people were crying, not because they knew Douglas, but because they had their own losses to feel. I don't think this kind of preaching is self-indulgent at all; I simply was "real" with the congregation in a way that conveyed God's grace (I hope).

I've done something similar for Good Friday. A couple of times now I've done a brutal sermon on that holy day by simply describing in detail the facts of what crucifixion was like. It's hard to hear--but God is there, too.

"'If you run away,' said his mother, 'I will run after you. For you are my little bunny." (source)

-t

Boom--The Gospel...

I saw this on Mike Swalm's blog...



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Lent 5 Sermon

I went much longer than usual: almost 20 minutes! Maybe I was just reflecting having heard John preach last week. Or maybe I simply had a lot to say this morning...

-t

More on Missional Church

I preached about Missional Church this morning (big surprise). The lections were perfect: Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones and the Raising of Lazarus. Basically, I said that if God can resurrect a pile of dry bones or some corpse that's been rotting for four days, then He can certainly give new life to the Church!

A couple of reflections about the meeting yesterday with Bishop Cray...

I gotta get me a copy of Mission-Shaped Church, the report from the Church of England about Mission and Evangelism. This document is a blockbuster in terms of opening up the CoE, and everyone keeps referencing it.

I need to check out the training resources developed through the Fresh Expressions project. What's there that's worth me spending a lot of time with?

Doing traditional church better (a model based on attraction) at best means competing for only about 6% of the population--but being a different kind of church has virtually infinite potential.

Key Principles:

• Inculturation
• Planting not cloning
• "Dying to live" (cf. John 12:24)
• Less detailed advanced planning; more discernment in context
• Seeing what God is doing and jumping in

"...do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, beautiful as that place may seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have been before." Vincent Donovan

Mission to Community to Worship, not Worship to Community to Mission

A sign of maturity in a Fresh Expression is that they know they need inherited church, and vice versa.

Every form of church is provisional and incomplete.

Fresh Expressions require a new ecclesiology, but they also need a new and robust eschatology to backup all that Kingdom-talk. We need a new language for the Christian hope that is more than just middle-class suburban bliss and do-good-isms or maintaining a repository of "culture."

If the decline of the church is our fault (for not adapting to changing need) than it can be addressed through a process of repentence (cf. Bob Jackson).

-t

Missional Church Meeting

Today two of my three Wardens and myself spent a few hours at St. Paul's, Bloor Street, to hear a presentation by Bishop Graham Cray about Fresh Expressions of Church. This the third event on Congregational Development/Evangelism/Church Growth I've been two in the last month or two. They've all been a little different, but also strikingly similar in many respects. Basically, the Church is poised on the edge of great change and growth, and it's being one all over the place already. So much of this mission stuff is about giving people the permission to engage their imaginations to recognize the work of the Holy Spirit already in progress.

One priest at the event pointed out that what's happening is a network of churches and people in the Diocese interested in Mission church is beginning to emerge. That's going to develop all kinds of experimental mission projects and initiatives. Yipee!

-t

CCCC Meeting...

We had another meeting of the Christ-Centered Character Curriculum work group today. We made more progress on what we hope to create and how we are going to get there. It's not easy but it's coming along fine...

-t

Project: ORAC Part 1

This week I ordered the first of the parts for my computer rebuild. They included a Thermaltake Black Armor Full-Tower ATX Case, An Asus Maximus Extreme Motherboard, and an Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core Processor (3.0 GHz). This is just the beginning of what is going to be one bad-ass workstation. My intention is to get back into creating websites for the church, and that means being able to edit image, sound, and video files. With my current computer I can do those first two fairly easily, but editing video has been difficult and inefficient. The transcoding alone (taking it from one format to another) takes hours with my single Pentium 4. More than quadrupling my processor power ought to help with all kinds of media-creation tasks.

I'm also looking forward to the craftsmanship aspect of the project. the "Leviathan" is going to require some new skills from me. I've never done water-cooling, for example, until now. That's right, my computer will use a system of circulating water to cool down some critical components. Stay tuned for more updates as I assemble the components...

-t