Great poem

This is an excellent poem I read on another blog:

The God Who Loves You
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction.
And every point A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance?
The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months.
Sit down tonightAnd write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.


Carl Dennis

Getting on with Church

I was reading a blog by a local theologian/writer. In it he talked about being "in exile in the church" - the idea that being part of a fellowship of believers is even more of a challenge than being part of this world.

I thought about this tonight walking home from an outreach event arranged by my church (this was one was aimed at men). I can't bring my friends to these things, it's a non-starter. We don't have conversations or encounters anymore that will come to a nice clean ending at a church service. I used to think I did in my teens when I was a fired-up wannabe evangelist type. Back then I never saw my friends as what they should be..just friends. They were targets, notches on a belt rather than caring individuals whose acts of kindness and selflessness meant more for me than I ever did for them. I still believe that becoming a Christian is an idea that's worth sharing - but it's one that's worth sharing. You learn to share -and I'm learning it's a two way thing between me and the other person.

We have yet to find a niche or a ministry, as they call it, since we moved into the area and decided to attend the local church. Lisa and I are involved in bits and pieces of work in our spare time that don't seem to fit directly into these categories. I'm starting to think that good gifts are just gifts, when did they stop or start being "spiritual"? Every good gift comes from God after all.

I've realised I have a huge list of social, political, even musical grievances against the established evangelical church, but that I need to get over myself. God has shown me more than enough grace to get by and I need to show more of it too. Despite the frustrations the blessings are still abundant inside and outside the four walls of that building. Church is a struggle - it's meant to be that way but thank God there's more to faith than two meetings on a Sunday. I need to realise this before I start hightailing it somewhere else at the first signs of getting pissed off with something.

Good lyric from Zimmerman

A lyric jumped out at me yesterday while listening to John Wesley Harding, probably my favourite Bob Dylan album.

From 'I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine:'

"Now go your way accordingly and know you're not alone.."

Simple, being given the independence to go your own way - yet safe knowing it's not a solitary journey.

The Link Family and Community Centre

I've been privileged to be involved with The Link Family and Community Centre in my home town of Newtownards over the past ten years.

They do fantastic, groundbreaking community development work and need as much help as possible!! Their website is www.thelinkcentre.org. I went on a training residential with some of the volunteer team to Lucan, Dublin earlier this year and was asked to write a bit about it for their newsletter.

Pulling up at the Clarion Hotel in Lucan with the rest of the group on Friday night I realised it was ten years since my last visit to this ever-expanding Dublin suburb. Back in 1997 I’d been getting to know a group of friends through The Link’s Friday and Saturday night drop-ins for a few months and the prospect of a weekend away with them all was too good to turn down. As a sixteen year-old veteran of church youth club weekends I thought I knew what to expect. Instead it was the first of many experiences with The Link when you feel a bit uncomfortable with something while realising you’re benefiting from it at the same time.

I tried to keep this feeling in mind at a reception for Link volunteers and staff in the Aras An Uachtarain, the residence of Mary McAleese the Irish President on the Sunday afternoon. Like the memorable weekend spent in a draughty monastery overlooking the Govan area of Glasgow, this residential was another Link experience that would undoubtedly be for my benefit in the long run. People as diverse as Link volunteers, Loyalist representatives, and Protestant clergy have all been welcomed through the Irish President’s gates – if only we were as welcoming to people in our own (much smaller) backyards. In Belfast over 40 “peace” lines still exist across the city, racially motivated attacks are rarely out of the local news, and up at Stormont the Good Relations strategy “A Shared Future” sits gathering dust.

In the meantime, organisations such as The Link continue to take risks and deal with social issues that remain unresolved. At Lucan youth centre in 1997 we looked at our perceptions of the Roman Catholic community and we were back at Lucan Presbyterian Church ten years later still asking the same questions, this time with an added multi-cultural dimension. Ten years ago we took the bus into central Dublin and for the first time I encountered young children begging for food and money along O’Connell Street. Fast forward to June 2007 and the forlorn roadside caravans of Dublin’s travelling community dotted along the motorway on our journey to Kilmainham Gaol was a stark reminder that the increased prosperity promised by the Celtic Tiger has widened rather than narrowed the gulf between rich and poor in the South. Over same period of time The Link has developed it’s services to continue to meet the needs of the marginalized in Newtownards, and trips such as this serve the dual purpose of being a reminder of the work to be done yet also an encouragement that we are struggling in the right direction!

Ten years on my involvement with The Link has progressed from young person to volunteer, from volunteer to staff member, and back to volunteer again. Yet each residential still manages to be challenging, stimulating and fun. I look forward to comparing notes at the Clarion Hotel in 2017!

The Protestant Revolution

I managed to catch the second episode of this four part series tonight - and although it was on BBC 4 I was still able to understand it OK!

It was refreshing to hear the development of family life that Protestantism served as a catalyst for - the programme interestingly traced how it's emphasis on individual conscience served both liberal and conservative ends of the Protestant spectrum. I was glad that all these bases were covered for a change.

I'm no theologian but after watching it I felt glad to be part of this tradition. There has been too much cheap TV recently focussing on the wackier, extreme, unreasonable elements of the denomination so this was a welcome change.

The (James) Blunt-ing of worship

American Worship artist Chris Tomlin is to play the Odyssey arena here in Belfast this week.

I think this has been the latest in a line of recent worship "concerts" in the Odyssey over the last few years.

It makes me a bit uneasy that events like this are more and more common - exalting the role of worship leader to that of a popular entertainer and then "God shows up" (I hate this term - it reduces the almighty to some sort of genie-figure that is summoned by whoever's leading the proceedings)

Don't get me wrong, if people want Christian entertainment - by all means folks are entitled to it - when it starts overlapping with worship of God is when it starts to worry me.

Worship has been commodified into a product that's in danger of taking our focus away from the Creator God and unto creator man instead.

As worship events become increasingly slick, and the accompanying CDs more and more smooth, bland, and unadventurous, I worry about how this style of worship in our churches reflects on how we see the world around us and vice-versa.

The prophet Amos' words to Israel from God about the noise of their songs and improvising away on their instruments while neglecting those around them made sense to me when I was thinking about this. It seems that the Lord wasn't annoyed about their musical ability but because they carried no credibility with the world outside.

I was involved on the music side of things in the church for a while and this really set alarm bells ringing for me and my involvement, attitude, and motivation.

Sex God

A deliberately provocative title for the latest book by Rob Bell, founder of Mars Hill Church in Michigan, the latest big name American Christian writer and speaker.

What attracted me to his first book Velvet Elvis -Repainting the Christian Faith was his open-ended style of writing. Each chapter was like a conversation with himself - then just when you're agreeing with him then he chucks a real curveball into the discussion to really get you thinking. You might not agree, but to him that's Okay - it's a discussion.

The subtitle of this book is Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality. It tackles a big question that's recently been plaguing me in relation to the evangelical church - we don't know what it means to be human. he explains that the word sex comes from a Latin root that means to be cut off or severed. We’re born into a world of disconnection, we’re disconnected from the earth, from each other, from God and ourselves. People say “I don’t know who I am”. So, sexuality is all of the ways that we are aware of this cut off state we’re in and the desire to reconnect.

Stylistically Sex God is very similar to Velvet Elvis, and is maybe too open-ended for some tastes, and I was expecting some discussion around homosexuality (maybe that's for a later book) but the final chapter where he draws everything together into exactly why he thinks Jesus uses the wedding analogy for his relationship with church is classic. I read this while I was away from Lisa in Chicago for a few days and it really gave me goosebumps!

Faith Beyond The Church

I was struck by the title of this article on the Christian Aid website (and then the content)- about what it really means to live the Christian faith outside of the comfy confines of church and into the firing line (literally).

Taking faith beyond the church - beyond "church" perspectives on an over-theologised conflict - and engaging with the world around us for the sake of all of God's people.

You can read it here

http://www.christianaid.org.uk/stoppoverty/conflict/stories/faith_beyond_church.aspx