The work that Frontline Community Church do in Liverpool has gained so much attention that the Guardian produced this film exploring their approach, and asking questions about how faith groups can fill in the gaps left by recent and forthcoming government cuts.

I especially love what the church leader says when he is interviewed, and the testimony from those who the church has helped. This is why we do what we do in Newport, and it’s great to see other Christian communities with the same approach who God is leading to do similar things.

HT: Dave

The deepest level of communication is not communication, but communion. It is wordless. It is beyond words, and it is beyond speech, and it is beyond concept. Not that we discover a new unity. We discover an older unity. My dear Brothers [and Sisters], we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.
Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, p.308

5 Essentials for Leaders

Brad Lomenick, who leads the conference called Catalyst in the US aimed at young leaders, gives 5 simple essential qualities for leaders:

  1. Be Humble- you’re not that big of a deal.
  2. Be Authentic- your team wants to be led by the real you.
  3. Be Informed- ongoing competence requires ongoing learning.
  4. Be Decisive- no one wants to be led by someone who can’t make a decision.
  5. Be Present- in the moment, focused on now, and physically around. literally.

Which are you good at?

And which do you struggle with? How could you work on them this week?

Missional Meals

With The Lab, we have always found food to be a great way to grow community. In this blog post at the Resurgence, Tim Chester agrees:

Jesus didn’t run projects, establish ministries, create programs, or put on events. He ate meals. If you routinely share meals and you have a passion for Jesus then you’ll be doing mission.

Read the whole post here.

The Pool of Siloam: Can a place hold spiritual power/significance?

Last week, for the first of our Lab summer series on John, we explored the story of Jesus healing the man born blind from John 9v1-12 (you can listen to it here). Here’s an offshoot of my thoughts/research that didn’t make the final version of my talk.

One of the really interesting elements of the story, is that Jesus doesn’t just tell the blind man to see - instead he goes through a strange process of making mud out of the dirt on the ground, rubbing it in the bloke’s eyes, and then telling him to go and wash at a very specific place - The Pool of Siloam - which at the time was considered a ’sacred place with healing power’.

The whole encounter draws us into asking some questions: Why not just simply heal the man? What was the significance of the ‘ritual’ that Jesus seems to go through? And was there a significance to that particular pool?

Growing up, I have always been very skeptical of any kind of ritual or over-spiritual religious activities. The idea that certain words, places, or rituals hold particular spiritual power or significance was always something that certain Christians (mainly Catholics) subscribed to, but not anyone who really had a brain. However, since studying theology, researching some of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition, and growing to be a bit more spiritually mature, I’ve become a lot more open to the idea that some places have a kind of spiritual significance to them and perhaps even experienced it.

Particularly spending time on retreat in a monastery, where there was such an incredible sense of God’s presence has really opened my mind to some of the more mystical aspects of Christian tradition. This was a place where Christians had been praying constantly for hundreds of years - and it felt like it as soon as you walked in.

When it comes to the story of the man born blind, there are several theological options for us to choose between:

  1. Coincidence: There was no significance to the ritual Jesus went through - it’s just a coincidence or a one-off situation.
  2. Intentional: The pool itself has no spiritual significance - but Jesus was intentionally pointing to the fact that even though God was doing a new thing through him, he had also done old stuff in the past.
  3. Cultural Significance: Jesus wanted to use the pool’s cultural significance. It was a place for ceremonial washing - where the Jews would make themselves ceremonially clean in order to be able to worship. Jesus wanted the man to know that God had made him both physically well and spiritually clean.
  4. Spiritual Significance: Jesus wanted to re-inforce the idea that the pool did have spiritual significance and was a place of healing - he wanted his disciples to know that God works through holy places.

Personally I’m probably hovering somewhere around #3, with occasional tendencies towards #4. Which option are you most inclined to go with?

Within Celtic spirituality, there is precedent for the idea that a place can be particularly spiritually important. These are called ‘thin places’:

‘In the Celtic tradition such places that give us an opening into the magnificence and wonder of that Presence are called “Thin Places.” There is a Celtic saying that heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in the thin places that distance is even smaller. A thin place is where the veil that separates heaven and earth is lifted and one is able to receive a glimpse of the glory of God.’ (source)

And of course, within both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition - religious relics, rituals and places hold incredible spiritual significance.

What do you think? Can a specific place or action hold a particular spiritual significance or power? Can heaven be ‘closer’ in one place than others?

Video of Hope Newport 2011 in Alway.

Thanks Sarah, as always, for your amazing editing skillz.

Experimental Youth Work in Hull

Thanks to Jonny for pointing out this video, showing some of the incredible work at Hull Youth for Christ, supported by Church Urban Fund. Over the last couple of years, I’ve increasingly become aware of CUF and how amazing they are - unfortunately though they only fund projects in England, not here in Wales.

I have friends who have visited Hull YFC and been very impressed with their work and the way the team there live their lives in such an open way to the community around them. I loved seeing pictures of the breakfast club they run - a great, really simple idea.

Those of you involved in youth work, or even just wanting to live for Jesus in your community - how could you change the lives of young people in your area by supporting their whole families?

Found this clip from King of the Hill really interesting.

Is the problem that Jesus was too packaged-up with youth cultural baggage, or that the Dad wasn’t willing to accept a kind of Christianity because the culture around it was too alien to him?

What do you think? Was there a need for less contextualisation/inculturation or more tolerance of a different culture?

Thanks Rethinking Youth Ministry for the clip.

As a postscript: Does the church lose young people when they grow up because they grow out of the cultural fads that we’ve wrapped Jesus up in in trying to reach them, or because we fail to fully contextualise the gospel in a way that makes sense for their own culture?

The Relationship between Desire and Reason

A week ago at our Sunday night Lab gathering I shared about the need to be constantly cultivating within ourselves a desire for more intimacy with God (you can listen again here). As part of preparing my thoughts for preaching, I often end up with lots of off-cuts of material that didn’t quite make the cut. I thought I’d begin to share some of this extra, bonus material on the blog.

Here are some thoughts on Desire that didn’t make it into the final cut - how classical and modern philosophy has tried to make sense of the relationship between reason and desire.

Read More

Trailer for Blue Like Jazz: The Movie.

Really excited by this. Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller is one of a few books over the last few years that have really spoken my language - it’s incredibly honest and humble in the way it’s written.

Blue Like Jazz: the Movie is now nearing release, and is probably the biggest fan funded film to be released so far. After it failed to get enough investment from the film industry, fans of the book stepped in to make up the difference. Doubt it will make cinemas in the UK, but if I can hold of it I’d love to do a showing for The Lab somewhere.