the word at the barricades...

Close attention...

Here I am in full flow. Just when I was going to report that few listened throughout I saw rapt attention being given by one person looking over my left hand (as you look at it) shoulder. Click on picture for bigger image.

Here we go...

Have been in Cardiff at a 'Reach the City' event run jointly by Open Air Campaigners and OM - research for my thesis on the performance of open-air preaching. It has been a fascinating week. Good weather. Much street contact. Helpful people.

So tomorrow, weather permitting, I will stand in an ancient biblical and historical tradition and preach in the streets (no that is not me doing a rain dance!).

This will not be a guerrilla sermon, but helped and supported by the kind folks from OAC it will be an evangelistic sermon aided by sketchboard as I try to put into practice what they do and I have seen many do well here.

I am about become one of those that folks will often walk by.

Having preached in church for many years. Having done an MTh in Homiletics. As a teacher of preaching. I am about to enter what has been called the 'extreme homiletic' where many of the supporting props are gone and there is little but the Word and human Voice.

Exhilirating!

Street Sermons 3

'Why does it always rain on me!!!!'

keep your suggestions coming...they are helpful...expect something to happen with all of this late August early September as an initial experiment...

Re-defining

Important themes talked about in Church can be reduced to a devastating centre:

Vision - the glorification of Jesus Christ

Discipleship - being made into the likeness of Jesus Christ

Mission - Bearing witness to Jesus Christ in word and deed

Success - Being faithful to Jesus Christ

Of course the question is begged rather than answered by these statements - how is this done, concretised in our situation?

Yet the danger is that in answering that question we have often talked about our vision, discipleship, etc. without allowing Jesus Christ, as borne witness to in the Scriptural narrative, and present living by the Spirit (the same one) to constantly critique, challenge, and shape what we mean by these terms.

Thus we get a vision that is about building up our churches rather than the kingdom, discipleship that is about bible knowledge, mission that is only about 'saving souls', and success measured in numbers - all of which is so un-Jesus like really.

Street Sermon 2 (maybe)

The Poor you will always have with you...So?

Street Sermons Wanted: Big Issue a Shot!

Ah hah...planning an experiment starting late August/early September...need some topics for street sermons...each will last about 6-7 minutes barring heckling etc...the latter being welcome in at least being a reaction...

Some will be available free one being delivered every 15 minutes or so...and some will be able to be bought upon the production of a Big Issue...there will be two versions Lo Resolution and High Resolution - the latter with megaphone...the former without!

A written version of these will be available on line on a new blog which will be advertised through business cards handed out in the street during the preaching event but which as yet remains hidden...

Any ideas will be welcome...but to give you a feel for the kind of thing I am thinking about...one sermon will be...'Confession is Good for the Soul' - which will not involve naming the sins of others but on the basis that all have sinned will involve naming some of the sins of the church and of our failures to live out the challenge of the prophets and the call of Jesus with respect to others, neighbours and enemies...ah hah get it now...this is open-air preaching Jimmy but not as you know it...to boldly go...

This could be scary or exhilirating...

The other 5

1. When you give me time to ‘reflect’, ‘to be silent’ to ‘consider’ – eh please give me time – this meditation thing if it is to run deep needs time to do. Indeed I may well require to be taught what I am meant to be doing when I am ‘reflecting’. Personally I find that it can take me up to 15 minutes with silent repletion of a prayer to reach a place of stillness in ‘Presence’. To get 30 seconds just does not allow me get me there, or anywhere actually. It feels like something put in but which is not understood. Don’t get me wrong I want these things, this time this space, silence as well as sound. But I need to know how to use it and be given the time to enter it.
2. Treat me as an embodied person. Help me understand how the physical impacts my worship. In turn recognise that the physical does indeed impact my worship. If I am tired or sick or disabled I may not be able to or want to stand for long periods of time. Oh I know that I can sit down but when I do so I cannot participate at all because others around me tower above me and obscure my view. I am also more than a mouth. Give me things to sing in praise and words to pray but give me also things to see and touch, handle, smell, and do. Engage my senses, engage myself in a variety of activity and experiences. Worship can be long but if it is too long I get weary and hungry.
3. Singing, ah. How many worship wars have been fought over this. I don’t actually mind whether songs are old or new. I appreciate both if they are suited and fitted to the occasion and the music. Some new songs don’t play well on the guitar. Some older ones struggle on the guitar. Use what you have well to be sure. I like both those which have a personal and relational dimension and those that teach and proclaim. I can do Psalms, Taize Chants,

   Iona

   songs, traditional and contemporary – the lot. The lyrics do matter to me and if I can’t get them or don’t understand them I won’t sing them. Please though remember that as a participant I want to be able to actually sing the songs chosen. I don’t read music. I don’t have any great singing skill. I need songs that I can actually sing as a member of the congregation and thus leaders who will help me sing them rather than confuse me with harmonies that however correct or pleasing leave me having to give up because I cannot remember the basic tune. When am I meant to come in and when am I meant stop? Knowing this aids my participation and limits my embarrassment – oh not to be the person who on their own who sings the chorus for the 5^th time when everyone else stops at the 4^th!
4. Know that Spirit inspired can be in the organisation as well as in the spontaneous. Please do not let openness to the Spirit be a reason for being unprepared or leaving a band and others not knowing what you are doing as though you are the only one who might be able to discern the Spirit’s moving among us.  Think ahead about where the worship is going. Respect the role of others. Speak extra only if you really feel that something should be said. Avoid berating the congregation if they do not show the enthusiasm that you think that they should.
5. I do not need pomp and circumstance. Please do not, however, allow informality to remove wonder and awe and a sense of the otherness of God and the things of God. Through your words and care please help get me there. Speak good words to me Holy Words. The trite I can get anywhere. Sentimentality drips from cheap cards. The slick becomes banal. Welcome me in grace and part me with a blessing.

10 well in fact 5 Thesis on the Worship Leaders Door

Was sent a picture of me holding Luther's hand (well a statue of him) while recently in Berlin. having established that friendship I thought that as part of a seminar I am leading I might nail 10 thesis on the Worship leaders door (then again i might not). Anyway here are my first five any comments on these or suggestions for others would be appreciated...

1. Worship is a many splendoured thing. It has a huge variety of possibilities and practices both from our own tradition and that of others. Know something of this richness and rejoice in the variety that is a result of the Holy Spirit’s creativity. Do not be so bound to your own approach whether that be ancient, traditional, contemporary, or alternative, that you cannot appreciate and be willing to use a variety of approaches. For example extempore prayers bring spontaneity, freshness, immediacy. Written prayers, however, can offer pace, beauty, careful language and thought out theology. Each have a place in the right place. Bringing to me the richness of the Church.
2. Corporate worship is corporate. It is not just about me and Jesus. Nor just about you, me, and Jesus. It is about us – the Church, the body, the fellowship. Provide us with things that we can do and say and pray and sing together and which through our participation will help form us into that ‘people’ of God.
3. Remind me that though I gather in worship that I am part of the world. Yes please direct me to God and to the Son and to the Spirit. Yes hold before me this gathered people and our shared concerns. Yet let me become insular and self-centred that I forget that with loving God comes love of neighbour. Through prayer and word and song hold before the World that God creates and loves and remind me that in it I serve God.
4. Please do no tell me to forget all my problems and worries and just concentrate on God and praise him. Yes I want to concentrate on God and I do want to praise him but the Psalms invite me to do that through taking my world and my issues seriously. They say that I can lament and rage and confess as well as worship and praise. Indeed they suggest that at times the only way I will reach praise is through being allowed to lament. This God the God of the Psalms is the one I need to engage my world in all of its complexity. I do not need him separated from it but brought into it in all his redeeming power. The light shines in the darkness. Hope comes through the night. If my worship is disengaged from the reality of my life there is a danger that my life will become disengaged from Worship and this is surely not what God wants (Romans 12:1-2).
5. Be careful in how you lead. I do not care if you are professional. But I do want you to be careful. I want the sense that you care about what you are doing. That you care that it is done to the best of your ability. That you care that it is done in a way that is helpful. That you care that the things we are doing are things that help touch the Holy. That you care about us in the congregation. Handle the important things well – Baptism and Communion they matter and should not be relegated as side shows to everything else that is going on. Know their place and significance in the history of the Church. Be careful that Word and Worship come together and are not just random and separated acts in the one ‘show’ but act, react, and interact with one another.

Betraying the generation...

'There's a truly great Irish poet his name is Brendan Kennelly,  and he has this epic poem called the Book of Judas, and there's a line in that poem that never leaves my mind, it says: "If you want to serve the age, betray it." What does that mean to betray the age?

Well to me betraying the age means exposing its conceits, it's foibles; it's phony moral certitudes. It means telling the secrets of the age and facing harsher truths.

Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was--which was ungodly and inhuman.'

From the Commencement Address at Penssylvania University by Bono, co-founder of DATA (Debt AIDS Trade Africa), and lead singer of U2, May 17, 2004.

What are the conceits, foibles and phony moral certitudes that require to named in our generation?

1. Poor treatment of the elderly in terms of respect and care.

Concerned not convinced

Listened to Jim Wallis (Call to Conversion, God's Politucs, Sojourners fame etc) on Radio 5 Live today.

Wallis repeated as in his book his confidence in a new wave, a movement of people operating from a faith basis and concerned about seven issues including poverty, justice, green issues etc.

This may represent what is happening in the USA - I am not convinced that it is happening in the UK.

Here I do not sense, in the evangelical churches, and beyond - a movement that has a moral compass in the direction of Justice. Here I do not mean in 'claim' but in practice.

Not convinced, I am concerned.

Concerned that compassion for the human other is so integral to biblical faith in God, that its absence is not simply unfortunate but is indicative of a fundamentally deficient spirituality and redundant religiosity.

Wallis in a previous generation had to fight to be an evangelical and a radical - don't sense that fight

- although there are plenty of other fights by evangelicals among other evangelicals as to who can own the name evangelical on the basis of this or that particular interpretation of a doctrine as key to being an evangelical as defined by evangelicals who cannot agree what it means to be an evangelical.

Yeah that makes sense...