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These are beautiful.
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Alan Mann has a great new post for us on our Deep Church blog.
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In Celtic spirituality certain locations were called ‘thin places’. These are places or perceptions where the division between heaven and earth are said to be at its narrowest. I would like to recount two of my ‘thin places’ places which would may explain my postmodern bias…
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Tim Wright just sent me this link. Like him I thought, ‘only in America’. I also then thought this can’t be real, then thought someone is going to make a lot of money, and then I came full circle back to ‘only in America’.
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So I learned that my favorite coffee shops is closing. It’s only a half a block from our flat (‘apartment’ on this side of the pond-but ‘flat’ is such a better word) and it had the seeds of being a missional place for us. We were getting to know the barrista’s, the regulars, and the musicians that played there on occasion. I don’t know why they are closing, but Makeesha (my wife) said that they said that a Starbucks was opening across the street. They may have been closing up anyway, but it did get me thinking – again – about big corporations and it begged the question for me this morning; Are the intrusions of big corporations into cities and towns forcing the smaller independent businesses to close shop a social justice issue?
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Whilst people maybe suspicious of dominant narratives, stories that seek to explain the meaning of life for everyone, we instinctively live by stories. There are dominant narratives in our lives, in our imagination, beliefs, values, inner voices and dialogues, childhood experiences, that are the reality we live by.
My Nan always tells me to put myself first because no-one else will! She means well, but it’s a not a story I want to live by. I got to thinking about where we hear expressed the narratives that dominate how we really live and order our lives. One place they seem to come out into the open are when we get together to eat meals and socialise. Looking back over the conversations I hear, and have, there seem to be a few stories we tell in the west.
1. Busy: we are all so busy, and justify our existence by being busy and letting others know how busy we are. We order our lives, the space we have for mission around this story, certainly in London.
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The word “Eucharist” comes from the Greek noun εá½Ï‡Î±Ïιστία (transliterated, “Eucharistia”), meaning thanksgiving. This noun or the corresponding verb εá½Ï‡Î±Ïιστῶ (I give thanks) is found in 55 verses of the New Testament (more background here).
Whilst we have ‘communion’ once a month in our sunday gathering/service/meeting, we are trying a full communion/eucharist service a few times a year. We held one yesterday, that included an explanation of the liturgical process we used for eucharist, and began with videos by our media team showing the history of communion/eucharist, and some video interviews with people from our community about what communion means to them (you can catch the videos here). We even baked our own unleavened bread.
Then we used prayers and texts from Nick Fawcett’s small but outstanding book “For you and for Many”, for our liturgy and eucharist.
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Missio Dei with human kind: finding/affirming humanity and confronting/challenging inhumanity?
20 Jul 2007
It was a crowded hot tube train, one sticky summer morning, and wedged in the corner i remember struggling within myself about whether i should or should not continue to starelook discreetly at the prominently displayed cleavage of the woman squashed next to me. The conversation that I had withmyselfthe Spirit went along these lines:Me: God, it’s clear to me that if i wasn’t meant to look then her top would not be so low nor her bra of such a pushing up variety…
Spirit: so why are you bothering me?
Me: well, i wanted to feel better about myself for looking whilst believing it’s my right as a man to look, isn’t it?
Spirit: what if i gave you permission not to look and helped you discover that you were actually more of a man not less so as a result
Me: ok, but this is london, in the summer, it’s going to be very hard not too…
And indeed hard it was – in fact at my tube stop the whole platform advertising was dedicated to launching a new range of raunchy lingerie (which says a lot about our sexualised erotic culture) and that God’s timing has it’s own sense of humour. But looking back at that moment (and every other cleavage i have been tempted to look at since) i have begun to realise that it was in that look about me learning to recover something of my humanity and also to give back to the woman i am looking at some of her humanity as well…
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We’ve got a new post this week at the Deep Church site, from Luke Bretherton.
Luke Bretheron, is one of the editors and contributors towards ‘Remembering our Future’, and my PhD supervisor. He prepared 3 mediations on the Presence and Absence of God, using words and art.
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We all desire to reach the world, especially those that inhabit our own communities. We desire to reach the lost, the unloved, and the forgotten. However, is it possible to reach those people and talk to them without some sort of preconceived notion or prejudice about them? Will our prejudice get in the way of initiating a conversation or even approaching them in the first place? I have a desire to reach teens, any teens, really– drug addicts or youth group student leaders– I’m not picky! With that, I have this wild dream that I could connect with the teens that hang out in “Old Town” Fort Collins.
Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, let me paint you a picture…
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