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What difference does the cross make? |
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 I'm getting fed up of doom and gloom.
It is probably down to watching too much Sky News - they have these weird promos for The Recession (heard of it?). Some have a Village People-like cross section of the working community filming an unexpectedly depressing video. They sit in the world's worst amusement arcade, shoving their last pennies into slot machines, to the sound of scary, abstract, claustrophic, dissonant droning - the music you would have in a film if someone fell down a mineshaft, and was still falling after 30 seconds. The other promos feature Jeff Randall, financial editor from the Telegraph, and Sky's answer to the BBC business sexer-upper Robert Peston. He warns us sternly that we're all living in la-la land if we think there is a quick way out of this mess, and we'd better take his advice and be good. And by the way, just to make us feel a bit worse, he could have told us this was going to happen in advance so WHY DIDN'T ANY OF US LISTEN TO HIM???!! Grrrr!!! Arrrgghhhh!!!! |
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What's your image of church? Do you think of some grand old building from Songs of Praise which blends neatly in with the Antiques Roadshow? Or do you have some childhood memory of being marched in and out of wooden benches and told to play an unpleasant game of stand up / kneel down / be quiet / shut your eyes / sing / etc... You might have heard people tell you how church is different now. There are nicer seats. Kids run around. You get to watch videos. The teaching is amazing. There's a really good band, etc. Is that what makes a church good? If so - why is the church not growing fastest in the most highly educated, richest and most tech-savvy countries, where they can create the most attractive churches? Pip n Jay in Bristol is an example of a slightly messy, odd church. It's where my wife and I belong. I recently redesigned its website - www.pipnjay.org - and you can get some sort of flavour of it there. Some of its members are quite well off, but the church isn't defined by affluence - far from it. If you came along on a Sunday night you might be next to a rich professional, or next to one of the homeless waiting for the evening's soup run - and you might not know the difference until you ask. The church has consistently given away more than half its income every year for the last 30 years. Is it the sort of thing which looks good to you, or is it one of your nightmares of how bad church can be? You can email me - bern@bernleckie.com I'm wondering, not because we're trying to market the church better, but because I'm aware that a lot more people are attracted to Jesus than to the church, and I'm wanting to know how much we look like Jesus as a group of people. If we do that, I don't think we'll get much neater, but I do think we'll see a lot more people wanting to be part of it. |
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Finding the Source of Peace |
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Where does peace come from? Not me. I know something about chilling, but I can only point the way to Jesus who - for me - is the source of everything I know about the real good stuff. In a series of podcasts and blogs, we're discussing what it means to have a source of peace.
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