Coffee Theology

Tonight our cafe-style service was on the theme 'pray as you can, not as you can't.'  I find prayer difficult, and I'm constantly meeting Christians who tell me "I wish I prayed more."  I figured maybe someone who wasn't a natural contemplative might be a good person to plan a creative prayer evening.  While at college I was always moaning that it was always introverts who planned this stuff... For the extroverts, we had coffee, cake and discussion questions in the coffee lounge.  This, for me, was the comfortable bit - talking with other people about stuff while drinking coffee (decaf, natch).  Then people were invited to move next door and sample some of the prayer stations, with Norah Jones playing quietly in the background.  (Most of the worship music on my mp3 player is loud and not  conducive to meditation).   There was a table with craft materials, including magazines and craft papers, where people were invited to make a prayer collage. ...

While reflecting further on Steve's 'red and blue' imagery - in other words, the fact that we all see things differently, and need each other in order to get the full picture - I found myself thinking about the different Hogwarts houses in Harry Potter. All students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are 'Sorted' into one of four houses on the day they arrive at the school.  The Sorting Hat magically determines which house is the best fit.  Gryffindor is for the bravest and boldest; Ravenclaw is for the cleverest; Slytherin is for the most cunning, and only takes those of pure wizarding stock; and Hufflepuff takes all the rest.  Harry and most of the other main characters are Gryffindors: courageous and fiercely loyal.  They do what's right even if it means breaking a few school rules.  Harry's friend Hermione explains that the Sorting Hat nearly put her in Ravenclaw, as she is extremely bright, loves school work, works very hard and is top in alm...

Last summer I went to a Christian festival, which was very, very cool.  I loved the look of the place; I loved the lineup of speakers; every time I went to a session I thought, yes, you're so right!  The speakers expressed views I heartily agreed with and received lots of applause.  I was among like-minded people.  Would I go back?  I'm not sure, and that's not just because it rained without pause for the last 36 hours of the festival. On one level it felt very warm and affirming to be around people who all seemed to have the same views as me, about politics, about military action, about Christian theology.  In church I am used to being very diplomatic, carefully neutral, or at least expressing my views with hesitation.  Here at the festival I could be completely me, and everyone around me saw things the same way I did. And that's the problem.  It felt a bit like eating a massive chocolate cake (or drinking two or three large double shot cappuccin...

Today, as part of the ministers' conference I am attending, Juliet Kilpin gave a presentation about the refugee crisis, specifically the situation of the Calais migrants.  She explained that we were seeing the biggest movement of people since the Second World War.  Calais was where migrants ended up when they were trying to cross into the UK.  Just 23 miles away from us, across the Channel, people were living in terrible conditions.  Juliet travels there every 7 to 10 days to meet with people and hear their stories.  She shared with us some of what she had experienced. Accommodation was basic, crowded and cold.  The ground was muddy - and it wasn't just mud people were wading through.  The local police frequently used tear gas to make life uncomfortable for the migrants, and to encourage them to move on.  The situation was so desperate that people took huge risks hiding in trucks and jumping on to trains, because if they were going to die, they wa...

Once again the marvellous Steve Tinning blessed us all with a really creative communion service at the Eastern Baptist Association ministers' conference.   As we entered, we were all given glasses to wear - some red, some blue.  During the service various prayers and Bible verses flashed up on the screen, some of which we were unable to read.  Those of us with blue glasses could not read the words in blue.  Those of us with red glasses could not read the words in red.  Some read: 'Blessed are the peacemakers'.  Others read: 'I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.'  We each had a particular 'view' of Jesus, depending on the colour of our glasses. When it came to communion, there was a choice of red bread or blue.  We were encouraged to take bread of the colour which we had filtered out.  That way, we could ask Jesus to help us see that which we had missed because of our filters. It was a wonderfully creative service with a very profound ...

  For years now I've been using sign language in worship.  I think it probably started with the Doug Horley children's song 'Wonderful Lord', which includes signs.  For those of you unfamiliar with all-age Christian worship, songs which have actions for children to do as they sing along are very popular.  Rather than making up simple 'actions', Doug Horley is a Christian songwriter who chooses to use British Sign Language to accompany his songs.  Since learning the signs to 'Wonderful Lord', I've been inspired to hit Google and learn some new signs to use when leading public prayers.  For example, we use the sign for 'praise' when we're praising God; the sign for 'sorry' when we're confessing our sins to God, and so on.  It's not just me - lots of other Christians have been using signs for a long time to help children engage with worship.  I really like using signs, but I'm not quite sure exactly why.  I guess the...

Ann Morisy's argument - that the rich and comfortable need to journey out and encounter struggle - is very helpful when applied to the suspended meal scheme we run in our church coffee shop.  One one level, this is simply a charitable endeavour whereby hungry people are fed.  We are meeting a need, perhaps not in our immediate area, but in the Borough of Southend: a pressing need for the basic necessities of life among our homeless community.  Morisy argues strongly that churches should not look at these projects simply as 'needs meeting' - there is something more profound going on. If we as a church see the suspended meal scheme as only  a way of providing food to those who need it, then we will seek to do so as efficiently as possible.  Our current scheme could been seen as highly inefficient: hungry people need to travel to us to get the food; we are in an affluent area where costs are high; donating the suspended meal money to a homeless charity which alread...

More on Ann Morisy's wonderful book, Journeying Out.   One of the chapters in this book made me wince the whole way through.  Morisy devotes a whole chapter to the problem of suburbia, which she describes as play pen living .  Those of us (and she includes herself in this) who live in suburbia live lives protected from life's struggles.  We devote our lives to trivia: to filling our wardrobes with clothes we don't need and our houses with Ikea furniture.  We accumulate so much stuff that our houses become cluttered and then we have to decide what to do with all the stuff.  Our wealth protects us from many of life's struggles.  It is as if we are children living in a play pen.   Ouch . Morisy does not claim that people living in suburbia never suffer, but that we hide our suffering behind our Ikea curtains, thus preventing us from the joy of receiving help and support from our neighbours.  She argues that we try to maintain a certain image - t...

As a 'Newly Accredited Minister' I have a certain amount of study I have to do each year.  I am in serious catch-up mode, with (actually, I'm not going to tell you how many) book reviews to do in the next few months.  Not much, you might say, but in order to review a book it is helpful actually to read it, and I am a VERY slow reader.  Fiction I can devour almost too quickly (I read the final Harry Potter book in 11 hours, virtually at one sitting).  Academic books take me much longer, however.  I concentrate for a page or two, then start yawning, even if the book is interesting.  I have to bribe myself to get through it (one more chapter and you can have a cup of tea).  Fortunately, the book I was reading yesterday is so fantastic I have to share it with you. Journeying Out by Ann Morisy is a book about a new way of looking at Christian mission.  It was published 12 years ago and I wish I'd got around to it sooner.  There is so much in t...

It's been a week now, and the headache has subsided.  My tea and coffee fast is going ok.  I'm not enjoying it, but that's kind of the point of fasting.  If you give something up you're not bothered about, it has little meaning.  You're also not supposed to make a big deal of it in front of others: Jesus says, if you do, you have already received your reward.  In other words, you've impressed people, but you haven't impressed God. At this point, I am hoping that God understands that when I tell the Internet about my caffeine fast I am not so much bragging as externally processing my thoughts, which is what we extroverts do, I'm afraid. I had a very interesting conversation about Lent in the church coffee shop yesterday.  A Christian colleague explained that, rather than give something up, she chooses something she enjoys, such as cake, and puts money in a jar every time she eats it during Lent.  That way she can give the money she's put aside to a ch...

This is a rather special blanket. The squares are lots of different sizes, and they're not all square.  Some are crocheted, some are knitted.  Some are very tightly crocheted with thick wool; some are very loosely knit with thin yarn.  They're all green-ish, but some are bright emerald green; some are lime green; some are pale sage green; some are dark forest green; some yarns are multi-coloured and some pieces are made up of several different colours.  They have been inexpertly crocheted together by me using three different colours of wool (I kept running out). Most of these squares started out as a 14ft high knitted Christmas tree, created by Leigh on Sea's absolutely marvellous yarn bombers.  The individual squares were made by people all over the world, some expert knitters, some beginners.  The yarn bombers brought them together into a wonderful piece of public art, complete with multicoloured pom-pom tinsel and fairy lights.  See https://www.face...

The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 Hollywood film starring Will Smith and his son, Jaden Smith, then aged five.  Based on a true story, it chronicles a year in the life of Chris Gardner, a single dad who is down on his luck.  He is a talented salesman who has invested his life's savings in a piece of medical technology which he sells to hospitals.  Unfortunately, sales are slow and money is very, very tight.  His wife is ground down by their life of struggle, and leaves him and their young son, Chris Jr.  His landlord is hassling Chris for rent money he doesn't have, and Chris Jr.'s daycare doesn't seem to be up to much, but it's all Chris can afford.   Then one day Chris sees a man getting out of a flashy red sports car, and asks him, jokingly, "What do you do and how do you do it?"  The man replies that he's a stockbroker.  Through much persistence, Chris manages to get himself on a shortlist of people being considered for a job training to be a...

I've written before on this blog about representations of women in film, both good and not so good.  I bought my husband all Roger Moore's James Bond films for Christmas, so I've spent a good deal of time over the last few weeks watching women on film being leered at, patronised and rescued by the male protagonist.  Clearly looking to James Bond for positive female role models is a mistake. Back in autumn last year the marvellous J.K. Rowling, writing as Robert Galbraith, published her third Cormoran Strike detective novel, featuring ex-military police officer Cormoran Strike and his assistant, Robin Ellacott.  Strike is a private detective, who hires Robin by accident as a secretary, and then finds that she has a great deal more to offer.  Robin is a really fantastic example of a complex female character who is both strong and vulnerable, feminine and yet defying female stereotypes. Robin moves to London to be with her fiancé, Matthew, and takes the job with Strike ...

I have mentioned on my blog before that my husband tends to vet my film and TV choices.  This is not because he is a control freak but because he knows how sensitive I am and what a morbidly vivid imagination I have.  Unfortunately, when he wasn't looking, I bought The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson.  It's a great book, but one I have to remember not to read last thing at night. People are absolutely fascinating to me and I have an insatiable appetite for understanding them better.  That's one of the reasons I am somewhat obsessed with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (that's a trademark, folks, but I can't do superscript in this app).  I frequently bore people to tears trying to work out their 'type' and engaging in long-winded analysis of the way they engage with the world and how it differs from the way I do.  I also find psychological profiling fascinating, but I have learned not to read about forensic psychology because the details of crimes really upset...

A few years ago I gave up coffee and tea for Lent.  I was concerned that I might be addicted to coffee and this didn't seem a healthy thing.  Giving up something I loved seemed like a good way to show God I loved him.  I had a headache for two days.  The tea and coffee fast showed me that I wasn't addicted to coffee, I just really liked it.  I feel about coffee the way some people feel about chocolate - it's one of the great pleasures in life, but I can do without it.  However, I realised that I was addicted to tea.  For me, tea isn't like chocolate, it's like oxygen.  In fact, I hadn't given up tea during Lent, I'd simply switched to decaf, knowing that giving up tea altogether would be too hard. Since then, every time Lent comes around I have thought about giving up tea and coffee again, but I just didn't have the guts.  This year, I decided I had to take the bull by the horns and do it again.  Surely I love God more than my morning cu...

Following on from yesterday's post, Caroline asked: How do you see the transforming power of God at work in helping us all live in peace?  When I was about 13 or 14 I was obsessed with the sixties, with pictures of The Beatles and John and Yoko all over my bedroom walls.  I painted a load of posters with slogans like 'Give Peace A Chance', 'Make Love Not War' and 'Ban the Bomb' and put them up above the picture rail.  One morning I got in a fight with my younger brother (he was 12, I was 14 - it happened a lot), and I shouted at him (this happened a lot too).  My dad, irritated by yet another argument and doubtless aggravated by the volume of my shrieking, angrily said to me: "Give Peace A Chance?  You don't know anything about peace!"  Being an emotional 14-year-old girl, I burst into tears and took down all my peace posters.  I was upset, not just because my dad had yelled at me, but because I knew he was right.  My idealistic vision of the w...

It's that time of year again - Shrove Tuesday - and part of my Lent discipline will be to blog daily.  Or at least, to try.   A few weeks ago I managed to pick a fight at an otherwise friendly ministers' breakfast by vigorously defending this much-loved song, written by the wonderful John Lennon: Imagine by John Lennon Imagine there's no heaven It's easy if you try No hell below us Above us only sky Imagine all the people Living for today... Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll jo...