Virtual Methodist

It is usually around this time of year that I have traditionally received gifts that many laypeople would be deeply jealous of... Funeral Directors' pocket diaries... One year I received 4. I offered them to members of my family but they thought them a tad ghoulish. But a member of my then congregation heard me commenting on this and asked me for one... And from there on in he sidled up to me in mid-December and asked had I a spare diary going. As the years went by I received fewer, but I had long since stopped using paper diaries anyway... Then two years ago my friend died... And this year I haven't received any Funeral Directors' diaries at all (just a pen so far, which my eldest son has purloined In the days when I was receiving them, one of the most frustrating tasks was filling in the first batch of dates (including birthdays etc). With a rolling electronic diary backed up online I don't have that problem... But this year I have more dates than usual coming in...

"If I, even for a moment, accept my culture's definition of me, I am rendered harmless." When Peterson makes this statement in "The Contemplative Pastor" he is specifically referring to pastors... but is it not true of everyone? In response to my post last week offering an operating manual for ministers, one friend (and wife of a Methodist minister) suggested that it was not just ministers who needed such an operating manual, but teachers, doctors, lawyers and other professions who are frequently faced with unrealistic expectations... My response was that not only was that true, but applied to those outside of the traditional professions too. I'm actually very wary of special pleading on the part of ministers especially when it comes to their long working hours and busy schedules (more on that with my next post based on this book), given that we live in a world where so many people are subject to tremendous pressure and unrealistic expectations. We as mi...

A number of years ago when talk of a covenant between the Methodist Church in Ireland and the (Anglican/Episcopal) Church of Ireland was first mooted, a friend said on the floor of conference that we should remember that "Putting two coffins together doesn't automatically produce a resurrection." He was almost assaulted later by another colleague who believed that such a statement was "anti-ecumenical", although my friend has clearly demonstrated by his actions before and since that he is deeply commited to practical ecumenism. His statement was by no means original (I read something similar written in a somewhat sneering fashion by "new church" leader Gerald Coates , at the height of an earlier frenzy of ecumenical endeavours), but it is true... Personally I believe that there is one church (with many flavours), and agree with the ecumenical analysis first articulated 100 years ago at the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference and succinctly summed up ...

Did you see the big fight? Not the Joe Calzaghe v Roy Jones Jnr bout from Madison Square Gardens, but the Armenian Orthodox Monks v Greek Orthodox Monks from the Holy Sepulchre. If you haven't seen it, you can find footage of it here . But you're probably better not watching it. For once it was not Northern Ireland dragging the name of Christ through the dirt. But it brought to mind this piece written by Arthur Leonard Griffith: "At the centre of the old city [Jerusalem] stands the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, reputedly on the site of the original Calvary and the original Garden of the Resurrection. It stands, but only because ugly steel scaffolding permanently supports the walls inside and out. This church is one of the dirtiest, most depressing buildings in all Christendom. It should be torn down and rebuilt. This is not possible, however, because the Church of the Holy Sepulchre belongs jointly to the Abyssinians, Armenians, Copts, Greeks, Syrians and Roman Catholics, ...