Virtual Methodist

Yesterday my friend Lesley Carroll put out a blog post that went viral, deriding the church for not speaking out in the wake of the Haass debacle, and in other important public policy issues... It is a piece that I could see myself writing, although less coherently... However, I found myself in the unusual position of being unwilling to promote her post too widely as I had been part of a group who met to discuss a joint-churches response and had appointed a team to draft a response... They got the guts of it done relatively quickly, but for various reasons it didn't get finalised, signed off or distributed as quickly as many would have liked... But it was released today , and here is the text: As Church leaders we encourage politicians to sustain the momentum and energy generated by the talks of the Panel of Parties in the Northern Ireland Executive, chaired and facilitated by Dr Richard Haass and his team. Significant work has been completed in recent months and we acknowled...

HUGE backlog... so much so that when I went back to my list of links I couldn't think why for the life of me I would have wanted to pass some of them on... Ah well, such is the ephemeral nature of the interweb... But there is still a huge collection here... So I will keep my comments to a minimum and just throw them out there under a few broad headings... Some are, as the signpost says, useful, others merely funny, and just because I've put them up here doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything in them... but they are worth thinking about or will at least give some of you a giggle... OBITS I said the last time that there would probably be lots of pieces on Seamus Heaney in my next Saturday Supplement following his sad demise. Sorry to disappoint. I only offer this one by Roy Foster in the O bserver, as well as another one from the Guardian the next day by Mark Lawson on David Frost who has gone to the great eternal interview...  SYRIA One of the areas ...

Another quick linkdump without much comment, due to packing and unpacking boxes being a priority this week. The big issue in Ireland this week has been Warren Gatland not only not giving Brian O'Driscoll the captaincy for the final showdown with the Aussies this morning, but not actually picking him for the matchday squad... Now the thing is BoD did have a bit of a shocker last week, with a couple of wayward passes, but he is still the most creative player out there, and arguably the only leader they have left... I really don't understand why you wouldn't even have him on the bench as a game-changer... Instead Gatland has gone for blunt force... With Manu Tuilagi on the bench incase Jamie Roberts crock's himself again... No plan B, despite the fact that this approach has never served Wales well against Australia in the past... But never mind, I said I wasn't going to comment much, and, that said, let me encourage you to read BoD's response to being dropped ...

This is a veritable landfill site of linkdumps this morning... Read them all and you could be still sitting here tomorrow. So I'll just group them under appropriate (?) headings and keep my comments to the minimum: HOMOSEXUALITY & SAME SEX-MARRIAGE In the week that has seen England and Wales make the first legislative steps towards the recognition of same-sex marriage there have been a number of stories that have caught my eye... An article by Alice Arnold on her relationship with TV sports presenter Clare Balding, and why the term "marriage" is important to them... A piece by Michael Bird , prompted by an "ex-gay" conversion story and the response to it, asking how those who advocate "Queer Theology" (an unhelpful term I believe), relate to those who call themselves "ex-gays"... In response to the same story Scot McKnight points to some research that suggests that such conversions are not only real but produce statistically...

Most of the pieces that have caught my eye this week follow on from some of the pieces I pointed to last week... First and foremost being ye olde flags issue... 9 weeks and counting... It must be serious in that even Seamus Heaney, has said something , despite his self-enforced rule of "whatever you say, say nothing." He argues that the whole thing was unnecessary and badly handled, but I would be wary, as some have done of taking from his words much succour for the unionist/loyalist cause, without also hearing his critique of the Unionist "caste" system. One of the pieces on this subject I highlighted last week came from a former youth worker at the East Belfast Mission, while this week one of the best was by the Director of EBM's Skainos project Glenn Jordan, on Crookedshore where he points to this as possibly the end of a political era and, perhaps the emergence of a new one with new voices and emphases. Meanwhile Jude Hill, UTV reporter and the driving f...

It's been a while since I did a round up of interesting things wot I found on t'interweb but was spurred on to do one this week on the back of two strands that have come out of the current "flags" issue in Belfast. Both are by people who previously worked with the two Methodist missions in Belfast: former East Belfast Mission Youth Worker, Harriet Long, and former club culture outreach worker with Belfast Central Mission Dave Magee. After a couple of posts on her own feelings about the protests and how they were impacting on East Belfast, Harriet then started a short series giving voice to some women in that area coming at the issue from diverse perspectives, concluding with this one from a girl in the Catholic Short Strand area . Dave has, for many years now, been working on peace-building and non-violent responses to problems in loyalist communities, particularly in North Down, and the flags protest prompted him at long last to start blogging from his experien...

Partly as a personal response to some of the issues raised in my (surprisingly popular) post last week prompted by some of the points of annoyance I encounter in my calling as a pastor/preacher, I thought I would return to Eugene Peterson's "The Contemplative Pastor" as part of my daily devotions for a wee while... And a few lines in I found a whole collection of thoughts piling up which required more mature reflection... so in the absence of any ability on my part to do such a thing, I thought I'd blog on a few of them... beginning, as we should with the discipline of prayer... Peterson says: "Prayer is a subversive activity. It involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime..." In other words, prayer is not just an act of personal piety or a corporate ritual, but is a profoundly revolutionary political activity. To continue my thoughts in yesterday's post , not only is prayer a pledge of allegiance to a ki...

I'm tired... I'm tired of people in power laughing and joking over capping benefits for the poor, sneering at them as "shirkers" or "skivers" in contrast to "strivers"... I'm tired of the wealthy bleating about losing child benefit, and fuel tax hikes that will make their gas-guzzling 4x4's marginally more expensive to fill up... I'm tired of an economic system that is based on greed and dissatisfaction... conspicuous consumption that is destroying the planet, impoverishing more and more people (while a few get richer), and causing profound depression among those who are never content... I'm tired of a Christian sub-set of that system that has bought into it uncritically, and constantly seeks to sell me the next big spiritual breakthrough in a book/programme/speaker/event... I'm tired of all the strands of the media, music, film, TV, newspapers, internet et al that are filled to overflowing with the celebration of igno...

On one of the radio talk-shows this week (don't know which one as I didn't put the radio on and am not even sure at which point in the week I heard it) one of the callers, who was a participant in the current "flag-protests" (although we all know that it's not just about a flag) claimed that he and his fellow protesters were more faithful to the 1912 Ulster Covenant than those Unionist leaders in Stormont sitting in government with the "enemies of Britain." There could be some truth in that. Take a look again at the words and context of the 1912 Covenant. BEING CONVINCED in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fa...

I suggested yesterday that American society and the church within it, needs to look at itself very, very seriously in the wake of the Newtown massacre, and other such events... But I say that from a society that also needs to look at itself very seriously... another society that, whilst claiming to be democratic, thinks that violence or the threat of violence, is a way to achieve its own ends... And that applies to those on both sides of the constitutional divide, whatever flag they may choose to drape themselves in and dishonour. My own analysis of the recent spat about the Union flag flying over Belfast City Hall, is that it has less to do with honouring the fact that Northern Ireland is part of the UK (which it is), and more to do with both Sinn Fein and the Unionists trying to assert their particular credentials over and against Republican dissidents on one side and the "Lundyite" Alliance Party in the middle... We've been here many times before, with the Unionist ...

Yesterday morning I and about a thousand or so other people were summoned to prayer, not by bells (or by a muezzin in a minaret) but by guys in fluorescent waistcoats blowing whistles... I was taking part in the 5 minute prayer vigil around Belfast City Hall, and as I said yesterday on facebook I was going to write a longer piece on it, but Stocki said it much better than I would in his Surmise . He even used a line I was gearing up to, the Iona Community's John Bell's oft repeated assertion that God's favourite colour is tartan... I suppose that line has stuck with me because I have a Scottish wife... But it certainly applied to yesterday, as I saw people from all sorts of denominational affiliations, social classes, theological bents and political affectations linking arms around city hall and looking out towards the 4 corners of this divided city as they prayed silently (for the most part) for it... But that is, in many ways, only the beginning... When we pray, th...