Virtual Methodist

I may be on sabbatical, but I'm not completely lounging around with my feet up... just taking a break from my circuit, connexional and chaplaincy responsibilities, freeing me up to to a few of the things that I enjoy doing and more reading and writing. Hence it was that I still found myself sitting in the green room of BBC Radio Ulster this morning at stupid o'clock to do the following Thought for the Day (for the next week you can listen to it here at 25 and 85 minutes in ) It's on a theme I've been touching on more than once here recently... Last week a number of banks posted their annual trading results, and as has been the case every year recently, the figures have been uniformly in the red… However, that hasn’t stopped bank executives being awarded hefty performance related bonuses, on the grounds that the losses weren’t as bad as last year! It strikes me that it’s a weird world where we don’t cap the bonuses of the bankers who got us into this mess, but do ca...

Time and again over the past couple of years I've come back to the issue of compassion, be it because of a perceived lack of compassion within the church particularly in this wee part of the world, or because I find it hard to practice any sort of self-compassion (the latter perhaps conditioned by the former). Well yesterday, in my re-reading of Peterson's "The Contemplative Pastor" I came across his "definition" of a pastor as: "a person who was passionate for God and compassionate with people." Snappy. It has a "mission" statement/soundbite character to it, uncharacteristic of the usually forensically careful Peterson. But I'm trying to work out the implications of it. Passion usually refers to some powerful emotion... Whilst it may be focussed on a person, or thing, often it can become intensely selfish - the person or thing may be the object of the passion but ultimately it is all about satisfying the emotional needs...