Virtual Methodist

This morning's Thought  the Day on Good Morning Ulster... Well do you feel your sap rising, with today being the Spring equinox… the day in the northern hemisphere when there is as much light as dark… hopefully heralding marginally warmer weather in the weeks ahead?  Today is also the International Day of Happiness, established in 2011 as a United Nations Initiative devised by social entrepreneur and UN advisor Jayme Illien to inspire, mobilize, and advance the idea of happiness as a fundamental human right. And as pat of that , today as in previous years, the World Happiness Report comes out with a league table measuring the happiness of different countries via some arcane statistics. Despite the economic doldrums of the past decade and the political rancor of recent years, the UK has remained fairly steady at around 18th out of about 150 countries… With central African countries generally rating very low and Scandinavians topping the league every year… Th...

Friday was a busy and diverse day... A morning spent hearing about and discussing the work of the Irish Churches Peace Project, an afternoon plotting and planning for the next 4 Corners Festival, then an evening at a fundraising Quiz for my son's gap year project... with a pastoral visit and some sermon preparation squeezed into the gaps... I enjoy quizzes... I enjoy the challenge of fishing around in the murky swamp that I call my memory to see if I can fish out the right answers to obscure questions... And so long as the subjects have nothing to do with modern culture (eg. soaps/celebrities/boy bands etc) I am usually OK... But on Friday night I wasn't trying to answer the questions... I was merely the beauteous assistant to our question master, having contributed a few of the questions to the pot from which he drew... And that is a useful metaphor for what I am increasingly trying to do these days... ask questions rather than necessarily provide answers... Earlier ...

Well, this morning we showed SlingshotCreations' "Happy Methodists" video from Conference at our morning service, subverting the fine work I have done for years in describing my attendance at Annual Conference as a trial akin to a millennium in purgatory (if we believed in such a thing)... I may not have looked it in the video, but I genuinely was happy at the overall direction of conference this year... certainly more so than for most of my ministry and more so than last year where I felt somewhat out of joint with everything for various reasons. This year was not perfect by any means, but this is not the forum to discuss what I perceive as it's shortcomings... and I have already discussed them with those who can actually make a difference. But throughout and after conference I have had a number of experiences that have made me genuinely happy... not just the somewhat superficial happiness induced by this video (though there is nothing wrong with that)... ...

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But anyone who opens their eyes whilst wandering around any city in the United States will see that while our Creator theoretically made us all equal, something has gone wrong in practice. Certainly my first morning in Pittsburgh showed that some people were finding the unalienable right to pursue happiness a little difficult in sub-zero temperatures... turned away from one city-centre church by an armed guard because they were likely to frighten members of the congregation. Other churches ran cold weather shelters, but they only kicked into action at 20 F, and kicked their inhabitants out at 7am. So what if the founder of the church also had no place to lay his head... Unless it was seriously sub-zero he'd have little chance of finding somewhere to sleep in the centre of Pit...