New Wine is one of the principle gatherings of the charismatic/evangelical community each year. Many of the leaders are Anglican ministers (by the skin of their teeth these days?) but much of the theology is Wimber/Vineyard.
Commuting over to Shepton Mallett meant we had to look carefully through the brochure each night and decide what we really wanted to go to the next day. End result was that we went to fewer things than last year but they were all pretty good.
A couple of the more theological seminars by the wonderfully named Crispin Fletcher-Louis were excellent in helping to build an understanding of Word and Spirit that did more justice to Word than New Wine usually manages.
John Peters on Ephesians had some good insights. He translated the lists of leadership gifts in the New Testament into just three for 2008 - adventurers, thinkers and carers. Churches, he said, should be run by adventurers with a carer hanging on one leg (to look after people) and a thinker on the other (to do process and make it all legal).
Mike Fuller's 50 minute guides (complete histories) to church, religion and the Bible were excellent. They are downloadable from his website.
Worship was lively (we did Venue 2 not main venue) but I think we are going through a phase of Christian history where the tunes are good but the lyrics are trite - from time to time it is good to sing a bit of doctrine. Where are the poets and lyricists?
Our church had nearly 30 there this year but I think the weather may have put some of them off. Camping with children is a bit tricky in the rain.
I think I remain more convinced than ever that if Trendlewood Church is going to renew and grow it will be God's work not mine but I come away from New Wine feeling a little more fervent in my desire to ask him to do that.
Showing posts with label New Wine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Wine. Show all posts
Monday, August 11, 2008
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
New Wine
I'm booked into New Wine this week but this year I am taking the opportunity of only living 30 miles away to commute. Sorry about my green credentials everyone. This morning I woke up in my own bed to the sound of lashing rain and felt I had made a very good decision. Yesterday, when I came home, I had the time to pop and visit a member of the congregation who is in hospital. Couldn't have done that if I'd been camping.
Today I will go over for lunch with the church and a couple of the afternoon seminars which look interesting.
New Wine, some of you will know, is a festival from the charismatic end of the Christian spectrum. It suffers a little from lack of debate, discusion and argument but the music and atmosphere are second to none. Picking and choosing your way through the day is a good way to stay sane. Not an easy place to be troubled by sexuality, gender issues or doubts about Pauline authorship.
Today I will go over for lunch with the church and a couple of the afternoon seminars which look interesting.
New Wine, some of you will know, is a festival from the charismatic end of the Christian spectrum. It suffers a little from lack of debate, discusion and argument but the music and atmosphere are second to none. Picking and choosing your way through the day is a good way to stay sane. Not an easy place to be troubled by sexuality, gender issues or doubts about Pauline authorship.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Thoughts on New Wine
I've tried to allow my thoughts and feelings to settle down a little before reflecting. I think three days is probably enough.
If you feel safe and secure in your own faith and belief there isn't a lot of harm you can come to at New Wine. You can enjoy the singing worship and pick the bits out of the talks and presentations without having to subscribe to the view that the only, the ONLY, way to respond to God is to go down the front and get ministered to by someone who will pray for you to have more Holy Spirit. I tended to pray quietly for a few moments and then slink off. I do not join the ministry team because I don't think that is what I understand by ministry.
I am quite reserved as an English man. I value this about my culture. I can get excited but it is for special occasions. I enjoy the fact that we don't, by and large, shout when someone treads on our toe in a shop. On the contrary we are more likely to apologise assuming we put our foot somewhere stupid. I appreciate this. In days of everything-rage it tends to slow most of us down before hitting people over the head. I like rocking crowds in rock events; I hate hyped up rocking crowds in other events. It reminds me of Kinnock's famous 1992 error, 'I shouldn't have inhaled (the atmosphere).'
If you are more liberal than most evangelical Christians you will have to cope with regular statements that the Bible is simply a matter of believing it, with no help or criteria to separate the drama from the fiction from the letters from the gospel from the history from the legend. There are exceptions. Simon Ponsonby, fast becoming the theologian of the charismatic movement, knows his Greek and his salvation history but I still don't get the God he sells who would only give his people more if they asked for it.
The only prayer really worth praying (IMHO) is 'Lord I'm listening.' If you hear the voice of God, through his word, through other people or through circumstances, fancy beginning even to imagine that he would call people and not equip them until they asked. It would be a like an army officer, seeing his battered and bloodied men return from the front, saying, 'I wondered when you were going to ask me for weapons; they're over there.'
I wish there was a libfest with lively worship, although we'd probably not get over agreeing on the words of the songs. Maybe they should all be instrumentals and we'd simply clap or dance?
Still I loved Mike Fuller's presentations on the complete history of the church and then western philosophy in fifty minutes. You can download the PowerPoints for these from his website. I will try and get to hear his other 50 minute specials on the Bible and the world's religions, some day.
Other seminars fell into the trap of being lectures; 75 minute ones in some cases. David Ruis' Bible studies on James in Venue 2 suffered greatly from his asides (he called them rabbits). On the penultimate day someone gave him a model gun and someone else offered him a fluffy fox. He would still not be distracted from his distractions. He faced an entire audience of 2000 people primally-screaming 'teach us'. Never came close. Bummer.
Ellie Mumford's love for Jesus shone forth. John Wright's deliberate and sensitive MCing of Venue 2 was a joy. Nick Page was a scream, with content. Baroness Caroline Cox's deserved standing ovation for her unique and lifelong commitment to the world's poor should not have been overshadowed by Charlie Cleverley's straining to get us to lament corporately and produce waves of tears. Again I slinked away to pray quietly.
The great thing about all this is that if you go with your church group you can talk through these things moment by moment and we did just that.
I don't think I will ever find a Christian festival at which I am not a piece of grit. I think it's the hand that's been dealt me. Back next year? You bet.
If you feel safe and secure in your own faith and belief there isn't a lot of harm you can come to at New Wine. You can enjoy the singing worship and pick the bits out of the talks and presentations without having to subscribe to the view that the only, the ONLY, way to respond to God is to go down the front and get ministered to by someone who will pray for you to have more Holy Spirit. I tended to pray quietly for a few moments and then slink off. I do not join the ministry team because I don't think that is what I understand by ministry.
I am quite reserved as an English man. I value this about my culture. I can get excited but it is for special occasions. I enjoy the fact that we don't, by and large, shout when someone treads on our toe in a shop. On the contrary we are more likely to apologise assuming we put our foot somewhere stupid. I appreciate this. In days of everything-rage it tends to slow most of us down before hitting people over the head. I like rocking crowds in rock events; I hate hyped up rocking crowds in other events. It reminds me of Kinnock's famous 1992 error, 'I shouldn't have inhaled (the atmosphere).'
If you are more liberal than most evangelical Christians you will have to cope with regular statements that the Bible is simply a matter of believing it, with no help or criteria to separate the drama from the fiction from the letters from the gospel from the history from the legend. There are exceptions. Simon Ponsonby, fast becoming the theologian of the charismatic movement, knows his Greek and his salvation history but I still don't get the God he sells who would only give his people more if they asked for it.
The only prayer really worth praying (IMHO) is 'Lord I'm listening.' If you hear the voice of God, through his word, through other people or through circumstances, fancy beginning even to imagine that he would call people and not equip them until they asked. It would be a like an army officer, seeing his battered and bloodied men return from the front, saying, 'I wondered when you were going to ask me for weapons; they're over there.'
I wish there was a libfest with lively worship, although we'd probably not get over agreeing on the words of the songs. Maybe they should all be instrumentals and we'd simply clap or dance?
Still I loved Mike Fuller's presentations on the complete history of the church and then western philosophy in fifty minutes. You can download the PowerPoints for these from his website. I will try and get to hear his other 50 minute specials on the Bible and the world's religions, some day.
Other seminars fell into the trap of being lectures; 75 minute ones in some cases. David Ruis' Bible studies on James in Venue 2 suffered greatly from his asides (he called them rabbits). On the penultimate day someone gave him a model gun and someone else offered him a fluffy fox. He would still not be distracted from his distractions. He faced an entire audience of 2000 people primally-screaming 'teach us'. Never came close. Bummer.
Ellie Mumford's love for Jesus shone forth. John Wright's deliberate and sensitive MCing of Venue 2 was a joy. Nick Page was a scream, with content. Baroness Caroline Cox's deserved standing ovation for her unique and lifelong commitment to the world's poor should not have been overshadowed by Charlie Cleverley's straining to get us to lament corporately and produce waves of tears. Again I slinked away to pray quietly.
The great thing about all this is that if you go with your church group you can talk through these things moment by moment and we did just that.
I don't think I will ever find a Christian festival at which I am not a piece of grit. I think it's the hand that's been dealt me. Back next year? You bet.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Balancing Act
Thanks for all of you who supported me and prayed for me as I tackled a New Wine seminar for the first time. I had about 250 people present in a large blacked-out marquee called Seminar City. All of them were there because they felt they wanted to get some sort of balance back into their lives.
I was surprised at the numbers because the 4.00 p.m seminar slot is the third of the day and dedicated attendees can also do morning and early morning Bible studies. I guess it just goes to show how out of balance we can all get.
I was determined to do a seminar, a word which has been hi-jacked at New Wine by the idea of lecture.
Anyway for those who weren't there, here's the gist.
Do you feel balanced? 100% of the people attending put their hand up to say they felt that somehow their life was out of kilter, out of hand, out of balance and were seeking equilibrium (a word that simply means equally balanced).
The Bible doesn't suggest walking down the centre of the road and being moderate on every issue or practice. It suggests that there will be extremes and stresses and the balancing act (the title of the seminar) is to take the pressure and make space for release.
A biblical view of balance is weird and uncomfortable. From the weighing in the balance of the mysterious tekel in Daniel 5:27, the bashing of Babylonian babies' heads against rocks at the end of Psalm 137, the 'It is too small a thing for my servant to be light only to Israel' in Isaiah 49:6 and Jesus' back-turning on the sick to go somewhere else in Mark 1:38 we see that sometimes extreme views and actions are mouthed and even enacted. This biblical God is a God who weighs people in the balance (judges), allows them to give voice to their anger and revenge, gives more work and responsibility to the already-busy and prioritises preaching over healing, sometimes. Job's life was balanced in that his lost family and fortune was restored, but who would forget the loss of those children? Write a pen-picture of a holy person from the Bible and you might find a prostitute-marrying, murdering, adulterous, zealot who cooks on dung. God doesn't do good taste.
But who wants to live a statistically balanced life? I have a son in Japan, a son in Birmingham and a wife in Nailsea. The mean position of my family is Finland, a place I have never visited. The statistician looks at the man with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven and pronounces him, on average, comfortable.
And who wants to live, apart from through monastic intent, a balanced life through withdrawal? All we can be certain of is that those who keep themselves to themselves, often lauded as a British character trait par excellence, will have few attending their funerals.
Those who seek balance by taking all opinions equally seriously will find they always bear the mark of the last person they were speaking to. Easily swayed.
No, the Bible's balance is different. David Ruis, 'If you try and live a balanced Christian life I can promise you a Valium prescription.' The balance comes from tension but you are not meant to feel tense or unbalanced. Embrace the tension.
When a younger christian I was taught that a priority list in my life might well say:
God
Family
Work
and that this would be a road to a balanced life. I now see it as a category error, like going to the shops with a list saying:
Eggs
Butter
Apples
Bread
New car
A God on a things-to-do list, even as number one, is too small. God is. We serve. We will find this demanding. We should expect to be out of balance. So how can the cross-carrying department feel more in balance?
Exercise: go through your week, session by session and score ranging from -10 to +10 based on how in or out of balance you feel at the end of it, assuming a Monday morning start with a score of nil. Does work drain you or energize you? Is the first hour of the week filling you up and preparing you for work or starting you off on a downer?
(In the live seminar 50% of the people present had positive scores).
Look at your score? What were the things that drained? What rebuilt? Talk it through with someone if you can. What caused the emotional mismatch between feeling out of balance and a positive score? What were the points that took your score down? Were they the same sort of things each time? How could they be balanced or compensated for?
If a phone call with one person is draining, phone another person at once who is more uplifting. If a meeting is full of dull people use your interventions to ask the more interesting people what they think.
Know the difference between real and apparent work. Some of the things in your job descriptions might be such fun you would do them even if you weren't paid. Some things are so hard in your home life (cleaning/washing/ironing/DIY) that we would rather we got paid to do them. Get a real/apparent work and a real/apparent leisure balance in each day if you can.
Don't be hijacked by the idea that you would be better if you prayed if you find prayer one of the things that attracts a minus score. Still do it. But be prepared to balance it. God may change how you feel about it.
Remember that biblical balance comes in the fullness of time, not hour by hour, or week by week. Whilst we wait for that ultimate balancing moment of our deaths and hopefully resurrections we need to find the tricks that help us live the John 10:10 Jesus way - life in all its fullness.
A bereavement may cause a score of minus 200 but you can observe it creeping back up.
Meantime we will, with Moses, have questions to ask of God from time to time. Moses great (Exodus 3:1-4:17) questions are:
Who am I?
Who are you?
How can I make people listen?
What if they don't?
Why not send someone else?
This is a very brief summary. It is meant to be a Eureka training session. At some point I hope you got it without having to run around the site naked Archimedes-like. It may change your life. If you don't see it or get it or it doesn't work for you, you only lost the time it took to read this. Hang your t-shirts on the line under slight tension in future and they won't need ironing. Time saved in return.
I was surprised at the numbers because the 4.00 p.m seminar slot is the third of the day and dedicated attendees can also do morning and early morning Bible studies. I guess it just goes to show how out of balance we can all get.
I was determined to do a seminar, a word which has been hi-jacked at New Wine by the idea of lecture.
Anyway for those who weren't there, here's the gist.
Do you feel balanced? 100% of the people attending put their hand up to say they felt that somehow their life was out of kilter, out of hand, out of balance and were seeking equilibrium (a word that simply means equally balanced).
The Bible doesn't suggest walking down the centre of the road and being moderate on every issue or practice. It suggests that there will be extremes and stresses and the balancing act (the title of the seminar) is to take the pressure and make space for release.
A biblical view of balance is weird and uncomfortable. From the weighing in the balance of the mysterious tekel in Daniel 5:27, the bashing of Babylonian babies' heads against rocks at the end of Psalm 137, the 'It is too small a thing for my servant to be light only to Israel' in Isaiah 49:6 and Jesus' back-turning on the sick to go somewhere else in Mark 1:38 we see that sometimes extreme views and actions are mouthed and even enacted. This biblical God is a God who weighs people in the balance (judges), allows them to give voice to their anger and revenge, gives more work and responsibility to the already-busy and prioritises preaching over healing, sometimes. Job's life was balanced in that his lost family and fortune was restored, but who would forget the loss of those children? Write a pen-picture of a holy person from the Bible and you might find a prostitute-marrying, murdering, adulterous, zealot who cooks on dung. God doesn't do good taste.
But who wants to live a statistically balanced life? I have a son in Japan, a son in Birmingham and a wife in Nailsea. The mean position of my family is Finland, a place I have never visited. The statistician looks at the man with his head in the freezer and his feet in the oven and pronounces him, on average, comfortable.
And who wants to live, apart from through monastic intent, a balanced life through withdrawal? All we can be certain of is that those who keep themselves to themselves, often lauded as a British character trait par excellence, will have few attending their funerals.
Those who seek balance by taking all opinions equally seriously will find they always bear the mark of the last person they were speaking to. Easily swayed.
No, the Bible's balance is different. David Ruis, 'If you try and live a balanced Christian life I can promise you a Valium prescription.' The balance comes from tension but you are not meant to feel tense or unbalanced. Embrace the tension.
When a younger christian I was taught that a priority list in my life might well say:
God
Family
Work
and that this would be a road to a balanced life. I now see it as a category error, like going to the shops with a list saying:
Eggs
Butter
Apples
Bread
New car
A God on a things-to-do list, even as number one, is too small. God is. We serve. We will find this demanding. We should expect to be out of balance. So how can the cross-carrying department feel more in balance?
Exercise: go through your week, session by session and score ranging from -10 to +10 based on how in or out of balance you feel at the end of it, assuming a Monday morning start with a score of nil. Does work drain you or energize you? Is the first hour of the week filling you up and preparing you for work or starting you off on a downer?
(In the live seminar 50% of the people present had positive scores).
Look at your score? What were the things that drained? What rebuilt? Talk it through with someone if you can. What caused the emotional mismatch between feeling out of balance and a positive score? What were the points that took your score down? Were they the same sort of things each time? How could they be balanced or compensated for?
If a phone call with one person is draining, phone another person at once who is more uplifting. If a meeting is full of dull people use your interventions to ask the more interesting people what they think.
Know the difference between real and apparent work. Some of the things in your job descriptions might be such fun you would do them even if you weren't paid. Some things are so hard in your home life (cleaning/washing/ironing/DIY) that we would rather we got paid to do them. Get a real/apparent work and a real/apparent leisure balance in each day if you can.
Don't be hijacked by the idea that you would be better if you prayed if you find prayer one of the things that attracts a minus score. Still do it. But be prepared to balance it. God may change how you feel about it.
Remember that biblical balance comes in the fullness of time, not hour by hour, or week by week. Whilst we wait for that ultimate balancing moment of our deaths and hopefully resurrections we need to find the tricks that help us live the John 10:10 Jesus way - life in all its fullness.
A bereavement may cause a score of minus 200 but you can observe it creeping back up.
Meantime we will, with Moses, have questions to ask of God from time to time. Moses great (Exodus 3:1-4:17) questions are:
Who am I?
Who are you?
How can I make people listen?
What if they don't?
Why not send someone else?
This is a very brief summary. It is meant to be a Eureka training session. At some point I hope you got it without having to run around the site naked Archimedes-like. It may change your life. If you don't see it or get it or it doesn't work for you, you only lost the time it took to read this. Hang your t-shirts on the line under slight tension in future and they won't need ironing. Time saved in return.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Wack from the Baws
So, New Wine survived. I have encountered, and failed to be wrecked by, this charismatic poshstock. There was much to enjoy, and indeed savor, but also a bit of dodginess and weirdness. Will reflect before posting but I enjoyed the company of my co-Trendlewoodians immensely.
I do note however that New Wine is one of the few places in the world you can sing, in harmony with 2000 others, 'I won't let go until I feel your touch.' A few more lepers to be healed yet then.
Lips salved. Beard shaved off. Body showered. Sore bits anointed. Washing on. 587 emails deleted. Bit tired now.
I do note however that New Wine is one of the few places in the world you can sing, in harmony with 2000 others, 'I won't let go until I feel your touch.' A few more lepers to be healed yet then.
Lips salved. Beard shaved off. Body showered. Sore bits anointed. Washing on. 587 emails deleted. Bit tired now.
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