Thought for the Day

As delivered on BBC Radio Bristol to James Hanson's Breakfast Show just now:

What is the point on which the soul should fix its intellectual eye? Not my question, but that of author, Mary Shelley, a talented teenage writer who wrote of Dr Frankenstein's creation. The House of Frankenstein in Bath takes the visitor into an experience of her times and the world she created.

The attraction includes an enormous model of Dr Frankenstein's creature. Mary Shelley wrote it between the ages of 18 and 20. As she said, 'There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand.'

Philosophy Professor Patricia MacCormack says that the Creature addresses the most fundamental human questions: 'It's the idea of asking your maker what your purpose is. Why are we here, what can we do?'

In the book of Job, a tale of suffering, a comforter comes along who, in his own words, waited until last to speak because he was the the youngest. He then gives Job better advice than his first three comforters and yet is completely ignored. The book never mentions him again.

I wonder if, in order to ask questions about her own purpose, Mary Shelley created a creature to ask for her. Such good questions that, 200 years later, we still discuss them.

Thought for the Day

As delivered at BBC Radio Bristol this morning:

'Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food and tyrannise their teachers.'

So said Socrates in the sixth century BCE.

So the police have sent out guidance to schools to pass on to parents about anti social behaviour during the summer holidays.

Where I grew up a ditch separated the back gardens of two rows of houses behind my home. One game was trying to get from the bottom of the hill to the top by navigating the ditch, occasionally crossing gardens when it became private property.

In the school holidays my friend and I tried to do this but reached a garden where an owner was outside.

Waiting on the corrugated roof of a shed for the coast to be clear (as you do) I became aware of a creaking sound. This turned to a cracking noise and I plummeted into the shed through the collapsing roof.

A belated apology to the owners of number approximately 24 Serpentine Road for the shed reduction provision.

Most of us did something in our teenage years that, if caught, would have seen us charged with anti-social behaviour.

The school holidays are times for exploring barriers - adventures stopping one short of mischief. We will do well to occupy our children's time with activity. Writer Garrison Keillor praised:

'Selective ignorance, a cornerstone of child-rearing. You don't put kids under surveillance: it might frighten you. Parents should sit tall in the saddle and look upon their troops with a noble and benevolent and extremely near-sighted gaze.'

If you are without sin please feel free to cast the first stone.

RIP Don Humphries

Sad to hear of the passing of the man responsible for my coming to faith and being ordained. This is not an obituary. It is an appreciation of someone who I was profoundly influenced by for about fourteen years but haven't really stayed in touch with. I think my story may be echoed by many others.

When I first met Don I was sixteen and he was a curate in his late twenties. He was serving his title (as the expression goes) at my home church of St Stephen's, Selly Hill. I did not go to church but responded to an invitation to a Youth Service, run and promoted by the church youth group he led called Cross Section. The week after the service Don called round to my house to follow up. He invited me to a games night and a Bible Study. He also spent most of the time watching Wimbledon on the tele, specifically asking my Mum not to turn it off, and, when he came in from work, arguing with my Dad about the proof of the existence of God. Don wore a leather jacket which made me think he was cool for a vicar and my unconvinced Dad must be wrong.

The curate's house at 114 Cherrington Road was a semi-detached with three bedrooms. I was once there for a Bible study with 78 members (we counted them). We broke into three groups - one in the lounge, one in the dining room and one in Don's bedroom. I think some people sat in the front garden and smoked. Do not read 2015 Safeguarding advice back into 1971.

In the holidays (when not doing houseparties) he got the youth group to do decorating jobs around the church and hall. We even decorated a probation hostel.

The Cross Section programme card for the summer I joined and a venture badge

 

Don managed to get young people from Selly Oak Boys School and King Edward's (direct grant, examination entry) happy in each other's company. There are probably more people in full-time ministry from a non-Christian background as a result of Don's ministry than any other clergyperson in the C of E. CYFA groups do not have to be mono-cultural.

For his thirtieth birthday the girls of Cross Section took Don shopping and bought him a second pair of trousers. He wore them for many years.

Don was an evangelist. He challenged everyone to Christian commitment. Everyone. His methodology was delightfully simple. He ran CYFA (Church Youth Fellowships Association) houseparties, now called Ventures, in the school holidays. He persuaded you to go. If you were too old to be a member he got you to help cook. He knew that on the houseparties you would hear two talks a day on aspects of the Christian life with one strong challenge to turn to Christ and a further one to wholeheartedness. He gave these two talks himself. He wanted you to reach such a stage of committed faith by age 18 that you could become a leader. He told Liz not to commit to me until I shared her faith.

Once 'promoted' to leader he trained you as a leader. After a few years of leadership he asked you to consider ordination. He did this to me in a gym equipment store room in 1978 as we were putting chairs away.

He insisted that speakers keep to a precise length but never managed it himself.

Here's the funny thing. There is a small army of us out here, who learned things under Don's tutelage and pretty-much decided never to do most of them that way. I have an image in my head of me doing lunchtime notices at Clarendon and Don snapping his fingers to make me go faster. I was trying to learn wit while he taught speed. His houseparties ran to a tight timetable. We also joked that his gift of encouragement ran to 'Steve, may I encourage you never to do that again.'

But we did learn that he hated stuffy rooms. Entering any room we could usually anticipate the command to 'Open the windows'.

He taught us wisely how to set up a room for a meeting. Chairs should face the dullest wall.

We also learned that once the houseparty leaders had got all the young people to bed those not with them in dorms went out for Chinese food.

His Bible study methodology was to ask a million questions. If he didn't agree with an answer he'd ask what anyone else thought.

The inside pages

In the leaders meeting after the morning meeting on the venture everything from the previous day was reviewed. So that we learned from all the mistakes and so that speakers learned to take criticism. It was a harsh environment but we learned not to be too defensive about errors.

Throughout his next three appointments, as chaplain at Warwick University, Vicar of Christ Church, Bedford then Holy Trinity, Cambridge, recruiting people to houseparty work continued to be the thrust of his evangelistic ministry, alongside recruiting teams to run missions around the country. Others will say more about that period of his life, his family and ministry.

Don did not enjoy good health. A nasty pancreatitis in the mid 70s required major surgery. In later life he endured Parkinson's Disease. Brandishing a knife, with a hand tremble, to cut the wedding cake at his marriage to Sarah he remarked to us all, 'There may be casualties'.

Don was a third generation of houseparty leader following Eric 'Bash' Nash at Iwerne Minster in the 1940s and 50s then Ken Habershon at Limpsfield in the 1960s and 70s. In 1985 Bob and Ann Clucas, Dunc and Gilly Myers and us Tilleys joined generation four (begun, I believe, by Steve Allen and Steve Wilcockson) when we started Great Ayton. I stopped in 2002 but Bob and Ann continue, although the venture has moved sites many times.

Don taught us to be leaders by joining in a project to do something for young people. We were taken away not for lectures and reading but to work in a team. We worked ridiculously hard and faced some unbelievably difficult situations. We learned to work out what to do because we were trusted at a young age to get on with it. In 1984 he was unwell on day one so he told (not asked, told) me to lead the venture. He had prepared me for this moment in a thousand brief conversations. I wasn't overawed. He also told the team I was in charge. I was then the same age he had been when I met him.

We discussed and prayed a lot. You will note the regularity of prayer on the term card for Cross Section.

Don's commentary on our work was often critical, but he made good people great. He ironed out the minor faults with direct words.

I am profoundly grateful to him. What Would Don Do? has been a helpful question to accompany thirty years of ordained ministry.

OK everyone. That's enough reading.

Washing up.

Don's funeral will be on Tuesday 10th November.

Quote Book Index 551-560

Love this one. Always catches somebody out:

559. Our youth love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for old people. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble their food and tyrannise their teachers.
(Socrates 5th century BCE)

Quote Book Index 471-480

Pete Everitt's book 'You'll Never be Sixteen Again' is a fascinating history of the British teenager. This on marketing:

474.  ...every time teenagers picked up a new toy it was snatched from their hands, polished, mass-produced and sold back to them at a profit.

Quote Book Index 421-430

422. There was nothing I could say. I am fourteen. I have no rights.
(Simon Britton in Nigel Williams' They Came from SW19)

Quote Book Index 200-210

From the late Mark Ashton's Christian Youth Work, a seminal work from the mid-eighties with principles that will never change (although the context of examples is dated). Worth reading for the prophetic nature of some of his writing, and quotes such as this one:

207. Our civilisation is '...creating adults who don't know what to do with delay, discomfort, discouragement and disillusionment.' (Quoting Ronald Hutchcraft)

Discipline

Interesting discussion on Radio 4's Today programme this morning at about 8.25.

A report on the riots in England last summer has concluded that a lack of support for young people contributed to the unrest and that we should all be doing more to help young people develop what they call "character". Serge Cefai, headteacher at the Sacred Heart Catholic School in Camberwell, and Camila Batmanghelidjh, founder of the charity Kids Company, discuss the recommendations of the report.

Now this was a ready-to-use piece of polarisation which barely needed assembling once removed from the box. It would be my guess that a Catholic school might be more disciplinarian than average; a founder of a work for disadvantaged kids the opposite. The headteacher began with the statement 'I find it a bit insulting...' and we were off.

The school's point of view, we were told, is that children need the comfort of knowing where the boundaries are and how people will react when they are crossed. The response was that this teaches a hatred and fear of authority for those who find it difficult and anyway in the 'real world' (love it that schools are not thought to be part of the real world) reaction to line-crossing is not always the same.

As a friend at Morning Prayer said just after, you only have to look at the amount of people who drive whilst phoning or texting to know that the fear of line-crossing is hardly a massive success. The world outside schools does teach that it is OK to disrespect authority if you can get away with it. So maybe we need a less utilitarian and more altruistic approach to life. And the youth worker's point was that you love people into conformity, you don't scare them.

As ever the truth lies somewhere in the middle and needs pondering.

So we went on into Morning Prayer and read from Hebrews 12:

And have you completely forgotten this word of encouragement that addresses you as children? It says,“My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his child.”

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline—then you are not legitimate children at all. Moreover, we have all had parents who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! Our parents disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

And pretty soon our post-reading discussion included the comment that the parents were to blame, we were all going to hell in a whatever you go to hell in these days, too many people broke the law and wouldn't if punished harder and that if you looked into the Bible too deeply you got a headache so it was best to take it simply on trust.

My response is that everything is character building and it is another brilliant little expression, like 'Big Society', that will provoke a lot of discussion whilst being completely unassessable.

The Youth of Today

There was a small piece in the corner of page something-or-other-well-beyond-3 in theipaper this week. It was about an emergency sitting of courts the day after an atrocity. Forty two young people were being charged with offences of looting and theft. 'Has it come to this?' A local resident, recently bereaved, might have said.

The piece was in the 'On this day' corner and described events following the bombing of London in 1941.

'Youth has no regard for old age, and the wisdom of the centuries is looked down upon both as stupidity and foolishness. The young men are indolent; the young women are indecent and indecorous in their speech, behaviour and dress.'
(Peter the Hermit, 1114, quoted by the late Mark Ashton in Christian Youth Work, Kingsway 1986.)

I am not convinced there is any one reason why our towns and cities fell victim to such outrageous behavior last week but:

1. It seems the perpetrators are gradually being rounded up and charged.

2. Opportunistic looting and peer-pressured rudeness seem to have been with us for quite a long time so it was probably not as extraordinary as some might make out.

CYFA Resources

Between 1992 and 2002 I was responsible for producing the output of CYFA teaching resources. Over that period I helped to publish about twenty titles in the Bible Based Resources for Youth Groups (BBRYG) series. Some of these (64 page A4) booklets took the Bible and asked 'What can we learn from this?' Others took issues and asked, 'What does the Bible say about this?' All bar one had ten sessions in them and included photocopiable work sheets.

To go alongside this I wrote or commissioned four volumes called Know Ideas (no, I can't take credit for volume 1, Phil Moon and John Simmons did that) which were packed full of ideas for games, ice-breakers etc. Also two volumes of Drama, Verses, Sketches which did what it said on the cover.

I did this from the offices of CPAS (Church Pastoral Aid Society) who have now decided not to sell such resources and have got rid of all their stock. Godstuff is a small charity which supports the work of my friend and former CPAS colleague Bob Clucas. It has bought all the back copies of all of these resources. We plan to make them available for almost nothing. That's right search engines. Find this post if anyone enters free or youth or resources.

The plan is this. The resources are, as you might imagine, dated. We will scan and publish online the first two sessions from each book and sell the books in bundles of five for £10 (a saving of £27.50). If anyone simply asks for a deal we will talk. If anyone is broke we will not worry about the money too much.

Beginning with Didn't He Used to be Dead? a BBRYG book on Jesus in Luke's Gospel which we have few copies of, we will be reworking the material so it is up-to-date and will then invite youth leaders who use it to add their ideas.

If you are an author of this material (I worked with some co-authors) and you are unhappy about this please get in touch. I will be trying to contact all of you over the next few days.

Apart from Urban Saints excellent Energize material I am not aware of what else is around in the youth market these days or of any organisation that has specifically taken on resourcing CYFA and Pathfinder groups from CPAS. Are you?

Oil Spills

I do an article once a month or so for the Urban Saints (formerly Crusaders if you haven't been keeping up).

Their on-line Energize material for teaching the Bible to young people is rapidly becoming the most thorough curriculum in the Christian world for supporting its youth-work.

I did a lot of sessions for them when I was working as a freelance and it was interesting work. I read the Bible, got to grips with it, tried to produce helpful teaching aids for others and got paid; what's not to like?

Part of the Energize site is Energize in the News. You will see various links to it. A few of us are on stand-by to write articles linking an event in the news to the Bible and a youth-group. We try and pump them out quite quickly. Latest two are on the World Cup and, talking of pumping out quite quickly, oil spills. I did the latter one. If you want to take an opportunity, in your week by week youth work, to have a discussion about what Christian faith has to say about a newsworthy event, I commend a subscription. There is a monthly fee but a three month free sample opportunity.

Youth Worker Needed

The following advert is going out this week in various publications. Anyone appointed would not report to me but to my colleague the Rector of Holy Trinity. However I'd be a colleague. I would be delighted to have informal conversations with anyone interested.

Holy Trinity and Trendlewood Church, Nailsea, North Somerset
Youth Worker

We are a lively evangelical church in the thriving community of Nailsea. We aim to be a biblical, prayerful and Jesus-centred community with a vision to:
Reach others with the love of Christ
Serve the local community
Resource the wider church

We are looking for an enthusiastic, committed and experienced youth worker to join our leadership team. You will give fresh direction to our youth work and committed team of volunteers building on relationships with local schools and reaching out to young people outside the church. We have a vision for enabling our young people to play a full part in the life and mission of the whole church.

You will be a committed Christian and confident in an evangelical faith and life style. A passion for young people, leadership experience or potential and ability to relate to a wide range of people will be essential.

Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations Section 7.2 and/or Section 7.3 applies.

Salary in the range of JNC scale 7-14 (£17,471 - £23,148 a year) according to experience and/or qualifications.

Closing date: Tuesday 8th June at 12 noon

Interview date: Tuesday 22nd June

For an application form and further information please go to www.htnailsea.org.uk/information.htm

Mark Ashton RIP

Sad to see that Mark, who I gather had been suffering from cancer, has died. He was only 62.

Mark Ashton was CYFA Secretary from 1981-1987 (two before me, although the title had changed and so had the job by the time I took it on).

He had worked as a minister in Cambridge since then.

His seminal work, and greatest contribution to youth ministry in this country, was the book Christian Youth Work. In a period when many were beginning to look down on the fellowship model of youth ministry he outlined how it was meant to work, not as a Christian clique but as an outward-looking group of young people who were disicpled that, as part of being an ordinary Christian, one looked out towards those of no faith and invited them in.

In those heady days CYFA National Conferences (usually at Kinmel Hall in North Wales) attracted so many leaders they had to be run on two successive weekends.

Asked, in my early days, to write a vision statement for fellowship model youth work, I could do no better than repeat this, which Mark had sent round in a mailing some years earlier:

CYFA aims to help churches present young people mature in Christ as appropriate for them, using Colossians 1:28 as a key verse in understanding this.

It encourages groups to take these five principles equally seriously to ensure their work is biblical and balanced:

Prayer as the mainstay of the work
Bible as the backbone of the teaching programme
Gospel as the attraction to the group
Relationships as an essential (importance of the individual not the group)
Church as the context for growth

He also, and many of you may wish him ill will for this, at a Venture Leaders training day in about 1985 or 6, taught me the alarm clock joke that has accompanied me on my teaching journey over many years since.

It might be a fitting tribute to him to reinsert some value into the name CYFA as CPAS seem to have lost interest in it. Anyone else up for that?

RIP Mark.

Know Ideas 5

Lots of shops give you a paper bag for your goods at Christmas and in the sales, especially clothes shops. These bags often have string, cloth or ribbon handles. There will be two, identical pieces of material if you pull them off the bag. Do so and save them.

Every now and again you will need to break a large group of people into pairs and you will want them to work with a relative stranger rather than a best friend.

Have a container full of pairs of former bag-handles. Shuffle them and shake them. Ask everyone to draw one out, blind. Then ask everyone to find their partner; the person with the matching handle.

Re-union

I'm off to the great venture re-union 25th this afternoon. The Tilley/Myers/Clucas CYFA Venture, founded at Great Ayton in 1985 has survived a quarter century, almost. To the left is Roseberry Topping which we used to ramble up and abseil off. I hear the voice of an old teacher in my ear whispering, 'Tilley - up which we used to ramble and off which we used to abseil.' I love knowing the rules they taught me.

Typical of our venture to celebrate the 25th occasion, meaning it is only 24 years since we started. Beautifully and creatively pedantic. I'm so proud.

I left in 2002 after only eighteen years in leadership and four different sites (after Ayton came Ellesmere, Bentham and Lancaster. It is now at St Bees). It will be good to catch up with so many people who date their Christian leadership to some time on our venture and to meet the team who have taken it on.

Laters. Embarrassing photos will surely appear here tomorrow. Some of you might want to be phoning your lawyers.

Youth Work

Spent last night with a couple of old friends we hadn't seen for well over ten years. The couple were co-leaders with us of the youth work in Chester-le-Street 1988-1992, but now live in Fife. They took the opportunity of only being 90 minutes away in Stratford-upon-Avon on holiday to drop by.

Through shared hardship and joy we got pretty close back in the days we were together. I wondered how things might have changed over time but we carried on talking as if we had parted only yesterday. We chatted, ate and drank for five hours more.

Listing the people from that group now doing vocational work - teaching, youth work and ordained ministry for instance - we got to wondering what it had been that made it so 'successful.' We came to the conclusion that a higher force than ourselves had been at work putting a very special bunch of people in the hands of those who would be happy to be lived alongside, pestered and cajoled into imparting knowledge and skills even if we weren't very good at so doing. In other words it was a user-generated learning experience (sorry, I'll never use that expression again) and we were God's hands, as it were.

Chester-le-Street was a bit of a blip in our personal geography. It was the only bit of our first 50 years of life we spent outside the Midlands. Why has he put you where he has put you? It may be sometime after that you find out.

Xewkija Festa

The expression, 'You had to be there' is not one I reach for that often. I prefer to attempt to rise to the challenge of description. This may be a tricky one. I'm going to tell you what we experienced last Thursday evening.

We were on holiday on the beautiful Maltese island of Gozo, a favourite haunt of ours and one with which we thought we were familiar.

To get the pronunciation over with, X = Z and J = Y; thus Xewkija is Zewkiya (zoo key er).

Gozo is almost entirely Roman Catholic. Every Gozitan village has a church with a patron saint and the saint's day is celebrated in the whole village, not just the church. This is called a festa.

Xewkija's church is dedicated to St John the Baptist (June 24th).

We have visited villages on festa night before and it is a mixture of relic-parading processions with robed clerics and acolytes, brass bands, fireworks, cheap fairground sidestalls selling toys that break the second the not-yet-disappointed child opens the packet, fast food outlets and a family re-union. All the bars in the village square spread outside and a bit more beer than usual is consumed, mainly Cisk (pronounced chisk). Cisk is brilliant when absolutely chilled but has a quality-lasting time once opened and warming of about three seconds. Buy a small bottle and neck it.

We have never stayed near the centre of a village in pre-festa week before. The excitement is racked up as more and more street decorations are displayed, louder and louder evening discos take place around the town and the church bells are rung increasingly randomly. Think of a wedding peel remixed by German prog-rockers Can and you get a little of the flavour. The time between the bongs was the sort of gap you'd get if someone had to run cautiously across a church roof in the gloom and tell a mate, 'Now'.

The biggest church dome in Europe is St Peter's Rome, followed by St Paul's Cathedral, London. Third biggest is St John's Xewkija. They get a bit competitive in the old church-building stakes in Gozo. When the people of Xewkija realised their church was comparatively small they built another one over it (the old church became a chapel). During festa week its silhouette is picked out in fairy lights.

So we have a party atmosphere cranking up and our next door neighbour tells us that Thursday night there is a big party in the square. Along we go.

The square is pretty full but mainly with family groups and big screen footie Germany v Portugal just finished. Not hugely interesting. We become aware that along the main road to the harbour, about half a mile of which is still technically in Xewkija, there is more activity and we walk towards it. It gets more crowded the further we go and some sort of procession is coming towards us. Very slowly mind. It moves about three yards then stops again.

Those who live along the way put chairs on the porch to watch. Some have strung nets of balloons across the street.

We go right up to the front and then stand aside to experience it passing us by. Here goes.

Four uniformed police are in the front, chatting amiably with the crowd and each other and, apparently, setting the pace. You need to bear this in mind because it helps you to understand that what we saw next was perfectly normal, no threat to society and condoned by the law.

Let's begin with the chariot. That's right. A wheeled chariot painted red and yellow was being pushed and pulled along. Three youths sat on board. One controlled a device for blasting silver and gold foil ticker tape into the night sky. One controlled a device for showering the following group with cold water. One controlled the other two. The front of the chariot bore an image of St John as St George. Here was the baptist as warrior.

Following the chariot were about 100 young lads aged 13-15. They wore this year's festa shirts, red and yellow with that same image of St John. Think of a more flamboyant competitor at the world darts championships and you won't go far wrong. One or two wore what were clearly last season's shirts but we had no way of telling if this was through irony, poverty or forgetfulness.

Here's the thing. They were all, almost without exception, out of their skulls on cheap alcohol. They were staying in a block and staying in the street behind the chariot but they were completely and utterly blodgered.

As the chariot went under a net of balloons it was released leading to a frenzy of popping and bursting, expulsions of water and foil and a trip to the following cart for more supplies of whatever it was they were drinking.

Following this group, with no sign anything untoward was going on ahead, was a uniformed brass band playing festa classics (everyone knew some bits of the tunes and clapped or shouted out at odd, but identical times).

There was a letter in the Maltese Times a few days prior to this from a bishop complaining that devotion of the saints had degenerated into fighting, drinking and loud music.

My best guess as to what we witnessed was a right-of-passage. It probably (make that certainly) wouldn't work in the UK but we saw an organised drunking (like a churching only with alcohol). Allow the young people, in safe surroundings, to get completely rat-arsed and experience the joy of their first hangover in the company of friends and family in order to moderate their future behaviour. That may not have been the point but Gozo is a safe island where people, leave their cars and houses unlocked and there is little drunkenness. This was an all-age occasion with the elderly sitting watching. There were push-chairs in the procession.

The disco (at which no-one seemed to dance but the soundtrack behaved as if it wasn't bothered it was enjoying itself) finished about 1.30 a.m. We listened to Faithless close the show as we read our books in bed.

The next day, as if to taunt the adolescent bedheads, 8.00 a.m, was announced with eight enormous firecrackers and ten minutes of manic bell-ringing. Poor mites. We imagined 100 simultanous Gozitan cries of 'That's the last time I'm doing that.'

Wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Dear Friends

Just when I thought it was safe to go on holiday I went and got myself kidnapped by my pesky youth group. See the evidence here. The handbag shot really hurt.

Fund Raising

I was going to be kidnapped. I know you don't normally get notice of this but the young people in my church were going to kidnap me and ask for a ransom from the congregation to raise funds for various charities before they will return me. I have pointed out the one, not insignificant, flaw in their reasoning and the rules have now changed.

The young people have made various additions and alterations to some ordinary neckties. They are going to display the ties and then place donation baskets under each one. The tie that raises the most money is the one I will have to wear to conduct our worship one morning.

I was thinking of this as I read the blog of new vicar Kathryn, discovering that as she is in charge she can make minor alterations to the choreography and liturgy without asking. I seem to work with a church who can make minor alterations to me without asking.

I wouldn't have it any other way and Trendlewood Church is a splendid place to be. I expect there will be photos of the tie.

Pip Pip

For those who work with young people and will be in the Bristol area on Saturday 10th May, Holy Trinity Nailsea youth worker Mark Close has managed to persuade veteran youth specialist Pip Wilson to come and do a training day on Saturday May 10th at the Trinity Centre. It should be brilliant.

Pip is famous for his Rolling Magazine tent at Greenbelt, reaching the unreachable with love and laughter.

Follow the links to his interesting blog.

Contact Mark or Holy Trinity office if you want to come.