Blogging as formation

 Blogging as an act of worship

I wonder how many of you, like me, have sometimes regarded your blog with a degree of ambivalence.

At theological college, I remember going through a phase, asking God whether he was asking me to give up my blog. Was blogging some kind of narcissistic indulgence?

At about this time I wondered whether the faculty thought blogging was a helpful or hindering past-time. I agonised over whether I was pursuing something individual when I should be using time blogging in building relationships in the theological community of which I had become a part.

Lecturers would look at me when they said they didn't want this going live in the public domain, please, as they revealed some inner convictions about the church or General Synod.

I now realise that whilst blogging can accompany my life, life at theological college will end. I will come out the other end. They do not expect me to be 'finished' and I do not expect that either, but blogging will help me to keep engaging in the process, the journey, in formation.

Blogging creates a community that supplements and does not compete with the community you're already involved in. When that community sleep, the blogging community does not, when that community is unavailable, the blogging one is never far away.

With the final essay of my Grad Cert in Theology and Ministry, before transferring to the Masters programme, I will submit an URL as part of my work and a lecturer will be asked to click links from domain to domain, from a private blog 'Jesus and St Alk's' about my placement church from which I worked for two weeks with the marginalised and an outreach ministry called Storehouse, and my public blog Re vis.e Re form, where some of my reflections with this ministry were blogged publicly. I could never have recreated this dynamic record of my thoughts and other people's responses to them with a conventional diary. Let's just hope our academic institutions are up to speed with the way that their students do their theology these days, Andii Bowsher's blogs are perhaps indicative that they certainly are. 

It has been good to read Ben Myers' article on Blogging and theological discourse. I repeat some of his key points below for you to consider.

Blogging is, according to Ben Myers (you can read the entire article here)
                                                                 

• not merely a new medium for exchanging information, but a new practice of self-formation—a new way of working on the self, of forming community and identity. 

• With technologies like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, one’s “private” thoughts are immediately manifest, immediately “publicly” available. The word is not carefully crafted into a fixed, perfected form; it is plastic, flexible, and dialogical. Here, the word is uttered not simply within the context of other authorial words, but in the lived context of an ever-changing interactive community.

If you do blog or facebook your feelings and thoughts, your impressions and moods and sometimes feel as though you should not share or that you might be criticised for doing so, consider Ben's exploration of Michel Foucault, whom I read for my English degree and how Foucault traces this practice of writing one's thoughts down through the ages:

• In its ancient form, this practice of self-writing was not, as one might expect, concerned with philosophical questions or spiritual experiences. Primarily, you worked on yourself by attending, with meticulous care, to the ordinary details of everyday life. Your writing records your moods, your reading, your social interactions, and your conversation.

• One writes in order to shape oneself.

• Early in the third century, Tertullian used the term publicatio sui: Christians are to publish themselves.

• ...one participates in a continuing conversation in a collective enterprise of learning and inquiry.

I am really glad about blogging, Ben points out that, 'A basic problem in theological education is that it often ceases after seminary.' Keeping a blog helps to continue theological dialogue.

Ben describes how blogging forms special kinds of community: 'reading is far removed from solitude, since here reading is understood primarily as the stimulus to conversation, criticism, and discussion.'

I can relate to the following, not that I would describe myself as an academic:

• An academic once told me that he doesn’t watch television anymore; instead, he sits down with a glass of wine and reads theology blogs. The medium is the message: there is something inherently fun about blogging, even when the subject-matter is serious and demanding.

Television just seems 2D and static in comparison to the dialogical dynamics of the net. I gave up TV at about the same time I started blogging. If I do watch TV, it is only because I intend to blog about it or I have seen it to be the cause of other people's blog-posts. The new TV sitcom 'Rev' became a must-watch because the blogs were covering it.

Just keep blogging, just keep blogging!

Stitches in time taste good

I have this bunch of random thoughts that I can not quite organise into anything coherent. I see the cross like an amazing break or stitch in time. It runs horizontally and vertically. It replaced normal time with something supernatural. Underneath this gap/stitch/hole in reality there is this kind of warp, where Jesus dealt with sin and death which is held in place by his death and resurrection. Where there is this warp in time at the cross, there is this intersection of the new creation, the new reality, with this one and when we go humbly to the cross, we see it and it spills out and over from the cross and breaks into the reality we know in bursts of the Kingdom. It is all quite beautiful and uncontainable. We can all go deeper into that place, the warp, the new creation in prayer and in our lives and in our dreams when God speaks to us without the interruption of other brain activity or the busyness of daily life. I keep going to that place, it's a beautiful place.

I wish I could draw what I can see but I can not.

My dreams are full of prayer and cosmic battles at the moment. Last night I was leading the Jehovah Witness whom I met yesterday, to God. I was explaining the work of the Holy Spirit and drawing all these pictures on the walls of my house for him, to make it clearer, and I could recreate Ellie Mumford's preach for him from New Wine and her move from fear to submission, to never seeking prayer ministry to being suddenly healed through it. I quite look forward to going to sleep these days for the dreams that I will have. I wake up so thrilled about God and so grateful for his presence in my life.

Yesterday, I walked around the parish where I will be a curate. The kids love it there. There is this amazing old-fashioned sweet shop and the idea of a sweet shop with all these goodies on offer has always been a picture I have had of God in his benevolence. The penny sweets there really are - a penny. The parish area is also a place of spiritual struggle, you can tell by the Chinese therapy shops and the shops selling pagan and Hindu icons. It's all kind of mixed up and searching! I have a good feeling about it. Just over a year ago, I sat in one of its coffee shops and almost had to touch my shirt, I was so sure I was already sitting there with my dog-collar on (I might not even wear one in reality, not sure) but the image was symbolic so I know that even though at times, it all causes me to pause with anxiety and it all seemed to happen so fast without me hardly having time to think, perhaps if I look back to my time with the DDO before Bap, this is just something I should get used to - the speed of everything, living in the stitch, the warp, the gap, time is not mine to control.

It's been a summer of such new beginnings and more authenticity, it's also been jolly hard work and it seems that as students, we all now stand on the cusp of the completion of one part of the journey, as we all get together to see each other's churches and future houses on google earth and speculate about the plans that God is going to involve us in over such a scattered geography. Yummy!

No Milk from Dr Moo - solid food!

This is my picture for my plea for the MOO NICNT on Romans.

The NICNTs are brilliant and as a theology student, I do not think I can live without Moo's NICNT (okay, I am milking it a bit here - milking it - get it!).

I remember Dr Daryl Docterman, another fantastic American theologian (okay, piling on the charm here - the freebie will wing its way from the good old USA, should I be successful.) Dr Doc taught us the 'Documentary Hypothesis', about which he had some concerns, and talked a lot about Dr Moo.

I always think about the expiation/propitiation thing, I really do, put me in a quiet room with a cuppa and this is usually what my mind will drift to - yep I am an unusual kind of girl - I reckon Dr Moo could help me on this front.

If you similarly want to beg and scrape in this rather disgusting way for a book you could not otherwise afford, visit Scientia et Sapientia, an exceedingly good blog.

Get the kids involved...

I really learned something yesterday through the sermon I preached on Eph 6:10-20, which I delivered at a charismatic evening service. It was great spending a few days with this passage. It reminded me that I once lived a kind of luke-warm Christianity and rather fell into that first dangerous category which CS Lewis describes, forgetting that the devil is at large in the world.

"There are two equal and opposite errors into which one can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them."
preface to The Screwtape Letters

I went to a seminar at New Wine led by Bishop Graham Dow on deliverance ministry. Whilst delivering prayer ministry at the end of his sermon, I could see what the devil can do and became aware that the more in love with Jesus you are, the more also you understand this living in the supernatural where with the protection of the Holy Spirit, there is nothing to fear but it is necessarily wise to understand where your weak spots are and where you are vulnerable to attack. 

Each time I prepare to preach, I feel it. I wonder if any of you experience all those nagging attacks - 'you're boring', 'they will not understand you', 'what you are saying is not correct' etc. This kind of thinking is wrong from the beginning, it's alternative would be, 'they're going to love me', 'what a great line that it', 'I think I'll keep them interested', 'I am going to be great'. Either way, the devil is  laughing if he gets us to focus on ourselves and our 'performance' rather than God. 


What I have realised over the years is that if God will use people to speak, he will use them, despite our mess-ups and inadequacies, our stutters (look at Moses) and our stumblings (Paul!). There are people in my past who have impacted my life with just a word or a sentence that God has used to bring me into greater truth or change my life. These people are unlikely to be aware that their utterances were so profound, unless I have told them, which sometimes, I have. What God does with the words we speak is up to him and we are his vessels and must just trust the Holy Spirit. This does not take responsibility away from a speaker who should use the gifts God has given them to speak but it does free one up somehow. 


Preaching evolves over time probably and I think I had a break-through yesterday because rather than always comparing myself to others, 'I do not tell jokes like they do', or 'I am not as grounded', or 'I am not as clever' etc (that faulty thinking), God had me realise that all I have to do is draw from the life that he has given me, which is unique to me. When my daughter, who is only five suggested she take a photograph of herself with a plastic spider on her nose to illustrate one of the points I was making in my sermon, I just went with it. 

Sample from sermon 22/08/2010 The Kingdom Dress Code (Eph 6:10-20)

It is terrible to hear that some of our troops in Afghanistan have died needlessly because their equipment and armoured vehicles were not fit for purpose. The armour that God gives us is completely trustworthy. I wonder if we are dressed appropriately for Kingdom living. Are we meeting the dress code? When I went to New Wine I listened to Mark Melluish, who spoke about the power that the local church has to change nations and how if we got over our fear, we would be very dangerous people like those Roman soldiers whose armour Paul describes. Each time I come back from New Wine, where I really feel my own spiritual armour has been buffed up, I am aware of having more more positive thinking and right attitudes in my life. Last year I was more confident for beginning college training.

This year it just very simply meant that I came back with no fear of spiders and the same thing seemed to have happened to Fran too. It could be partly also because the children had taken small plastic toy spiders with them to New Wine and kept leaving them around the campervan much to their delight and our shock. Fran and I thought about how probably on seeing real spiders again, we would not be scared On returning home from New Wine, we would move house to Bramcote three days later and I kept rescuing five big burley men who packed up our house from spiders which caused them to shrink back and call for me each time they found them – they were huge but this had us all laughing. I knew what I was up against and they seemed as innocuous to me as those plastic spiders I had lived with all week in the campervan. Fran did even better than me. One night whilst we were all reading a bedtime story, a spider crawled up the back of Fran's head and onto her nose and just sat there. 'There's something on my face mummy', she said and we both laughed after we had chucked the spider out of the window to its safety. She was not at all scared. We had both been fearless! Just like those spiders whose plastic imitations I had lived with for a week, we need some degree of familiarity with what we are afraid of, we need to be aware of our weaknesses, where we might be attacked, discouraged, become less than we have been made to be and we need to defend ourselves against those attacks with the powerful armour God gives us.

I want to encourage us tonight to meet the dress code of the Kingdom.

I want to encourage us to shine for God by taking the polishing cloth of prayer to the spiritual armour he has given us.

God intends for us to be fearless. It might look as though he made us naked and vulnerable when we think back to Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden and when we think forward to Jesus hanging naked on the cross but instead the first human and the most perfect human were dressed in a spiritual armour that human eyes can not see. Where Adam's armour was weak, Jesus' is impenetrable. God always designs his creatures fit for purpose and Christ came to clothe us with power from on high. Paul describes six elements of our armour: the belt, body armor, boots, shield, helmet and sword....ETC

There are always going to people whom you please and people whom you do not. Whilst we need to be mindful about to whom we are speaking, I think we also have to be ourselves. The danger with the internet is we can spend hours and hours discovering how other people have preached a passage, we can download podcasts, read exegesis papers, watch Youtube preaches and hook up to God TV but the words we speak have to be the ones that God has given us. I spent way too long once with Mars Hill on Jonah before preaching on this book in an evangelical church. I am realising that the time we spend in preparation has to be spent largely in prayer and it is a very different kind of preparation to that for a college paper.  

...so the journey continues, we learn and grow. It's painful and exciting. We can remember those break-throughs along the road and those moments when we were visited by the darkness.  It's a vulnerable place to be, just you and God's Word and people hungry for Him but he never leaves you empty and always leaves you changed. 

A few days to go, and I will hand the big summer essay in. The last of the boxes has gone to the garage and we have made a home here in our little house that stands in the shadow of the huge steeple of a church, which we have attended on Sunday mornings and through which God is having us make all sorts of new friends.

God continues to be faithful as we try desperately to hear what he is saying to us through all the usual brain clutter of life. Keep on marching!

No hype - Hen

As a mother hen protects her young under her wings, we are sheltered by the wings of the Holy One who keeps us secure ("He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge" Psalm 91:4).

What I really appreciated about New Wine this year was the gentleness.

There was a real humility about the speakers, a quietness almost, an absolute confidence that it is God who works and people do not need whipping up into some emotional state. There was an eloquence, a gentle conversational style and then a simple waiting on the presence of the Holy Spirit. Ellie Mumford and Mark Melluish come to mind, particularly. In their preaches I was most able to listen with the ears of those coming to faith; those a little bit worried about giving God control of their lives. I was able to see these speakers with their hearts, how receptive they could be to this gentle, loving God who does not need us to tell him what to do; who will give to us out of the sheer generosity of the overflowing love of the perichoretic relationship He has with the Son and the Spirit.

This all meant that during prayer ministry I too had complete faith in this God who will bless his people with His presence. Like the speakers, I could say less and expect more, wait with more serenity and relax in His presence. God just swept through those spaces to encourage, affirm and equip his people. Nothing jarred from the stage, I like to think that we didn't get in God's way too much.

I really hope that our churches begin to minister more confidently in the power of the Spirit. There is a leveling that takes place when we see God at work and ask for more of him and less of us. If we just trust that God can meet with us despite our 'fears and failures', if we can just learn to see each other more through His eyes, we will begin to see each other that way more often too, bridges will be built between denominations, cult of personality will begin to melt away, we will strategise less and wait for his leading more, we will watch for where He is already at work and has gone before us and we will have guts to take more risks for God, assured that we are completely loved and it is only our heavenly Father we are to please.

I really hope I carry some of this into my own ministry. My curacy is settled and just needs signing off and a working agreement arranged.

By the way, any tips for the working agreement would be really appreciated. I am hoping to protect some family time, the writing of my Masters thesis and my ministry at New Wine. I am not asking for too much, I hope.

And for the rest of August, which is already fast slipping away, I now just have to move house, preach on Eph 6 and write a 6000 word report for college by the 31st. I have got out of the habit of asking for your prayers but realising more and more I can not do these things in my own strength, I am asking... put a word in for me, please.

I am okay, I think. But my dreams tell me otherwise. I am leaving my house and I am crying. I have told God off this morning, not really my style, but I figure he can take it and he has asked me to be more real with him. He is asking me to do things, I am saying yes and of course, I have free will to choose, but I am going out of my comfort-zone. I can no longer provide certain things for the children, their garden will shrink to a tenth of the size, many of their toys have been sold on ebay but God gives me dreams of all these toys for them that I discover. My husband must support them in their entry into a new school and I will not take them to their new school in September because ironically I will be in traffic on the A52 hurtling all the way back to where we have just moved from for my September church placement back in Derby. My husband is also putting his business on hold, such sacrificial love. I will have double the academic work-load next year and... I think I am sharing my vulnerabilities here....oooh scary! Usually so upbeat and full of theology, perhaps it's time this blog exposed a little more skin.

So I feel I am living in the presence of the future, in more ways than one. I sometimes have to remember which house I am moving into. My prayer-life is already orientating itself around the curacy but that will not begin for another year.

I hope to stay rooted and grounded, become more Hen-like, and 'Hen (my husband: Henryk) - like' and gather my family under my wings (Luke 13:34). My husband is so good at that. Please pray that we are all bound together in His love, that the children settle well into their new house and that we will continue to seek more of God. Thank you.