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Graceocracy
Forget everything you know about the parable of the good Samaritan. It is not a nice moral tale about a kind man who does a good deed by helping someone who has had a bit of a nasty turn. Nor is it about an arrogant priest who ignores a dying man leaving him to his obvious fate. It is a story about a different kind of priest, one who would come to end all that the earthly priests had been required to do.
Tags: Christianity, Church, CityGroup, Community, Grace
Super Noodles & Sushi (Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us….........)
A year ago tomorrow, which if in fact you are reading this tomorrow, the 17th, it will be a year today. And if you are reading this at some time after the 17th .... well you get the idea. Either way the church plant Redeemer Central will be one year old. Birthdays are odd things. A while ago we celebrated the birth day of our wee boy Jude. That was shortly after I told our seven year old that if the baby was a boy we were going to name him Bubbles. If you have got an seven year old you will know that they take things very literally. She told her school teacher that we were calling the boy Bubbles. A few days after he was born we get a card from her teacher saying 'congratulations on the birth of baby Bubbles'. I hastily had to reach for my broom and begin a quick exercise in sweeping up. As a thirty something grown adult having to explain to a teacher the reasoning behind my faux naming of my first born son ........ lets just say it is a beetroot head kind of experience.
Tags: Church
We are looking for you
Are you a regular at Redeemer Central? Why not write something for The Collective. You could write anything. Why not look through and see what others have written and have a go. You don't even have to be a great writer! E-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more info.
Tags: Church
The grass roots radicals
I've been hanging out with the tales of the early church as told by Dr Luke in his appropriately named book Acts. In fairness, by anyones standards the few months leading up to the beginning of Lukes writings were epic. The twelve disciples became eleven plus a traitor and watched as everything they had been told would take place happened, although to them it would have hardly made much sense at all. The king of the Jews, freedom fighting Rabbi, son of God, friend, companion and old testament legal advisor was now hanging naked on a tree. Out beyond the city wall, with the leapers, criminals and city rubbish dump hung everything that they had spent the last three years pinning their hopes on. It must have felt like the end, the twelve now eleven soon to be twelve again were in disarray, the great revolution had seemingly come to an abrupt end. The end it was, in one sense that is, it was the end of something old and the beginning of something very very different. It would take them three days to realise the gravity of what had just taken place. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
Tags: Christianity, Church, Community
Red:info
Are you new to Redeemer? Have you recently started coming? Or are you wondering how you can get connected? On Thursday March 4th we are hosting an evening when you can come and hear more about us, our vision and what we are about.
This Sunday at Redeemer Central - The You Temple
This Sunday at Redeemer Central we will be continuing our series red:values looking at our core values. In his talk titled The You Temple, David will be talking to us from 1 Corinthians 3. Join us at 10:30am, The Oh Yeah Music Centre, Belfast.
The times, they are a-changin’
I like Friday afternoons in work. My colleagues are a little more disciplined than I am through the week, and come in early every day, building up enough hours to let them take a half day on Friday. I am not so good at doing that, so inevitably I end up spending Friday afternoon in the office by myself, putting in the time. We have been listening to Cool FM (local radio station and thorn in my flesh) all week, and my head is mashed with the sounds of Basshunter, Cheryl Cole, and other such non-musical geniuses. But my colleagues have just left, I made coffee, switched off the radio, and pressed play on the CD player. I am now listening to the graceful, never-gets-old sound of the master himself, Bob Dylan. The first track on my disc is ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’; there is something about his voice, the questioning of the lyrics, the quiet rhythm of the guitar, that just instantly makes me feel calm, relaxed, happy. Bob Dylan makes me smile.
Tags: Church, Faith, Music, Relationship
Another year over
We haven't even been meeting a year! It’s amazing to think of all that God has been doing amongst us since February this year. It seems a long time since a small handful of us gathered in my modestly sized lounge to worship and pray. Then came Love:Belfast which saw 120 people gather in the Studio Theatre at the Waterfront Hall to worship, pray and support. We quickly found ourselves too big for our front room so complete with wafting smells of pizza’s we began meeting above Pizza Express in the City centre. Within weeks it became clear that we were going to quickly outgrow Pizza Express and by September, surrounded by memorabilia from Belfast's rock music history we settled into our new home, The Oh Yeah Music Centre. In the space of a few months we doubled in size gathering together as ordinary people called to be and do something extraordinary! So into 2010, meeting on Sundays and launching as a church in September. Next year is going to be very exciting.
Tags: Church, Church planting, CityGroup
We are nothing unless We are everything
It's the way it all goes down in Luke part 2. The acts the Apostles do see a dynamic community established. The new followers first response is to be an everything people. Everything for everyone, in no small amount. You need it and I’ve got it? Then you can have it. You are poor and I am less poor? Then I will choose to become poorer so you can become richer. My home is your home, your home is my home, lets share a meal of bread and wine.
Tags: Bible, Christianity, Church, Church planting, Community, Faith
Studio altercations
I recently visited an exhibition of paintings by the Irish born painter and two time Turner prize nominee Sean Scully. Speaking of his work Scully says "I hold to a very Romantic ideal of what's possible in art, and I hold to the idea of the 'personal universal.' This is a complex agenda. My project is complicated in this way, and in that sense I'm out of fashion. I'm going against the current trend towards bizarreness, oddness; as you just called it, the 'esoteric', which of course was around in the 1920's. That's what is being revisited now. In between the two great wars, there was a very strong period, particularly in Europe, of a strange, bizarre, distorted and perverse kind of figuration, with freaks in the paintings. Very disturbing twins, subjects like that. These paintings were mostly coming out of Italy and Germany. Now we have a return to that again in a strange period, after the end of Modernism".
Tags: Art, Christianity, Church, Church planting
Deep church
Been reading the book Deep Church: which you can buy here
Tags: Books, Christianity, Church, Church planting
Grace in dangerous places
On Monday night I went out for a drink with some friends, one of whom happens to be gay. Brought up in the church and a follower of Christ, albeit in ‘another’ place on his journey at the moment we had some fascinating and revealing discussions about how the church (not just our church) can converse with those in the gay community.
Tags: Christianity, Church, Faith, Hope, Identity, Life, Made me think