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Sucking sailors nipples and three other ways christianity came to Ireland
Slightly perturbed by the title? Me too. But it happened, to a young man by the name of Patricius aka St Patrick, patron saint of Ireland and to some, patron saint of getting a day of work to get an overload of stout. Somewhere around 400 AD the young half-a-man, skinny and gaunt from years of cold, hard labour in the bleak Antrim countryside is attempting to negotiate safe passage back to his native England. The hardened sailor with whom he negotiates is no fool. Why hire a weak shepherd with a suspiciously odd accent, this was a job for men. But Patricius had not made his dangerous journey through dark nights to this coastal town on a whim. He carried a promise. This was no ordinary journey.
Tags: Christianity
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
Gods Proxy Polaroid
It is God who does the first missional act in history - He sends his word into the nothing, unleashing seven days of perfect and unparalleled creativity. In an almost prophetic statement of everything that his great story line will accomplish God speaks light into being and separates the light from the darkness. Then come the heavens and the seas, vegetation, plants, seeds, trees, fruit, seasons, evening, morning, night, stars, birds and beasts. God speaks and the lifeless nothing bursts into life. And over his new work God makes his first declaration of judgement, that everything he has just created is good.
Tags: Christianity, Identity, Life
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
my life is a constant transition…..
my life is in constant transition and i've been told that it will never stop. every once in awhile you feel like you've 'arrived'. but you haven't. don't be fooled. you're just on to the next thing. i've been back in Belfast for about a month now. i had the best time being home in Canada, which i find shocking because i honestly didn't expect it to be. but it was awesome, so awesome that i almost didn't come back, but a lack of purpose and God's direction brought me back, oh and all you lovely people! (i really wish everyone i loved would be in one place, or that flights would be cheaper so i could go home more often) the first few days back were great, except that a few key people in my Belfast life were in Spain, or Africa or just away, so i was a bit lonely for a while there. thankfully some people that i am still getting to know really came through and it made transitioning back easier. i naively didn't think that i would have to transition back to life here, but everything and nothing changed while i as gone. now that i've accepted all this transitioning and have a support system of people when i need it i'm 'on to the next thing'. ........
Tags: Christianity, Faith, Finances, Life
The Doctrine of Chubbhander
It feels like something is happening within Christianity right now. A groundswell of the dissatisfied within the Church is rising during our generation, a gathering of Christians eager to question and stretch our faith in order to save it and breathe life back into it. (Phyllis Tickle and others have labelled this “The Great Emergence” - It’s too early to tell if this name will catch on but, if it does, you heard it here first!) The most refreshing thing about this movement is that it feels ok to voice concerns about some aspects of Christianity which have been handed down to us but which don’t feel in sync with Jesus, who He was and what His priorities were. Where in previous generations questioners or doubters may have been labelled troublemakers or heretics, now there is room in many churches for people to be able to say,”I have problems with this. I don’t understand where this has come from. Does anyone else have problems with this? Let’s talk it through.”
Tags: Christianity, Faith, Life, Made me think
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
The phenomenon of wow
phenomenon • noun (pl. phenomena) 1 a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause is in question. 2 Philosophy the object of a person’s perception. 3 a remarkable person or thing. ORIGIN Greek phainomenon ‘thing appearing to view’. wow informal • exclamation (also wowee) expressing astonishment or admiration. • noun a sensational success. • verb impress and excite greatly. Jesus spoke incendiary truths and did explosive things. He identified the elements of his culture that were contrary to the scandalous message of grace. He would then take them down, not with complex arguments and weighty discourse but with simple acts, mind bending stories, displays of deity and outrageously phenomenal statements. His audiences were told to love the people they hated the most, lay down their stones and leave the adulterous woman alone and touch those who would make them ‘unclean’. They were amazed by a man who would destroy the temple, the very thing that gave them identity as a people. They were perplexed by this Jesus who claimed to be the sibling of Yahweh and then told them He was also The I AM.
Tags: Christianity, Glory, Life
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
Put your hands in the air stand up sit down sing a song say hello turn around
Some time ago I was invited to go and watch the Belfast Giants play ice hockey. For an ice hockey virgin stepping into the home of the Giants, the Odyssey arena, was to say the least, otherworldly. I only have two ice rink sports based memories the first is of Torville and Dean in theatrical dress dancing and throwing each other around and getting all upset. The other is of the Slovak professional ice hockey player Miroslav Satan at the 1994 Winter Olympic Games. As young geeky evangelical pastors kids we had endless minutes of fun with this (a geek of course being a word derived from 18th century circus performers who bit heads off chickens, but that's another story) the thought of Satan playing ice hockey in hell was soon put to bed by the obvious temperature disadvantage that exists there. Although, as I was fast learning, watching the game, for some, may of course be used as a very successful form of eternal punishment.