We visited St Andrew’s today. The town is getting ready for The Open which starts I believe on Thursday. I had a look out to see if I could recognise any famous celebrities – the thing is I wouldn’t know a celebrity anyway if I saw one on the street. St Andrew’s is usually full of all kinds of people who could quite easily be celebrities. It is really quite a cosmopolitan town. I suppose being a University community it attracts a wide range of people. Maybe every second or third person is a celebrity?

Anyway the weather was good and I was enjoying the sun streaming around me. I stopped at the corner where Holy Trinity Church stands and sat on a bench. Within a few moments a young woman appeared took out her guiltar and started struming. Could she be a celebrity – look closer, she was for me every bit a celebrity – totally brilliant!

Anyway we think it is another groundbreaking move that will allow people to follow worship live in nursing homes, public transport and even on the golf course and why not? When streaming live onto the iPad everything is available at the click of a button the golf course might be a bit far fetched but the bus and the nursing home is a real possibility

Recently we’ve been developing within our services the opportunity for worshippers to contribute to worship using the text facility on their phones. Its actually a fantastic way to let people contribute to the prayers of intercession. It is also an interesting way to engage with the congregation interactively through preaching from the text. Only the text is the text message that has appeared on the screen in the sanctuary.

I believe there is an interesting opportunity for ministers to begin to explore how we can best utilise technology. Changing worshippers from consumers to producers is what worship is all about. Its about thinking about what I bring to church not what I get from church. I’m sure we will have an intetresting debate on the issue. Some will think what I’m talking about is a gimmick, but its not its a real opportunity to empower the worshippers. Its about engaging liturgy into everyday life. Its actually very Orthodox to talk of liturgy in this way.

Neil tried out the technology last weekend, and he was able to sit in his car on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh and watch the morning service live. This also means that if he had wanted he could have sent his contribution for prayer via the iphone and it would have appeared on the screen at the front of the church. He tells me to make it clear he was not drivng at the time.

For those of the congregation and friends who don’t have iphones or ipads I believe Neil also plans to try streaming services live onto Blackberries, Google Androids and Nokia phones in the not too distant future so watch this space.

One other thing most of you guys know that I’m a bit of a U2 fan well I think its about time we had a U2charist here in Scotland. This is a Communion Service that uses U2 songs as part of the worship and praise. I believe these worship events have been taking place now for a few years all around the world but from what I can gather non in Scotland. So I thought we could develop a really cool service using U2 tunes using iphones and ipads then podcast it on itunes.

So what do you guys think. I’ve come across a web page worth looking at which gives all kinds of hints and ideas to help organise such an event. Have a look at U2charist resources I’d love to hear what some of you think. We could perhaps start our next Sanctuary First with a U2Charist or should we aim to put on a bigger event in one of the Cathedrals? I waiting on a text or an email but at least a comment

This was one of the themes picked up by Archbishop John Sentamu as he issued a reminder at the closing worship service of “Edinburgh 2010” in the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall. Alluding to the gospel account of Peter’s denial of Christ, Sentamu added: “Jesus today is on trial in the court of the world by our lips and lives. Jesus and his gospel are being judged.” Sentamu continued, “Human activity only begets human activity. The prophetic Word and the Spirit make us live.” His voice echoed with an evangelising passion that recalled preachers of the past who spoke in the same space. It was also reminicent of his recent visit to the CWW National Gathering in Edinburgh in 2008 when I had the privelege of introducing him to the 8,000 audience gathered at Ingliston. Archbishop Sentamu has been such an inspiration to many of us in Scotland and he was the ideal peron to bring the conference to a close.

PRAISE GATHERING 2010
All the good things were not just happening in Edinburgh, through in Glasgow, the Praise Gathering, under the leadership of Ian Watson was packing in thousands to the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall over a three night stint. I had the privelege of attending on the Saturday evening. It turned out to be a fantastic evening. What I like about the Praise Gathering is it lterally does what it says on the tin. Its about praise to Almighty God, and its not about celebrities. in many ways it seeks to pick up the theme of Hope and Humility.

The Director and Conductor Ian Watson has been a wonderful friend to all of us involved with Church Without Walls events. Over the last few years in Aviemore. His inspirational leadership in worship was quite outstanding. Ian has put together an extensive programme of praise music, for the Praise Gathering, in doing so he seems to be able to find the balance between a participatory element to allow his audience to engage with praise themeselves allowing them to become producers of praise, while at the same time offering everyone the opportunity to become a consumer listening to an amazing 400 voice choir sing a variety of pieces ranging from traditional gospel to more contemporary songs.

For me the highlight of the evening was an arrangement of the well known hymn “How Great Thou Art.” How they did it I don’t know but they moved from a lyrical ballad to a rockous gospel sound in less than a minute, greatly assisted by Gamu.

Now I said there were no celebrities but there was one outstanding star! Once again for me the evening highlight was the young Glasgow singer Gamucharai Nhengu (aka Gamu). She is a seriously talented young woman. The truth is the she brought the whole Concert Hall to life. She has amazing stage presence and for someone so slight one wonders from where does the voice come? To hear Gamu sing again it would be worth any Glaswegian brave the elements and venture east and attend the next Praise Gathering which takes place in the Usher halls Edinburgh on Saturday 19 June.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been talking to a number of people about Norman’s lecture. Helping people see the “Magic” is an important aspect of mentoring and encouraging leaders and even friends.

I know we don’t always succeed but I’m sure we all agrree that it is so important to try to bring out the best in the people we work alongside. Its so easy to be negative but there is a real joy that comes from connecting people to the “Magic” that Norman Drummond talks about. Encouraging people to rise to their real potential. I also liked one of Norman’s memoralble phrases when he spoke of our culture that is so often all about “valuing targets rather than targeting values.”

Norman’s theme was of special interest to two young teachers with whom i met up with last week. We had arranged a meeting to talk about ways in which we can help contribute as a Church, to the Curriculum for Excellence in our local Secondary School.

Both of the teachers were really passionate about what they were trying to deliver in their classrooms. They were also enthusiastic about the opportunities Curriculum For Ecellence will bring them giving them the freedom to create much of their own material.

It was good to work along side Lilias our Youth Worker as together we were able to make a contribution to the way christianity will be taught in the school. We’re hoping to use the Jesus Manifesto as reported by Luke at the end of Chapter 3 and the beginning of Chapter 4 as the starting point from which to introduce Christianity to all the first years.

I think its going to work. It will also allow the RE Department to engage with all kinds of links across the curriculum and also the community. While we were talking about all this the ‘Magic” appeared and it wasn’t long before we could also see the wisdom we wanted to share appear.

Using the words of Isaiah, Jesus tells his listeners, in the Gospel of Luke, that he has fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah. He suggests to them he will “bind up the broken hearted, set prisoner free, heal the sick, and give sight to the blind.”

Using this quotation from the Gospel, we will be able to make links for the school to the local prison, and connect the children with our various Church Outreach programmes, which are all connected in some way with healing.

In the school there are lots of connections with other subjects that can be formed. The history of Art, will allow the Art teachers if they so desire to see the importance of the parables of Jesus as retold by many of the classic painters. What I’m realising is that there are many opportunities available to share the gospel in schools through these creative educational opportunities.

It was a great honour to have the company of our Patron The Princess Royal and also to have been given the use of the Palace by Her Majesty the Queen for this event. We had people from every walk of life with us including Oscar Schiappa Pietra who currently advises the Minister and the Secretary of National Planning in Papua New Guinea as a UNDP Officer. Oscar in the past has been a Senior Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs; and Executive Director of the Peruvian Agency for International Aid, in Peru. He has also been a great friend and advisor to the Trust. It was also great to see some of the first members of the Trust attend the dinner and to remind ourselves of our early challenges and difficulties.
However it is because of people who were prepared to carry on in the face of difficuties that we have the Trust as it is today. We all had a wonderful time. I was especially pleased that Princess Anne highlighted the work that the Trust is now developing in partnership with schools in the UK and also paid tribute to the way we work trying to be innovative and inclusive networking accross the whole strata of society.

I can hardly believe that 25 years have past since we first opened the Branches shop here in Bo’ness. Today much of our success has been brought about by the grace of God working in the hearts and minds of people of faith and even no faith. I particularly want to say a huge thank you to Willie McPherson our Executive Director and his small but dynamic staff who have worked so hard to make the Trust an effective partner as we work alongside Scripture Union in Peru bringing Health care to over 100,000 people in the Amazon through our Medical Programme and supporting over 200 children in the five homes we have built and continue to fund. All this is a far cry away from our first falteriing steps as we opened a shop in the Market Square in Bo’ness. Its a great privelege to be Chairman of the Vine Board and to have such a creative group of people on our team.

As Bob Dylan wrote many years ago ” The times they are a changin’ ” Its amazing how politicians in the national interest can end up comprimising their once strongly held beliefs in order to gain the controls of power. I’m not sure what to think about the change of government. But I do know we are facing one of the gravest economic situations ever and we now have a very divided and inexperienced coalition government taking office. Time I guess will tell if they will be able to hold together the agreement they’ve just made. I hope it works for all our sakes. Perhaps some of the more extreme policies of both parties will be curtailed when they come to the vote in the Commons. One thing is for certain we all need to remember in our prayers all those who have taken upon themselves the high office of public service. It would be wonderful if we could gain back into our public life a sense of integrity of purpose. How we do that when we have such an unscrupulous press is not going to be easy.

I must confess I’ve always felt that we’ve not always had unbias reporting manner as far as the media are concerned with this past election. I could never quite understand why they were reporting a Clegg bounce when the leadership debates were going on. I never thought Gordon Brown did as badly as the political pundits reported. And I guess the election result bears it out. All this has got me thinking for which party would Jesus have voted. Answers on a postcard.

Mary tells me she has attended St Andrew’s for most of her life. She has been a Sunday School Teacher and a member of the Choir. She misses many of her friends who ae no longer with us, however she always has a genuine interest in the work of teh church and is someone who realises that changes have had to take place. While she may not like all of the changes. She believes that some were essential.

Her father was invited to be an elder, but because he didn’t have a morning suit. He turned the offer down. All this got me thinking. Many people complain that the church is not what it once was. In some respects I’m glad. When I think of a church that excluded people from the eldership because of their clothes, I think of a church that had missed the point of the gospel. Lest we as church leaders a hundred years on get on our high horse, perhaps we need to think of the attitudes we have that are preventing and creating barriers to faith in Christ. It might be of interest I just heard the other day of someone who went into a church only to over hear someone comment on their clothes. Nothing changes! Even James in his epistle wrote about attitudes to clothes and riches.

Anyway its happy birthaday to Mary

As minister of St Andrew’s Bo’ness I was delighted to see that once again we have been able to share our vision of working in partnership with our sister congregations and civic officials to help build a better community for the people of our town. It is important that the church has been able to serve the community by making the above hustings happen.

One of the agents for the candidates remarked as he left the church, ” This is not how I expected the evening to go, tonight has been an eye opener for me.” I think he was referring to the local expertise that was around in the church building. He may also have been referring to the fact that the church was able to stream the event out live, that the Vine Trust has its roots deep in the Christian Comminity in Bo’ness and that we in St Andrew’s in partnerships with others are delivering a multi-facited social programme touching all ages across the community.

The purpose of the day was to introduce a new constituency to Alpha and also to show that there was a sound theological ethos surrounding the whole course. The framework of Hospitality, Encounter, Catechesis and Community were all duly explored as key elements to the course.

It was actually well done. However one couldn’t quite help thinking how a course that has been run for years put in the hands of a theologian can be repacked in such a way that one would almost think that it had been designed that way in the first place? Don’t get me wrong this comment is not meant to be a criticism it is more a revelation. Sometimes we do things and we don’t see the shape or the structure that lies behind what we do. I guess it was this that I found helpful and yet left me asking the question, when they designed it. did they think this structure?

The guest speaker was Graham Tomlin. He is on the Alpha staff at Holy Trinity Brompton and an Oxford Don to boot. If I closed my eyes I thought I could have been listening to David Cameron. However there the resemblence ended, because there was real substance to his contribution.

He has recently written a book entitled ‘Provocative Church’. Tomlin’s presentation was spot on helping us all to think through how we can best engage with a generation that is very suspicious of people who want to evangelise them. The summary of his thesis it seemed to me to be saying, Its more how you live it rather than saying why you believe it. Believing comes later belonging comes first. The how comes first, the why later.

I totally agreed with his analysis of our post modern or post Christian culture here in the UK. We are in a different place from where we were 50 years ago. The rise of pluralism has made it difficult for Christians to talk about world evangelisation in the way we once did. Religion in this new world order has been given a different place. When it is brought into the public arena it has to be branded in such a way that it speaks an inclusive language. How do we do this without comprimising our belief in the exclusive flavour of the Christian gospel is a question we need to be wrestling with on a daily basis?

It will be interesting to see what comes out of the Edinburgh Missionary Conference 2010 this coming June. This will be an international gathering of Christian leaders and academics engaging with the current ethical and moral topics facing Christianity today in the light of Christian tradition and culture. One thing is for certain it will be a different conference from the one held in Edinburgh in 1910 exactly 100 years ago. It from this conference that the worldwide missionary movement of the 20th century has been attributed.

Today we need to be continually asking the question, how do we share the gospel of Jesus Christ in this changing world where different cultures and faiths demand an equal respect and acceptance. It will also be of interest to see how the Lauzanne Congress in Cape Town later this year engages with these very same same topics surrounding pluralism and evangelisation. This whole dialgue takes us into the area of philosophy and sociology of signs and symbols. It also challenges the whole concept of truth. Indeed we are back to Pilate’s famous question to Jesus.

In the conference yesterday Tomlin introduced a quote from the famous 20th Century French thinker and commentator Jean Bandrillard. I think it went something like this,( if I’ve got it wrong someone will correct me) ‘ None of our societies know how to manage their mourning for real… as a result we try to reproduce an endless searching after the real.” It was an interesting quote which he used to suggest that what people are in search of today is reality. To put it in my words they are asking of us the simple question ” Does it work? ”

All this is a challenge to evangelicals to realise that there are many different ways to communicate the gospel. Christians who have a passion for world evangelisation need to realise that Britain is in a post Christian pluralist culture. The fact is the prevailing “plausibility structures”, have a profound aversion to evangelism. The political classes have no desire to see one religion promote itself above another.

The rise of fundemalism and the whole experience of 9/11 has caused a fear factor to be projected by commentators around the ideas and actions of over zealous religious people. Too many of our role models for evangelism have been rooted in the American Culture of the 1940s and 50s spiced up a little bit to look and feel more attractive for the 21st century. The tele- evangelists of the current God Channels in the UK are on the whole connecting with people who agree with them and many of the contributers on reflection may well be adding to what I call the commercialisation of the gospel. Whether this is a good thing or not can be debated. The facts remain they are talking to a narrow ghettoised audience. We need to be in the business of broad casting rather than narrow casting.

The truth is that there is much we can learn from other Christian cultures, especially those in the east, who have lived with pluralism and know well very the challenges that pluralism brings to Christian witness. I for one am indebted to the insights of Bishop Newbign who spend a huge part of his ministry in india living our gospel principles in a society that has over 33 million gods. Newbign was of course a Church of Scotland missionary before becoming the first Bishop of the Church of South India in Madras.

All this means that the authenticity of the gospel will only prevail when Christian men and woman earn the right to talk about faith becuase they have been living the reality of the gospel in their communities. We must become people who live out the reality of kindness, grace, forgiveness, service and integrity.

On a more personal note, I was delighted to be able to film a number of church leaders for our next round of video podcasts coming up on Sanctuary First. Make sure you take a moment to check out their contribution over the next few weeks. And a huge thanjk you to the organisers of the Alpha Training Day it was a great success.