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Archive for the ‘Church’ Category

Advice on Hands in Church

Posted in Church, Fun, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 30 March, 2012| 1 Comment »

The brilliant Tim Hawkins has some advice for those who are unused to the more exuberant type of contemporary worship. I confess that I don’t get much further than ‘Carrying the TV’ myself. I am Anglican, after all…

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G.O.S.P.E.L.

Posted in Church, Faith, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 29 March, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Caught this great gospel rap link from Propaganda the other day.

His explanation of the gospel comes with a neat mnemonic – a new gospel outline for Easter, perhaps?:

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An Informal Easter

Posted in Church, Faith, Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , on 28 March, 2012| 1 Comment »

Bee has been here over the last couple of days, helping out with Messy Church last night and with the school Easter service this morning. She and I got together this afternoon to talk about next Thursday, when Cake & Chat becomes DIY Holiday Club. She had some lovely Easter craft ideas and we sourced some others online. We’re going to be making:

I was going to get hold of Baker Ross colour-in cards too, but looking at the list above, I think we’ll have plenty to do.

The crafts will give us good opportunities to chat about Easter with those who attend. Some will be joining us at the Maundy Thursday meal that evening and will be in church on Easter Sunday, but others won’t be at anything official. So we’re very much looking forward to our informal Easter service over cake and crafts.

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Our New Favourite Bible: The Gospel Story Bible

Posted in Church, Faith, Family, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 25 March, 2012| 1 Comment »

We’ve had many favourite kids’ bibles over the years in the Vicarage (and previously in the Curatage, the Ordinandage and the Engineerage). Top reads have included The Jesus Storybook Bible, the Big Picture Story Bible, the Praise Bible (sourced in a secondhand shop) and (when they were very little) The God Loves Me Bible. For a while the Engineer was very keen on the Veggietales Bible Storybook, and whilst I wouldn’t recommend it for teaching kids great doctrine or anything, his enjoyment more than made up for the struggles we had with reading about Dave and the Giant Pickle repeatedly. I think he learnt to read his first words from that book. As I recall, they were ‘God’ (yay!) and ‘Dave’ (not such a yay for that one).

Our kids love variety so we are always hunting for the newest best bible. All our kids can read a ‘proper’ bible now and the Engineer had been using an International Children’s Bible and the excellent XTB bible reading notes. He’d just finished a set of notes when I went on my conference the other week, where there was a hard-to-resist bookstall where they were selling The Gospel Story Bible.

I had a look through and decided that the 7yo Engineer might enjoy reading through this for a change from his bible notes. The way in which the bible stories are told pointing to Christ are so helpful. And each story comes with a few questions to help the child clarify what they’ve read and learnt. And this evening the Engineer skipped into the kitchen just before bedtime and told me he’d read three bible stories all by himself. He was so excited to communicate all that he’d learnt about the plagues and the Passover.

That’s a winner of a bible for me. Which bible do your kids read or have read to them? Do you have a family favourite?

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Bishops Got Talent: Selecting the Next Archbishop?

Posted in Church, Faith, Fun, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on 16 March, 2012| 4 Comments »

Since Rowan Williams stepped down this afternoon from the hardest job in the Church of England (or maybe not, parish life is just a microcosm of the Anglican Communion tbh), Twitter has been awash with suggestions of who will succeed him.

It was suggested that rather than the Crown Nominations Commission we could have a Bishops Got Talent show, with possible candidates competing for the post. This leads to the fun possibility of theme weeks:

  • Sermon week
  • Sitting through tedious civic occasions looking interested week
  • Dealing with the media week (including a round of ‘explaining the basics of the Christian faith to most reporters and especially sub-editors’)
  • Eyebrow styling week
  • Mitre modelling week

It also led to speculation about who could be on the panel. They must obviously conform to the required stereotypes of benign expert/stroppy upstart/foxy chick/joker. First suggestions (who do not necessarily have to be alive or real) include:

  • St John
  • Archdeacon Robert (from Rev)
  • Ellie (the Headteacher from Rev)
  • Adrian Plass.

I’d love to hear your ideas for possible rounds and those you have for alternative panel members.

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The Vicar on Video

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on 14 March, 2012| 6 Comments »

We’ve slowly been souping up our rather basic church website over the past few months. The best thing we did was get our kind computer-literate friend to change it to a WordPress platform, which was familiar to us from blogging. The old site used Joomla and was just too difficult for us to get our heads around.

We try and update the site a couple of times a week to keep it live, and it seems that people are beginning to use it a little. Most of our congregation aren’t on the internet, but we think that the website is especially important for those who aren’t yet in church.

In our quest to make the site friendly and useful, a video of the Vicar has now been produced by Capable, a church member, and Compassion, who is a great friend of our congregation. I think they’ve done a great job and we’re hoping it’ll be a good introduction for people visiting the website. At least they won’t be surprised by the Vicar’s Scottish accent!

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By Faith

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 12 March, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Starting next Sunday for the rest of Lent (and a bit afterwards) the Vicar will be taking us through a few chapters of Hebrews in his sermons. So this, of course, will be our theme song to accompany the preaching. It’s also one we sang on my conference last week, so it’s sort of in my head anyway.

I’ll have to listen online next week as I’m in Junior Church for a second week. But I think we might try and sing along to this song in the Vicarage at teatime so those of us who’ll not be in the main body of the kirk during the sermon will have a little taste at what everyone else is up to.

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Devotion

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , on 8 March, 2012| 2 Comments »

Back from deepest Leicestershire and feeling rather spacey after three nights in a strange bed with unfamiliar pillows. But on my home computer so able to share the lovely song and video from Stuart Townend that we saw at the Ministers’ Wives conference. It’s not called ‘This is my Devotion’ as I thought it might be but ‘Christ be in My Waking’. Which is what I want, even when I’m feeling rather out of it after being away.

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Encouragement

Posted in Church, tagged , , , , , , on 7 March, 2012| 1 Comment »

I’ll have lots to blog next week when I get back from Hothorpe Hall where I’m on the Proclamation Trust’s Minister’s Wives conference. I’m being very well fed on a diet of Ezekiel, Luke, tales of minister’s wives from history, seafood pasta and cake.  I didn’t bring a laptop, so I’m using the steamdriven conference centre computer and I don’t want to spend too much time online. There are too many lovely people here to talk to and a wonderful bookstall and space to pray and think.

I was going to upload a great song video we watched yesterday but the Jurassic system isn’t letting me show it to you. So instead, I’m going to commend Open Doors to you and their campaign to get those who are able to write letters of encouragement to Christians around the world who are suffering for their faith. We are writing some this afternoon here at Hothorpe. It’s such an encouragement for us to be here that we want to share some of that with brothers and sisters in far more difficult situations.

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Possible Solution for Musicianless Churches?

Posted in Church, Fun, tagged , , , , , , on 5 March, 2012| 1 Comment »

A friend recently linked to this excellent video on Facebook and suggested it might be the solution in small churches where musicians are thin on the ground. We’ve been blessed recently by musicians playing in our services and replacing the cds and midi files, but one (Rocky, our Ministry Trainee) is leaving in the summer, so we’re praying for reinforcements. If you know any musicians, or even some helpful robots, do please send them our way…

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