Kid’s Church At A&O
At Alpha & Omega primary school, Kampala, they have a church service once a week for all the kids, which the Australian team lead when they were there. I got to be a fly on the wall for one of the services…
National Youth Assembly 2008
I’m about to hop on a train up to Dundee for the weekend to attend the Church of Scotland’s annual National Youth Assembly. I’m going up in a work capacity, but am personally very excited about this: it’s not everyday you find a local conference (ie in the UK – there are a couple in the USA) that is aiming to really make use of web2.0 technologies as a major part of the conference. The organisers are hoping to use Twitter to facilitate real-time dialogue and feedback during sessions, as well as making use of blogging, flickr and wiki tools, both over the weekend and after, to foster ongoing dialogue. It’ll be very interesting to see how this works out in practice! For now, check out the links below for the official NYA2008 wiki & blog.
PS. Did I mention I’ll be staying here? I love my job!
Alpha & Omega Primary School
A few of my favourite snaps from my time in Alpha & Omega Primary School, Kampala, with the Australian team from Camden Uniting church. Lots more shots on flickr too.
“Youth Advocate Volunteer”
So, today I started work in the Christian Aid Glasgow office! Not too much going on today to be honest, lots of orientation and introductions and reading the 20-odd emails already in my inbox. It feels great to be starting out, there have been a lot of mental shifts in the past week or so, actually getting my head around this whole ‘real job’ thing. My official title, as I discovered today, is “Youth Advocate Volunteer”, which pretty much means my remit is to enthuse & support the 16-25 age range to get involved in campaigning on issues of poverty & justice. Pretty cool, eh? I’m really excited about this opportunity to do something I love, and be supporting others to get involved in it too.
Changing Everything So Everything Remains The Same
Last week I got to hear Pete Rollins speak at Greenbelt, on the topic of “Changing Everything So Everything Remains The Same”. I thought I’d post up some of my notes for you! I just finished reading his new book, The Fidelity Of Betrayal, which looks at a lot of these comments more in depth. Love to hear your thoughts on it too?
* Deeply suspicious of the popular movement to be like the early church again.
* Not trying to succeed where others failed, but trying to fail in better ways.
* We shouldn’t try to fulfill our dreams, but to find new ones. Our dreams reflect the scope and limitations of our theology.
* We find justification after the fact – retroactive justification.
* If you can reason the revolution, then its not a revolution, its in old wineskins.
* The heretic is the one who steps out of the dominant system to create something new.
* (Usually) The best way to silence someone is to give them a place within the system – eg the Franciscan order in the Catholic church.
* “Transgressions that actually solidify the structures”
* “The God of the gaps” – when we don’t know the answer to something, we pull God in – eg the beginning of the world.
* Humans always want to externalise our actions so that we don’t have to take responsibility for it.
* Gods ‘no place’ becomes ‘every place’ – omnipotence – Bonhoeffer.
* Christian prayer – that you no longer believe in the resurrection, but you become the site of a resurrection. Prayer as a mode of being.
* By renouncing heaven, they find heaven; by renouncing an other-worldly salvation we find our salvation here.
* You can never colonise salvation.
* The new expressions are ways of refusing leadership, ways of forcing the responsibility back on ourselves.
* A form of atheism is essential to our faith.
* Our faith is a meganarrative, not a metanarrative – it is a lived truth.
* Protest becomes the heat valve – we protest so we don’t actually have to change our lives.
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