conference on climate change

From 7-18 December 2009 in Copenhagen delegates from 192 countries will meet to discuss and come to an agreement on:

• a new treaty to follow the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012;
• new targets for industrialised nations to reduce carbon emissions;
• new targets for poorer nations to limit greenhouse gases;

In preparation for that there was a meeting here in London last night and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change attended a public rally to answer questions on the current state of negotiations in the lead up to Copenhagen.

There were questions from the public who attended the event as well as from live international links from Kenya.  Abdi informed us that the cycle of droughts has gone from 11 years to every two years and is now followed by floods.  As a result 80% of live stock have been lost and people are struggling to feed themselves and their families.

There was also received an audio message from Papua New Guinea where islands will have to be evacuated.  And, in Bangladesh we heard how 20 million would be forced to migrate as 17% of the country would eventually be under water.

The messages were strong and clear. For those of us in the west reducing our carbon emissions is a lifestyle choice. For developing countries, it is a matter of life and death.

The plea was for all of us to reduce our emissions. The call to sacrificial living should neither be a difficult nor alien concept for the christians.  If nothing else, we would be doing the very thing we were created for have dominion over the earth (Gen 1:28).  For some that might evoke images of tyranny but that would be going too far. We are called to be like a shepherd who cares for, tends and feeds his animals.

There are few animals in the centre of London but, what ever takes place in the middle of the city has an impact on the animal kingdom and on the entire planet so I’m going to do everything I can to reduce my emissions and contribute to UK carbon reductions in a global effort to save the lives of people on the other side of the world.  I hope that you will join in too.

#beatcancer hashtag challenge

This month is breast cancer awareness month and tweeters were challenged to make #BCawareness a trending tag.  It might have worked except PayPal then  teamed up with #beatcancer to get it to the number one position in trending tweets in one day.  Paypal will pay 1 cent for every tweet, blog post and facebook update with the hashtag #beatcancer… and it worked.

If you haven’t yet joined in, you have 1hr 30 to get in on the act (from the time this was posted).

word of the day

I have been trying to read Jürgen Moltmann’s work for some time so picked up ‘God for a Secular Society’. I have no idea if this is a good or bad place to start but I did get confused half way through chapter 3. Not because I find his writing difficult but because I stumbled over a word I’d never come across before.

Moltmann uses the word ‘diaconal’ three times in two paragraphs, making both incomprehensible if you don’t know what it means.

Right about now I am giving thanks to God for the dictionary App I downloaded from iTunes. ‘diaconal’is an adjective and it means, pertaining to a deacon.

My work here us done.

need an uplift?

• all though the world is full of suffering, it is full also with overcoming it – Helen Keller
• If you create an act, you create a habit. If you create a habit, you create a character. If you create a character, you create a destiny – Andre Maurois
• I had obviously crossed some line while talking with my wife because suddenly she was steaming made. Without coming right out and asking what I’d said wrong, I tried a Dr Phil trick: “How could this conversation have gone better?”  She replied, “I could have had it with a different person.”
• You can give without loving,  but you can never love without giving – anonymous
• Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago – Bernard Berenson, 1865-1959
• We didn’t lose the game; we just ran out of time – Vince Lombardi
• We don’t really break the laws of God, we break ourselves against them.  We do not break the law of gravitation by jumping from a skyscraper, we break our necks – Vance Havner
• Try not to become a success, but rather try to become a man of value – Albert Einstein
• Not the maker of plans and promises, but rather the one who offers faithful service in small matters. This is the person who is most likely to achieve  what is good and lasting – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
• When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life – Anna Quindlen

how not to win the heart if a community

There are plenty of good examples out there of how a church can positively impact a community. Pastors who have spent years in ministry, trodden the path and learned from their mistakes have written books about it. Seminarians spend time doing courses in it (or at least classes). Some might even dedicated research papers and dissertations to the subject. Such is its importance, whole theologies have even been dedicated to it. And, of course, the web is full of blogs, webinars and sites telling us how to do it plus, there are plenty of good examples out there.

Doing church well is important not least because, in the process, we are creating an image of God when we build a church community. And, good or bad, that image will be left with some for a very long time and for others that image may never be shifted.

So yesterday morning as I read the free newspaper as I made a train journey through London, I was horrified to learn that after an 18 year legal battle, a couple have had to sell their home to foot a £230,000 repair bill for their neighbouring church. They don’t own the land the church is on and they aren’t living in the vicarage. They just happened to have inherited a house that, under a 16th century law, gave them liability for chancel repairs.

I’d like to think that the Parochial Church Council gave them all the help the need to fight their legal battle. I’d also like to think that the Parochial Church Council are doing all they can to ensure that this couple’s future isn’t being jeopardised for the sake of a church building. It is the people that make a church and not the building and, protecting and repairing a building at the cost of the welfare of others is no way to win the heart of a community.

Read the story here.

prayer

This is a prayer that we recited at our recent women pastor’s retreat.  It spoke directly into my life and how I have been feeling.  I hope that you find something in it that you can relate to.

Unfortunately I am unable to give the origins.  If you know, leave a comment.

Lord Jesus Christ

You South the silence of the desert

And said to your disciples

“Come away by yourselves and rest awhile.”

We would also take time to withraw

We want to enter the solitude that will lead to greater clarity,

Greater insight and greater stillness of soul

God our keeper and our companion

We come in need of encouragement

In need of refreshment

In need of forgiveness

In need of new strength

Some of us are weary in body

Some of us are weary in mind

Some of us are tired in spirit

We come with stresses and angers

We come with sorrows and anxieties

We come with excitements, plans and preoccupations

We come with broken confidence that needs repairing

We come with pride that needs piercing

We come with deep hurts that need healing

And wounded visions that need restoring

You have promised your presence

We believe you hear, you see and you know

Open our ears to hear what you what you have to say to us

Give us the vision to see with the eyes of the heart

Lord we pray for each other,

May we know deep in our souls that we are accepted by our

Friends and colleagues here.

May we each feel your touch through each other.

In the name of Jesus Christ we come to you now. Amen

pointless joke

Q. What’s the difference between Bird ‘Flu and Swine ‘Flu?

A. For one you need Tweetment and for the other Oinkment.

jurgen moltmann

Following the recent conversation with Jurgen Moltmann which was tweeted about here hosted by Emergent Village, I thought that it was more than high time that I got around to reading his book, God For a Secular Society, that has been sitting in my living room for the past few months.

I am looking forward to it after the excitement of seeing tweets with the hashtag #moltmann.

I don’t know what I am letting myself in for, if I will enjoy him as much as his supporters or if I will find his theology questionable.  One way or the other, I hope that I will have the time or the mind to blog about it here.

audoboo recording of women in seminary

In case you didn’t read my earlier posts about the women pastors convention and, in case you missed my tweets about the audioBoos that I recorded there, you can listen to them again here.

I had hoped to have the opportunity to speak to more women but it time was short and the wifi was overwhelmed so I was unable to record and post anything more than these three boos.

Do listen and leave our comments or get involved!

Former seminarian transitioning to ministry
Listen!

One seminarian’s experience
Listen!

Helping women seminarians – book proposal
Listen!

memories from women pastors’ conference

mooreclose

We had a list of good speakers at the recent women pastors convention held on the campus of my seminary, all who had given time, thought and prayer to what they were going to say.

I tweeted from the convention some memorable quotes but, if you are not on twitter, you wouldn’t have seen them so I will repeat some here.  I will also repeat some of the challenges that we were presented with.  Maybe you will find them useful.

Chris Oberg

• Be a woman of purpose
• Write a personal mission statement that is simple, short and memorable.  Recite it daily
• We are often our own distractors by the burdens, levels of excellence and expectations we place on ourselves
• The church doesn’t need confused, sad, angry women to lead.  It needs women who know their mission

Dr Duda

• There are three women in the book of Esther who have a unique message for us today and we need to hear it and live it
• women will encounter men who have an agenda for their lives
• There are women like Vashti all around us today who know it is not right for men to treat them  the way they do.
• Embrace a theology of healing and grace.  Traditional theology measures things as they are. A redemptive theology describes how things should be and how they are in God’s mind
• What seemed to be a dream turned out to be hard work
• If God has gifted you and called you to lead then, for God’s sake, lead

Helen Pearson

• Don’t confuse what we want with what God wants
• Don’t confuse others’ expectations and our mission
• Be still and ask for the gift of discernment to know what belongs to the church board, to God and to ourselves
• Fill in the blank; ______is what I came out to do.