Author: Leighton Carr

5 Questions to lead a bible study

Eddie Gibbs, guru to church thinkers worldwide, came across a small community in Australia that used a simple set of questions to guide their corporate study of the Bible. A particular passage would be printed on an A4 sheet of paper as most people didn’t have a Bible, and printing it out put everyone on a level playing field.\r\n\r\nI’ve used these five questions to great effect with Christian and un-Christian groups alike.\r\n\r\nThey are:\r\n\r\nWhat did you like about that passage?\r\n\r\nWhat didn’t you like about the passage?\r\n\r\nWhat didn’t you understand in that passage?\r\n\r\nWhat God say to you out of the passage?\r\n\r\nWhat are you going to do about it?

Clarke in Photos – A New Book on Extraction and Refining of Oil

In yet another attempt to make progress on promoting the sculpture by Geoffrey Clarke I am privileged to own,  I have this week published the catalogue of photographs taken from the work.\r\n\r\nIt’s an idea, anyway.\r\n\r\nSee here or open this window:\r\n\r\n

… as Apples are to Apple Pie

There’s a story, probably apocryphal, about a professor at an Ivy League university – Harvard? Yale? – who asks some of the brightest and best students on the planet “What’s in an apple pie?”\r\n\r\nThe students didn’t want to be thought dumb so they shouted out:\r\n\r\n“Cinnamon” … “Raisins” … “Nutmeg” … “Sugar” … “Butter” (clever one that, because you can only infer there’s butter because there’s pastry: you can’t see the butter: very clever).\r\n\r\nNo one shouted out …\r\n\r\n… “Apples”. \r\n\r\nThat story came to mind when I thought back over a conversation held in a hospital room last week with the pastor of a large growing church. Now in his 80th year and still ministering every week, this pastor was musing about what the future held, about perhaps taking over a dysfunctional church and turning it around. A new challenge.\r\n\r\nThere was definitely a glint in the eye. At his age (79), he said, with somewhat lower energy levels, if he was to leave his church now he reckoned he could turn a problem church around in two years.\r\n\r\nMaybe three.\r\n\r\n”How?” I asked, “What would you do?”\r\n\r\n”Preach” he said.\r\n\r\nOK, he’s possibly in the top five preachers I’ve ever heard … in the world, that is. But even so!\r\n\r\nBut then I thought that I don’t know of any growing, confident, theologically literate church where there isn’t … great preaching.\r\n\r\nSo to fill in the blanks in life’s comprehension test, what this pastor was saying was this:\r\n

Preaching is to Church as Apples are to Apple Pie

\r\nI don’t think that’s the whole story, but it’s definitely worth talking about.

Conversations you never hear (1) – with a small church that wants a vicar

Here’s an opening line to a conversation you never hear.\r\n\r\n“You can have your church buildings, or you can have a vicar, but you can’t have both”\r\n\r\nWe’re in a strange world where it’s easier to remove clergy than sell buildings. Two reasons for this immediately come to mind. First, there’s a belief that keeping the buildings (up)together keeps the congregation together, and this combination of buildings and people IS the church. Second, it’s simply easier for a diocese to reorganise to reduce staff than to sell assets. Presumably this is done in the hope that one day effective leadership will grow the church back to full occupancy and full staff numbers.\r\n\r\nBut as my bishop says, the first task of leadership is to define reality.\r\n\r\nIf there’s a small church, getting smaller, where no-one has come to faith for a decade, and without the income to support the buildings let alone a full time member of the clergy, then something has to give.\r\n\r\nIt’s reality.\r\n\r\nBut of course a small church, like any church, wants it all. It’s had it in the past, and in it’s own collective conciousness the past is the model for the future.\r\n\r\nBut wouldn’t it be a great conversation starter, in answer to the demand for a new vicar, to offer one or the other, the buildings or the staff?\r\n\r\nIt’ll never happen of course, but if it did I suspect the conversation on its own might start to radically redefine a church.

Seeds in the pocket?

This week I read Mark chapter 4. The parables of seeds.\r\n\r\nThere was enough in the first parable (“… of the sower”) to keep me puzzling for a long time …\r\n\r\n(are ALL parables really like this as says Jesus? and did Jesus’ theology came fully formed, day one, sermon one, or did it develop over three years? and so on)\r\n\r\n… so that I almost missed the second parable as I got up to leave -\r\n\r\n-  “… of the man with seeds in his pocket”.\r\n\r\nThe story is simple enough. A man takes seeds out of his pocket and throws them to the ground. He goes home, goes to bed, gets up, goes to bed, gets up, and guess what, the seeds grow. How? He doesn’t know. The seeds, and the earth, together, produce life – shoots, stalks, harvest.\r\n\r\nUnlike in the first parable, the man in the second parable is just a man, not a farmer, so there’s no confusion that it’s the seed and the soil that do the work, not the skill of the man.\r\n\r\nThe man just throws the seeds out of his pocket.\r\n\r\nWhatever else you might think this story shows, we could probably agree that seeds in the pocket are no good. Seeds have to be in the ground.\r\n\r\nSo …\r\n\r\nThis week I have been throwing seeds out of my pockets.\r\n\r\nA letter here. A meeting there. A phone call. A conversation. A prayer. \r\n\r\nIt turns out that my pockets are full of seeds. It was a surprise. I usually spend so long trying to grow trees in my pockets that I couldn’t see the seeds for the trees, and hadn’t realised that there were other seeds to sow, and that …\r\n\r\n… the Kingdom of God works this way.\r\n\r\nAnd for more on fruit see Seasonal Fruit

Candle Power

Remember the seventies?\r\n\r\nPower cuts and blackouts. Eating by torchlight and candles.\r\n\r\nIt was great to have a new excuse for not handing in homework.\r\n\r\nJohn’s gospel records Jesus saying “in me there is enough light to live by” and yet so many Christians experience their lives like a family huddled around a candle during a power cut.\r\n\r\nBut LIGHT!\r\n

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  • Light reveals things previously unseen.

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  • Light stops us bumping into things that hurt.

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  • Light reduces the frustration of searching for things you know should be right there in front of you.

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  • Favourite things look better in the light.

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  • Colours come out of the shadows as the light is turned up.

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\r\nWhy wouldn’t we live in the light?\r\n\r\nAnd yet John the Apostle, who obviously pondered this question over a long lifetime, also said that we prefer the darkness to the light.\r\n\r\nWhy?\r\n\r\nBetter the darkness you know?\r\n\r\nBetter the devil you know?\r\n\r\nCome into the ‘light to live by’.

Seasonal Fruit

1st October.\r\n\r\nNew month. New cycle of psalms.\r\n\r\nThe Coverdale translation of the Psalms in the Book of Common Prayer is tolerable (just about, to my modern mind) because of the benefits of pattern, structure and rhythm the daily division of the Psalter offers to my life.\r\n\r\nEvery day, for thirty days, morning and evening, the Psalms packaged up to be read in a month.\r\n\r\nOn a month with 31 days I read the Ordinal – the ordination service – on the 31st, which follows straight after the Psalms. It’s good to remind myself what God, my Bishop and the church requires of me.\r\n\r\nBut today, the 1st October, as I turned back to Psalm 1, I paused at the Commination, a little known and hardly used public liturgy describing sins and judgements found in the Bible. It’s been a while since I read it and so this morning I spent a few minutes going through it, I have to say reasonably quickly because it’s not the most enjoyable text in the book.\r\n\r\nAfter the initial introduction and responses, the Commination doesn’t hold back on painting a pretty bleak picture of God’s judgement. There are no paragraphs, just one great block of unrelenting text. And about a fifth of the way through it says this:\r\n

‘For now is the axe put to the root of the trees,\r\n so that every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit\r\n is hewn down, and cast into the fire.’

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That goes to the heart of the fear and guilt many Evangelicals face when they reflect on their life.

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Fruitlessness.

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How many times have I sat under a sermon where the preacher has expected action on my part – where action equals fruit – from ‘winning the lost’ to serving the poor. And yet most days are just – ordinary days. Up, eat, work, home, eat, TV, bed. Sometimes a home group or PCC meeting (do they count?).

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The good pastor doesn’t leave the congregation without hope, but turns the page from the Commination to Psalm 1 to paint the whole picture.

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‘Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the way of sinners …\r\n But his delight is in the law of the Lord…\r\n And he shall be like a tree planted by the waterside:\r\n that will bring forth his fruit in due season.\r\n His leaf shall not wither:\r\n and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.’

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Of course, we remember, fruit is seasonal.

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Nowhere in the garden do we have continual fruit. For two years our blackcurrent bush was fruitless while it bedded in but our apple tree – in it’s season – was prolific. The strawberries weren’t as fruitful as we had hoped, but in due course some fruit appeared. The chillies were great, the tomatoes were small. And so on.

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That’s not to say that we aren’t surprised sometimes by unseasonal fruit, or that there aren’t other times which we expect to be fruitful that turn out not to be, at least as far as we can see with our limited perspective.

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But we should be encouraged. This psalm reminds us that while waiting for seasonal fruit the tree can be still be thriving. It’s a picture of flourishing, not a picture of a long winter between seasons of fruit.

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And the secret to thriving? Be planted in the right place.

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We may not be able to force out the fruit, but we can take control of our garden.

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And for more on fruit see Seeds in my Pocket