We had a very interesting weekend at church. The Must Be More Festival turned out to be an interesting start to the coming church session. I pray that we are on the right tracks.

At present we’re in the midst of a capacity building exercise. This calls us to look at the way we organise ourselves so that we can become more effective as an organisation. I’ll tell you more about this in the coming weeks.

We have come to the conclusion that we need to be continually reviewing the way we structure ministry. The picture of scaffolding on the left is one that I saw in India last year. It was pretty dangerous looking, made up of pieces of wood tied together with rope. Got me thinking that while the structure needs to be flexible it also requires to have an element of security about it. However the structure cannot in the end determine the shape and the purpose of the organisation. The shape and vision must determine the structure required to support its function.

Part of our vision in St Andrew’s is making church relevant for those with young families this  is one of our priorities as a church. The Children’s Holiday Club was well attended last week and it was great to see many of the children and their parents return to church for the Sunday service. We need to be reflecting on the right things to do that will keep attracting the children to worship. I’ve noticed thatwe don’t always get the same children eturning i the following weeks to the Holiday Club. the question is do we need to change the way we do Children’s ministry?

Got me thinking about how we do church at the present. At one time we used to have three services on a Sunday. An early morning one which was especially focused on young families. We ran it for nearly seven years. Eventually we merged the two services. Sunday morning last week was a great service focused on the children, it got me thinking about how we might further develop such services in the future. I must say a big thank you to Craig Hannah and his team for doing such a great job.

This week I’ve started working on a series of sermons centred around the book of Nehemiah. I think it is going to be very useful to us all as we consider this winter what is going to be the way forward for us as a congregation. We have had a group looking at the refurbishment of our present building to help us bring it up to standard for the 21st century. We also have a group as i mentioned before looking at the way we organise our administration. The shape of all this is determined by our vision.

I’m looking forward to exploring all this with the congregation. Nehemiah is all about rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. There will be lessons for us all to learn as we consider the walls that we need to rebuild in our ministry and the ones we need to tear down in order to fulfill our ministry to be a local congregation with a global calling. We’d love to hear from others who are going through a restructuring. there is much no doubt we can learn.

We have an internal  broadsheet in the Co f S that is printed for ministers. Its an opportunity for ministers to share among themselves ideas and issues that are troubling them. Recently at least two ministers have written about their belief that there is no real theological underpinning in the Church Without Walls Movement. In the May issue one such minister questioned whether CWW was radical enough in its approach. He seemed to think that it was a centrally driven programme. Nothing of course could be further from the truth. It calls for the empowering of the local church. The CWW report came out of a great deal of theological thought and prayer. It calls the Church to follow Jesus.  This in itself is a radical and challenging mindset to adopt. Perhaps though for some, to talk of following Jesus is too simplistic. Perhaps they  want a bundle of teaching that is heavy and burdensome.  However Jesus told us ” My yoke is easy and my burden is light” The wonderful thing about the gospel is that it is a call to live in freedom knowing that the one who will judge you is the one who has saved you. Calvin in his Institutes, reminds us that repentance can only come about in the heart of the sinner  because of the great hope that salvation brings.  To repent without hope is to miss the grace and love of God. The cross always points to the hope beyond the suffering.  Paul speaks of this in the Book of Philippians. So CWW  calls the church to allow itself to be shaped by the Gospel and encourages us all to reflect at great length on the doctrine of justification by faith and to live lives that embrace the Grace of God.  It reminds us that the church needs to become the “Friend of Sinners” following the example of Jesus and calls us to consider what it means to be  a church shaped by friendship.To be a church that lives in  and for the companionship of Jesus. It also calls the church be become engaged with the culture around but not to be “squeezed into its mould” as Eugene Peterson suggests in his translation. Finally the report calls the church to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in allowing the Gifts of the Spirit to shape its ministry and mission. This then is to invite local congregations to engage with Ephesians 4 and begin to consider what it means to “grow up into the full stature of Christ.” The report further encourages the church not to forsake the call to stand for justice which the prophet Micah speaks of, but rather  to engage with the issues of power and powerlessness with in the church and her structures and also within our society at large.. These to my mind are just a few of the theological issues that underpin the work and vision of CWW. The second minister in this months edition believes that many Church of Scotland ministers are afraid to engage their congregations with weighty theological issues. Indeed he believes that he is one of the few ministers who has been published in recent years and bemoans the fact that he believes that ministers are not reading substantial christian material. How he comes to know all these facts is beyond me. One more thing, I was somewhat saddened by this minister who wrote in the June edition, he was pointing  out the moats in the eyes of his fellow ministers,  yet omitting to see that he could be accused  of having a very large plank called “intellectual superiority” sticking out of his own eye. I have come to the conclusion that it is not our intellectual rigor that will win men and women into the Kingdom, although that is important and must not be dismissed.  It is  surely the rigor of our daily lives that count. It is the epistles of our lives and actions  that are being read by the watching world and not necessarily the epistles of our minds. So where is the theological underpinning in CWW? We’re pinned to JESUS! By the Grace of God  nothing will separate us, for he has broken down the walls of partition reconciling us to God.

Friday proved to be a very cold and windy day here in Bo’ness, as I think it was all around Scotland. However, I’m glad to report that a good number of ministers got out on the streets and took the church to the people. I was delighted that my colleague Len Bennett who is a Pastor in the Apostolic Church came up to join us for our Good Friday Service. Len, was  carrying a cross he made over 20 years ago he had  70×7 printed on the cross and this he tells me has been a talking point over the years.  As we walked along the street together with  the cross we found people looking on, wondering what it was all about. We ended up standing outside TESCO for nearly an hour. Around 15 people took the bread and the wine and I believe that everyone who participated found the experience to be meaningful. I also ended up catching up with some people who I hadn’t seen around church for a number of years.I’m glad we did it and I’m also glad that I shared in the walk with the cross.  I think there is a whole new ministry that more of us could develop if we were more prepared to take the symbols of the faith out to the people on the streets.I was delighted to hear that John Sentamu once again this Easter has been baptising people in the open air. Perhaps this is something that we in the Church of Scotland can learn from. How cool would it be if we  could organise a large baptismal service in the open air for new believers? A kind of Church Without Walls Service. We could gather new communicants from all over the country who have never been baptised to profess their faith.Perhaps that is something we could all work towards for next Easter. It would be great to hear comments on this idea. I really think there is more milage to Church Without Walls than we might think!

Once again we used the idea of a Passover meal this year to help engage us all in the significance of the Passion. Putting the crucifixion in the context of the Old Testament story of the Exodus, is to place Jesus as the pascal lamb. It is to help us also understand the significance of Jesus being called the Lamb of God. The pascal lamb was to save the nation of Israel and bring them out of slavery.I believe we have a responsibility today to try and explain the significance of the  cross to people today. Those who are in the church and those outside. For many it is something that is a complete mystery, indeed for many it is a complete absurdity. Hence the need to not simply pass over the Passover but use he Passover to explain the context and meaning of the death of Jesus. The sacrifice of Jesus was a much more inclusive and universal idea.  It had to have a significance for his time and the people who he moved among, but it also has a significance for the whole of history. His death was to save the world and bring us all out of slavery to a new freedom. What happened at Calvary all those years ago still impacts the way people live and has a significance influence on millions of lives . As I’m writing this I’m watching on BBC the latest version of the Passion. Crucifixion is such a dreadful experience. All this calls us to reflect on the meaning and the purpose of the death of Jesus. Here we are two thousand years on and still his death is talked about and made into film material.The challenge for the Christian church today is to explain the death of Jesus so that it makes sense to 21st century people, who know nothing of the Jewish background or theology surrounding sacrifice and forgiveness. One thing I’m certain of is that forgiveness is still very much part of the agenda in the lives of 21st century people.

Here I am again trying to get into the swing of making regular posts. Today was an interesting day. I was at an Emerging Church Conference at the ICC in Glasgow. I found it interesting and frustrating. The term “Emerging Church” is being used today in the Christian Community to describe worshipping communities that are seeking to engage with people who lost interest in what we might call traditional understandings of church. Or who may never have been there in the first place. There has been a whole host of books written on the subject. Indeed the term itself seems to be defined by so many in different ways.

I was surprised to discover that the Rupert Murdoch owns Zondervan one of the big Christian publishing Houses. I was further intrigued to discover that Zondervan have taken out the copyright on the term Emerging Church. I started to google this tonight and her is what I discovered” Media magnate Rupert Murdoch bought Zondervan for $56.7 million or $13.50 per share a few years ago. Zondervan’s stock jumped $4.25 per share on the announcement.Murdoch, an international world citizen who started in Australia, was building a media empire via his company, News Corp. The following month, the tycoon Murdoch gobbled up the nation’s largest circulation magazine, TV Guide, also Seventeen, and Good Food magazines plus the Daily Racing Form on a $3 billion cash binge which was the second largest media deal ever. The seller was Walter Annenberg, 80-year-old Jewish publishing partriarch, who privately owned Triangle Publications whose lucrative national magazine distribution business takes not only their magazines to newsstands but also many others including Reader’s Digest.”In recent years Murdoch has built a media empire worldwide with revenues over $10 billion (64 percent in U.S.A., 19 percent in United Kingdom and 17 percent in Australia and the Pacific Basin). Holdings include Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., Fox Broadcasting Co., Fox Television Stations, Inc., Harper-Collins, TV Guide, and FSI (multi-page free standing inserts each week in 390 local Sunday newspapers). Also owned in the United Kingdom are The Times, The Sunday Times, Today, Sun and News of the World. These account for one-third of all national newspapers sold in the U.K. market with the latter two having the largest daily and Sunday circulations respectively in the English-speaking world. Also 50 percent owned is British Sky Broadcasting Ltd., the leading U.K. direct-to-home satellite television broadcasting service. News Corp. is also the largest newspaper publisher in Australia.

The final piece of information which I found even more disturbing is the company that publishes so much soft porn also publishes the NIV Bible. So what is this Emerging Church all about is it no more than publicity brand name made up by a publisher to sell books. Have a look at Urban Expressions web page in Possilpark Glasgow. There is little doubt that those involved in this movement are are seriously committed to Christ. Nonetheless the other side of it via the Murdoch empire leaves me with serious questions.

I was sharing my frustration with Peter Neilson tonight on the phone, and he made an interesting comment. Suggesting that maybe we should be talking about the church that is seeking to engage with the emerging culture. I realise that is what I’ve been trying to do all my life. Hence in the 60s we had a rock band and a cafe style outreach church. I suppose the difference is that we saw this as outreach not church. When perhaps all along it was authentic church.

I like what John Drane was saying today about the importance of theology being rooted in the practice of daily life rather than being kept to the seclusion of the the ivory tower inhabited by the academic. In reality I’m not sure if real dynamic theology has ever been ivory tower bound. I remember my Professor of Systematic Theology John Zizziulas telling us that unless our doctrine was rooted in our every day practical acts of living and behaviour it wasn’t worth believing.

Well tomorrow I’ll be sharing my doctrine of the Kingdom with the MSP at the Scottish Parliament. I’m going to be centering my reflection around the idea of the lost child that is in all of us. Depending how it goes I might even post it on the blog tomorrow. One thing I’m sure of Murdoch will hold the copyright on the gospel or does he? Now there’s something you might like to comment on.

  I must confess that I was somewhat astonished to read about the Pope offering Indulgences to the faithful. I thought this aspect of the Roman Catholic Faith had somewhat disappeared. However it would appear not to be so. The following article outlines the Pope’s offer of reduced punishment in Purgatory if pilgrimages are made to Lourdes during a specific period in the year 2008. It sounds quite bizarre to me. Hear is the article . This got me thinking about Indulgences and how it was this very topic that brought about the Reformation. Tom Ascol writes an interesting article on the topic, its worth reading. The point I think the Pope has missed is that we are saved not by our own actions but by the Grace of God revealed to us in Christ. ( But I’m sure he must know this? ) Further, our acts of gratitude to God should they be pursued and promoted like some commercial deal? You know do this and you’ll get one free! How naive does the Pope think people are? What power does any human being have over the eternal destiny of a soul. For me this is the very topic that the much maligned film The Golden Compass is exploring . (The danger of power when it is concentrated within individuals and also Institutions, whether they be religious or atheistic.)I don’t wish to be seen as bashing the Roman Catholics, but the view I have expressed, I suppose is the reason that I am one who stands on this side of the Reformation. I’ll stick to Jesus alone and I’ll trust his death on the cross for my eternal salvation.