As has become my custom, I like to pick my top tweets of the year. I’m including some of my favourite re-tweets this year too. Nothing like a spot of website maintenance to start the New Year. All links now working as they should, and information is up to date! (Thu Jan 01 08:21:35 +0000 2015) May the love of the Word made flesh enfold us, his joy fill our lives, his peace be in our hearts; this night and always. #compline (Sat Jan 03 21:01:57 +0000 2015) Started my placement at Knaresborough today. Next 4 months joining in the […]

Another activity that’s good for youth group, but also cell group meetings, is the progressive psalm. It requires no significant extra preparation, but is a nice act of corporate worship. It’s a bit like the game “Consequences“, except that a poem of worship to God is built, instead of a silly story. As with everything else on this site, this isn’t my idea, and I take no credit for it – it is an exercise I have taken part in that I found to be a source of blessing and enjoyment. I struggle to identify where I first came across […]

October 31st is an interesting day for the Church. How to engage positively with modern culture while still celebrating the Light? One approach is to subvert the festival to point in another direction altogether (i.e to Jesus). One possibility is to run a Light Party – a celebration of all that is light, with music, games, and sweets. The idea being it’s even better than dressing up as a zombie and going trick or treating! Another approach is to carve a ‘Christian’ pumpkin – as illustrated here. There is a little poem that goes with it that is a sort […]

Virgin Media just keep on increasing their lowest tier of broadband, at least in this area. This time last year, we have 20Mbps, which was boosted to 50Mbps, and has just been bosted again to 75Mbps. My LAN only runs at 100Mbps! I’m a panelist for broadband speed monitoring, and I quite like the profile of the download and upload speeds over the last 12 months: There’s clearly a bit of instability / variation in the download speeds, as one would expect, which is a shame as it masks the steps up a bit. Still, I like it.

Journalling is, I think, one of the more misunderstood spiritual disciplines. There’s a sense that you have to be super spiritual to keep one, or write 5 sides of A4 a day. Certainly if you were to read the journals of spiritual “heavyweights”, it could be quite a daunting and demoralising experience. It doesn’t need to be a masterpiece though, and the simple act of writing down your thoughts, and occasionally going back to reflect on them is extremely valuable, as well as being an interesting and enjoyable exercise. The first rule is to ditch the guilt. It doesn’t matter […]

In Romans 6:23, Paul says: For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Aside from the obvious quip (“That’s fine, thanks – I’ll sin on a voluntary basis”), I’ve been reflecting on this recently, and my own experience of sin and death. Sin, for the purposes of this post, is anything which is contrary to God’s will, plan, or nature. It must be kept that in mind that God, and Jesus’ sacrifice, are far greater than any sin we could conceieve of, or do – however bad […]

So far in my ordination training, the vast majority of assessed work has been via a written essay, usually of 2,500 words. UPDATE: By the look of this year’s handbook, the citation rules have changed, and we are allowed to use the altogether more sensible Harvard referencing system. The styling also seems a lot more relaxed, with wording like “usually” and “normally”. The only hard requirements seem to be regarding the title page, and what it must show. The point about not doing it manually still stands though. These need to be academic, with – frankly – some very odd […]

Some years ago, I read a book called “Contemplative Youth Ministry”, by Mark Yaconelli. This was while I was a youth group leader, and it is a book that has changed my life and my spirituality. I mentioned it already in the context of Lectio Divino. It’s a book about understanding God’s role, and our role. About moving away from anxiety driven ministry to Spirit lead (and equipped) ministry. It’s about saying “actually, these young people have a deep relationship with God, and maybe I’m here because God wants me to learn from them, and not the other way around. […]

Right – hopefully that’s everything back up and running again! The hack didn’t affect my customised theme (and I’ve restored a clean version from my source-control anyway). I suspect there will be little dark corners that don’t quite work, but the site is looking much like I would expect it to.

My WordPress site apparently got hacked while I was away on holiday (which is why the site went down). I’ve done a fresh installation, but am not going to copy the theme customisations across just yet until I have a chance to make sure nothing’s been compromised!