As I attempted to get myself out of bed this morning, late!! I was struck by the radio broadcast between John Humphrys and Rowan Williams, where Rowan Williams was invited to evangelise John Humphrys and engage with his unanswered existential questions arising out of life experience. It was one of the most profound interviews and spiritual moments that I have heard for a long time. I found it deeply helpful in my slight life of gloom at the moment. I really recommend listening to it.

Listen to it here

Seeking Spiritual Nourishment in preparation for the festival of the incarnation.

... I've been singing this all day, and I don't see why I have to suffer alone.

But it IS quite funny.

Numanuma

Saw Bonobo last night at the Carling Academy in Islington. The music was great – laid back, chilled out, slighlty jazzy with a twist of funk. A good little venue as well, holding about 800, which made for a nice and intimate atmosphere. Aaron posed very well for the camera as the mysterious blue man.

Breathing in believing
Breath,
God’s breath,
God breathed and it was so.
Breathe in breathe out,
Molecules, born of the cosmic dance created,
From the heavenly lights renewed,
Revitalised through mystical exchange of matter.

God breathed, and all creation became so.
From void to infinite distance,
From darkness to incandescent light,
Fanned by the breath of the belovéd

So as God breathed over the waters,
Life entered where the divine played.

And God breathed on those,
Bestowed with the image of God - both equal,
Called to breathe and co-create,
To make, to incarnate, to propagate.

And the God of three was pleased,
With the results of creative breath.
But as one profoundly all-knowingly,
Knew breath and play were not enough,
That God must breathe as those bestowed with mortal breath.
To restore and recreate,
By loosing breath for others,
So that all may breathe well,
To breathe for eternal freedom.

Breath divinely given,
Breath humanly taken,
Breath divinely lost
Breath divinely restored.

But will God breath over our boiling waters and parched land once more?
Will divine breath restore a creation loosing its last breath and sustenance?
Will divine presence draw our world afresh once more?

Ian Mobsby
June 2006.

Anyone fancy doing this... Sounds like real fun... Aaron and I are sort of planning on doing the Mongolian Rally next year - could be a good way to raise some funds for moot :-)

See here for introduction to the urban rhythms series. (10 September 2006)

'Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers...'
Jane Jacobs, The Death And Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Spatially cities are complex, dense and congested. The simple fact of so many people living and working within a limited area means personal space is difficult to find. Thus we have invented devices and modes of behaviour to find refuge in our own spaces. iPod’s, mobiles, PDA’s and laptops provide electronic connections to other spaces or connections to electronic space. We have space to retreat to within the flux of everyday life. These devices allow us to be mobile and anonymous, to get on with our own plans with minimal interruption, to live out our chosen rhythms. They betray our psychological need to somehow deal with all of those people that surround us.

Our desire for personal space is also worked out at a grander, collective urban level. The locks on our front doors help keep out those we do not wish to meet and provide us with sanctuary. Gated communities (an extension of the lock on our front door) similarly keep out those who are unwanted. They allow us to control who we wish to be associated with and who we invite into our space. A building developer will be reluctant to mix up social and private residents for fear of not being able to sell the private space to those who would rather not mix with ‘others’. Market conditions extend further into public spaces to become an extension of corporate branding: going out for a run helps Nike to ‘Run London’ and busking on the Underground is underpinned by a Carling Stage. City life is appropriated for commercial ends. Even our own government exerts a zone of control outside Westminster to keep out unwanted opinion and disturbance.

One of the hallmarks of the city is that it is place where we can be anonymous. We can be here and do our own thing and no one will be concerned. Whilst helping us achieve our own aims they, by definition, dull our awareness of the needs and rhythms of others. Rather than the public spaces of the city being places of freedom, expression and exchange its spaces risk becoming ‘single minded’ rather than ‘open minded’ (Rogers), encroached upon by the rhythms of the market, government and our own psychology.

presence | acceptance | balance | creativity | accountability | hospitality

Image: Private Public, Joe Maila.
tags: rhythm of life, moot, London, urban, urban rhythms, anonymity

I have uploaded a new moot calendar for those of you who use macs (PC version coming next term - I promise). You can download from the column on the left under moot community info. Thanks to Andrew for putting it together.

Came across this beautiful quote in Jean-Luc Marion book La croisée du visible (The Crossing of the Visible).

"There is a natural link between the icon and the face, the icon helps us to decipher every human face as an icon. For every human is an icon. Beneath all masks, all the ashes, every human being, however ravaged he or she may be by his or her destiny, every human carries within him or her the pearl of great price, this hidden face. During the liturgies in an Orthodox church, when the priest censes the people, he censes every individual Christian, and in every individual Christian he censes the possibility, the opportunity, of the icon, in some sense or other, the chance of the ultimate beauty, of true beauty."

Makes me think of the time that I went to a Coptic service in Egypt, during which the priest censed every person (there were about 500 people), at the time I wondered why he did that, and exclaimed that I was not suprised that their services take 4-5 hours, how different that part of the service now seems. Maybe we should organise a moot trip to an Orthodox church?

Last night moot explored the theme of presence in our eucharist... That is being present to God, ourselves and each other. The service formed part of our continuing exploration of the moot rhythm of life. As people left we gave them an LED that was magnetic, as a sign that God was with them (thanks for graffiti research lab for the idea), they should last for 2 weeks which is pretty cool. I also did the homily as well sitting in a nice armchair which was fun...

Presence Homily
Turn on the TV set and flick through the channels and no doubt you will find a talk TV show, Trisha, Jerry Springer and all the rest. As the show unfolds a whole raft of people will share some of their deepest secrets and desires, their hurts and feelings. Bobby left me for Alice, my husband beats me all day, my daughter hasn’t spoken to me in 15 years, my dad isn’t my dad but my uncle… I’m sure you could think of a few more too…

Read the rest here.

I'm so refreshed to read this article by Terry Eagleton laying bare the faults of Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. Faith is hard enough without being misunderstood....and Richard Dawkins has made a career out of slamming Christians for believing things that, well, many of us don't. I'm sure many people in the church and elsewhere do have incoherent and even damaging views of God, even of misidentifying God with the attributes of the Hebrew Satan or the Accuser. This also appears to be Dawkins mistake too. What's so great about this essay is that it takes the debate away from the right or wrongs of the logic about 'God' and thinks about the idea of 'God' itself, a journey so many of us have taken.

I have just finished being involved in the PORVOO consultation on mission, and have enough material going around in my head to last a life time. It was a great privilege to represent the Church of England in these discussions and experiences, and have come away challenged.

I think many of us in the emerging church feel some what misunderstood and excluded, but I have realised that we are just as snotty as everyone else. In the discussions, groups of us went off for site visits with fresh expression projects. My group were sent off to Margate to go and see a charismatic evangelical church using post-alpha to build community in Margate. I really didn’t want to go. I had bad associations with Margate and church weekends away, and to be frank, an arrogant attitude to Alpha of the superior type – very middle class. So stropey me was taken to the church with my Nordic friends, and I entered the church that felt very familiar in its layout and style. I didn’t want to be there – and I was being a stropey teenager.

What I met in Margate, was the most horrific dumping ground of asylum seekers, heroin addicts, homeless people, people with all sorts of mental health problems trying to make the best of it. It was one of those places where loads are people are dumped on the edge of society. A Community Care ghetto.

I encountered the stories of desperate people, where the church was the only moment of hope in their lives amongst the struggle and dreariness. Whether I liked it or not, this place was one of the most palpable places of God I have ever been in the sense of a group of people seeking to make God present with a whole community of excluded people. I heard their stories, and realise, that in the music, as if music itself was a sacrament of making God present, people found hope, inclusion, a place of expression and acceptance. Who was I to judge that this was not authentic!

I felt humbled and I have to confess shedding a few tears afterwards. They showed me the video of a baptism service, where a number of addicts came to the church with their families to be baptised. All the more remarkable, because often these families were split up for their safety in the community – dreadful stories of familes being broken up – so people came with their social workers, carers etc as a moment of these families being together. In the baptism service, they shared stories of how these desperate people found acceptance in God which will remain with me for a long time. It was a wonderful time of celebration of life and God, before the heart-rendering reality of being split up again at the end of the service and re-enter the harshness of life. For a moment there was the Kingdom of God, before returning to the world. I have a tear in my eye as I write this, as I have not ever experienced a Church like that in my life. That the church – two GPs, volunteers and a vicar were working so hard to be transformative in that community. So that charismatic worship and alpha courses in this context were liberational, and that my attitude was the problem, which I needed to face. It was deeply moving.

I am now reflecting on how arrogant and intolerant I can be as a so-called Anglican Minister, and how hard I am on things that have been important in my life time justified by intellectually arrogant justifications. I met God in a place I did not want to go, and have been humbled. I now want to hold onto this being more accepting and loving, as I have seen a bit of the love of God for people who do not have much in their life. So I for one will try to be more accepting, and seek God which I sometimes think we are far too in our heads in Moot. We could be accused of sanistising God as some form of hypothesis that we do or do not accept, as our lives are very rich. I have had a real dose of reality – outside my nice comfortable life – and I have been caught wanting. These people had nothing, other than a loving God. In many ways they were far richer than I will ever be. Please God, may I be someone that does not continue the harshness of a church that always seeks to divide who is in and who is out – even if it is called the emerging church. Help me to follow a God who seeks me not to be so...

Many emerging churches/fresh expressions have emphasised 'belonging without necessarily believing' and faith as a journey of life. But we are left with the question - how do people in new forms of Church find and continue to grow in faith? And what instruction or resources need to be in place to facilitate this important spiritual journey?This study day seeks to explore practically the issues and potential solutions for contemporary forms of Christian formation.

Tonight's moot service was on the subject of Presence, as described in our Rhythm of Life. The link to our Rhythm of Life is on the left, but I've also had requests to put elements of tonight's service up here, so here goes:

The Jewish prayer was a traditional one found by Aaron on a unitarian website, and went like this:

O Breathing Life, your Name shines everywhere!
Release a space to plant your Presence here.
Envision your "I Can" now.

Embody your desire in every light and form.
Grow through us this moment's bread and wisdom.

Untie the knots of failure binding us,
as we release the strands we hold of others' faults.
Help us not forget our Source,
Yet free us from not being in the Present.
From you arises every Vision, Power and Song
from gathering to gathering.
Amen -
May our future actions grow from here!

The two meditations were from different sources - one was from beingyourself.info and is here:

BYBiblemeditation.pdf

The other one was from "How to Pray" by John Pritchard, which is a great resource generally:

meditation1.doc

The music was all taken from "The Shutov Assembly" by Brian Eno.

The Moot Learning Day on Faith formation today was excellent. John Drane brought some new thinking and analysis for his forthcoming book, on how the emerging church attempts to engage with what he calls the new conceptual age, which I for one found incredibly helpful.

Andrew Roberts looked at Fresh Expressions, and how discipleship arises at different stages of the creation and development of Fresh Expressions, also giving some examples of the more recent discipleship training type courses.

Ben Edson, drawing on the conceptual basis mapped out by John Drane, explored the differing approaches to meaning making and faith formation in emerging church practice drawing on the praxis at Sanctus 1 in Manchester.

It was an excellent day. For those who missed it or want to hear it again, the mp3 downloads through the mootique will be shortly available. Click here in a weeks time.

However, we do have some of the content of the three talks below without the question and answer sessions. Please click on the links below to download from the moot website, they will take a little time to download.

John Drane presentation
Ben Edson presentation
Andrew Roberts presentation

This Tuesday we will be looking at Luke 22:39-46: -

He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives; and the disciples followed him. When he reached the place, he said to them, "Pray that you may not come into the time of trial." Then he withdrew from them about a stone's throw, knelt down, and prayed, "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done." Then an angel from heaven appeared to him and gave him strength. In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground. When he got up from prayer, he came to the disciples and found them sleeping because of grief, and he said to them, "Why are you sleeping? Get up and pray that you may not come into the time of trial.

Questions about the passage:-
What does the passage reveal about the nature of prayer?
... about Christ?
... about God's will?
... about temptation?

What gives this passage it sense of power and presence - what is it that is so present - suffering, God, humanity, struggle?

Really keen...
Compare with Mark 14:39-42 & Matthew 26: 36-46

Hope to see you there... Tuesday 7.30pm in the St Matthews Tower.
(posted by Gareth on behalf of a soon-to-be-IT-savvy Jonathan)

We awoke to strange snorting noises coming from outside our front door. Someone had abandoned a baby mammoth and left him - merely a few days old - wrapped in a blanket and sitting in a small cardboard box.

We immediately took him to heart and brought him inside. Not having much experience with baby mammoths - let alone fully grown ones - we weren't sure what to do. However Phillipa's mothering instinct took over and she cradled him in her arms. It seems that Stan (his new name) has found himself a family.

We are not sure how big he will grow, or what he eats, but suffice to say we are trying to practise hospitality to all we come across. He's a little noisy and very inquisitive, but seems to like nothing more than sitting on the table whilst reading the sport section from the Guardian.

If you have any information that might help us look after Stan please do let us know.

We hope that soon he will come and take part in a moot service and be able to meet a few more people. But do feel free to come round and meet the new member of the Powell family.

Two things that have happened in my life recently have got me thinking about what effect our relationships have on our identity.
The first one was getting married, which I did 1½ months ago. There were several commitments I made to Pete - in the declarations, which is the love, comfort, honour and protect bit; in the vows, which is the for better for worse, till death us do part bit, and in the giving of the rings. The most moving part for me was when I gave him his ring, and promised “all that I am I give to you”. I imagine the whole of my life will be a journey of discovery of quite who and what I am. A promise to make that journey with another person, and to entrust the discoveries, whether I like them or not, to another person – now that’s special. A married friend was saying how she feels that she and her husband are one, that they are one unit, one entity, and although they act independently that she thinks of ‘us’ rather than ‘me’. Now I wouldn’t go that far (to say that now Pete and I have the same identity) but we have entrusted our identities, all that we are, to each other.
The second thing (which is linked) was changing my name, which we have done together, to a combination of our former names. It felt really scary! Especially the bit on the deed poll where I had to declare that I absolutely and entirely renounced, relinquished and abandoned use of my former name. That felt scarier than any of the wedding vows. It was an utter abandonment of my name, the name I’ve had since I was born and have carried with me all my life, and the adoption of a name that absolutely and publicly joins me to Pete (it’s a pretty unusual name so there’s no doubt!). That’s not a bad thing, but I just hadn’t thought until now how much my name was part of my identity. It felt like a sacrifice, though willingly made.
These aren’t just self-indulgent bridal ramblings, because this all got me on to thinking, how do we allow our relationships with God to be part of our identity? That journey of discovery of who and what I am, that’s with God too, and I entrust that to God. Do public commitments make a difference to that? And what are the outward signs of our relationship with God – nothing as concrete as a ring or a name change for the majority of us (although of course for monastic people) – although for some of us a collar and a ‘Rev’ are, or will be, part of that relationship. Thoughts?

Pleased to say that I have edited a version of Moot on BBC TV Songs of Praise into quicktime movie format. If you don't have this, you can get it for free in pc & mac format, click here for the download page - check you get the mac or pc version. Please click the link below if you have the software installed. It will take a little while to download.

Click here to download.

...for a weekend, so that we could all stare at Ian's computer.




Ian's photos of the weekend click here

Found this great quote in a book entitled "The Future of Anglicanism" and one of the essays within it was a quote by Tim Bradshaw on the 'Christological Centre of the Church'. This really resonated with me as something I think is really missing in many churches, which is a founding vision for the emerging church.

Anglican practice enacts a theology of concentric circles, at the centre are the holy trinity, the object of our worship and the source of our redemption. We believe that God is working in many ways and at different levels in people's lives and in social structures. But we are committed as a church to focus our faith on God revealed and mediated in and through Jesus. That is our central vision, and from that vision we read society and the work of God generally. God can reveal himself through a blossoming shrub, a summer's day, a Mozart concerto or a dead dog... Anglican practice accepts the many circles and types of commitment and faith; it is inclusive to an indecent degree.... It is very hard to be cast out of a truly Anglican congregation. People belong at very different stages, but the Church aims to bring them to the centre, to the feet of Christ. Our doctrine or practice of charitable presumption, the refusal to judge the spiritual state of people who want somehow to belong, shows both the commitment to the concentric circles and the insistence that this solar system has its centre of gravity.

October 14th, Christian Formation with John Drane, Andrew Roberts and Ben Edson.

Moot Reflective Compline Service, 6.30pm St Matthews Church Sun 8th Oct

I have come across a few cool things in the last few weeks and thought I would share them with you...

• Moo - a fantastic business card creator that links in with Flickr, costs £10 for 100 including postage, Jonny has got a sample pack and it has to be said that they look fab. Upon placing my order I forgot to put my email on - so I quickly emailed them to let me know. Within 10 minutes they had contacted me saying they could change it, which after another quick email they did. Good to see a new company that not only looks good and is easy to use but also looks after their customers!

• modul8 - after using Arkaos for VJing for several years, I really feel that this has the upper hand when it comes to creative mixing of stills and video. Its harder to use, but for me creates much better, more organic, results.

• Matt from home recommended the album tree - a really good electronica genre group - who sound great. We will be using one of their tunes in our next eucharist, so watch out for that. Home have also pruduced some of their own tunes which you can grab from Lulu.

• Both Addict and Howies have launched their latest Autumn ranges - both of which look great, and in Howies case, are pretty good towards the environment as well :-)

• Moot have published our first book (well nearly) - I showed off a copy of the rhythm of life book/journal at the community meeting last night. I think everyone was pretty struck by how easy it was to create a great product for so little money (about A5 size, 200 pages, £3.50!) Kudos to Lulu for being such a great website.

An interesting post up at Seth Godin's blog. He works with big business and organisations of various sorts, but his posts are always interesting, and I think, in this case, there are transferable ideas that could apply to our thinking about how we do church:

"What’s the point of talking to a group?

Dilston Grove Gallery, Southwark Park, SE16 has an installation by Michael Cross entitled 'Bridge'. More info here:

'Housed in a former church, (one of the earliest examples of poured concrete construction and a Grade II listed building), the piece comprises submerging two thirds of the inside of the church in water, and producing a series of steps which rise out of the apparently empty man-made ‘lake’ as you walk across them. Each step emerges one step in front of you and disappears back underneath behind you as you go. This ‘bridge’ is purely mechanical, the weight of the person on it depresses each step a little, this force activates a submerged mechanism which raises the next step.

The public are invited to walk out on it as if walking on water, eventually reaching the middle of the lake, thirty steps and twelve meters from the shore. There they will stand alone and detached, stranded in the middle of a plane of water until they choose to return the way they came. For some people this experience of being cut off and surrounded by water will be peaceful, for others terrifying. For some walking across the water will be pure childish joy, whilst others will be too scared to try.'

Tags: Michael Cross, Bridge

NEXT WEEKEND>>> >> >
Moot Weekend in Arundel Friday 6th-Friday 8th October 2006

So far we have 21 adults, 3 children and 2 day visitors but...

..THERE ARE STILL PLACES so if you still fancy joining us it is not too late. Alternatively, if you only fancy coming down for one night or the Saturday or Sunday then you are more than welcome. Just leave your e-mail address in a comments box and I'll be in touch.
For those attending, remember we have the venue from Friday midday so come down earlier if you fancy it.

See you in Arundel.