Liturgy

Is there a point to it or not? In the charismatic traditions liturgy has very much been thrown out. Is this throwing out the baby with the bath water?
in Roy Godwin's book, Grace Outpouring, about the growth of Ffald y Brenin he says they use liturgy based prayer so that all can join in, from whatever background without feeling marginalized or ignorant.
They use liturgy to bring people into a comfortable safe place so they can then encounter what God wants to do with them, rather than having to try to work out what to do next; which was interesting after having some friend round who felt that friends of theirs were caught in some sort of religiosity through their use of liturgy and weren't meeting God for real because they didn't do free prayer.
Now in Ffald y Brenin their liturgical prayer has space for free prayer too, but I feel that especially as the liturgical prayer in Ffald y Brenin has the Bible verses printed with it, at least one does know that what one is praying is in the will of God. And I have found that He uses it to take me to some very deep places.

Pegs!!

I just had to buy these whilst out shopping, though I am afraid that the advertisers will think I have fallen for their jargon!
These clothes pegs were sold as "eco pegs". The reason? Because if you hang your washing outside on the washing line you save lots of energy that you would've used from putting your tumble drier on.
And also they were even better for the environment because they were made from post and pre-recycled plastic. Now I am sure post recycled plastic is plastic that hasn't been used for anything else yet so not able to be recycled. So these pegs weren't even from 100% recycled plastic though the wording could've confused someone, and probably did.
Or has everyone bought them because the wording is just so amusing?

Don't get complacent

We had some lovely friends round for supper last night who we hadn't seen properly together for a while so there was a bit of catch up. They have been through a hard time with various churches they have been in in recent years and have found somewhere that they feel like they can be themselves.
But what stuck me is how much, once one gets into knowing a congregation one can see the human failings and can so easily dwell on that. These lovely people are now going to a congregation with a youth group of about a dozen, the most they have ever had in any congregation they have been in before, and yet at Bath City church we have a 11-14yrs group of 40plus registered, and about 30 who turn up each week. And the older teens, 15-18yrs there must be about 25plus, who do come at their age out of choice, no longer cajoled by their parents.
Also Mark had just had a brilliant healing of his knee during a time of worship on their church weekend away, but again it struck me how things like that have become almost common place where we are and often people don't get excited enough to get up the front and praise God.
We did get spoiled with all the Fire stuff that came from Lakeland, but actually we had lots of this going on already - a large group of young people, regular healings, respected teachings from our speakers who are international speakers and we take so much of it for granted.
So often we have that tendency especially of seeing the negative rather than the positive, a very British thing. So this has got me thinking that even though God has blessed me with being able to "see" things, and at times very much like the Old Testament prophets I need to be like so many of them, and even though I do get to see the negative side at times I need to hear God and what He says on it.
As Patricia King says on her web link how we need to be like Habakkuk and let God gets us to see the blessings He has even if the situations seem bleak
As Stephen Wood preached in our church on Sunday we need to make sure that we don't give the negative things in our lives power by focusing on them, instead we need to look at what God has done before and what He is going to do.
Please God help me to focus positively on You and where You want me to be for now.

Being Humble

As I trogg through the wonders of life and of dear friends who have known me for years and so value my options and want to hear what I have to say, and yet how draining that is on me - though I do love you guys, Amanda and Sharon who I spent time with this weekend gone. And dear family I love you too even though you took the brunt of my tiredness and frustrations with life. But you are great and so so forgiving. Thank you.

And then how I try to find my space in where God has me know, in what I should do and what I am not meant to be doing, in doing things I've never done before and not having the space to do things that I use to be let lose in, and also having to deal with the physical stuff of being in my late 40's peri-menapausal and have days when I have no energy at all.

And then today Tabee and I have spent the afternoon preparing stuff for the boards for the Prayer room at Bath City church to help focus people on prayer I came across this great blog as I was doing a search on 2 Chronicles 7:14 " if my people, who are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land" in which he talks about what it is to be humble. So here is an abridged version.

1. Appreciate your talents
2. Understand your limitations
3. Recognise your faults
4. Stop Comparing
5. Appreciate the talents and qualities of others
6. Dont be afraid to make mistakes
7. Dont be afraid to defer to other people's judgement
8. Rejuviante your sense of wonder
9. Seek guidance
10. Think about yourself under different circumstances - as in would you be able to do what you did if your circumstances had been different
11. Help others
12. Be real and dont pretend to be humble
13. Dont think being sycophantic makes you humble - you cant praise others so you get praise for yourself

Keep in mind that being humble has many benefits. Humility can help you be more content with your life, and it can also help you endure bad times and improve your relationships with others. It's also essential to being an effective learner. If you think you know it all, you won't be open-minded enough to seek out new knowledge. Humility is also, somewhat counter-intuitively, an excellent tool for self-development in general. After all, if you feel superior, you have no incentive to improve. Most of all, being humble allows you to be honest with yourself
Thank you to http://www.consumingworship.org/

And when I do things like this I think that maybe I'm getting somewhere but I still have a long way to go. But at least I've got Jesus by my side and rooting for me to keep me going! Thank you Jesus, and thank you too Ian, Ben and Tabee for not letting me get away with things, but loving me too when I make mistakes.

Open Doors and Connecting Lives

Lots always seems to be happening and some of it interesting enough to blog - and staying on that positive theme!

Tabi and I got an offer about helping to put together some boards in the prayer room to help direct people's prayers. I've just heard we could have 2-3 boards now so loads of space which means we could both chase our own ideas. Sounds really exciting and something I have been wanting to do. Both with Tabi and I are creativity comes in arranging, though she can do the drawing and painting bit too, but mine is very much in being able to place things and make them look right.
This is going to be great. Though we do need to focus as it is working with someone who wants to hear what we are going to do first!
Oh no a plan!!

Am also in the middle of trying to sort out seeing a friend in London. I am going up for the evening to see one friend for her birthday and was chatting to another on Facebook chat and thought I could catch up with her too, but now it seems to be getting a bit complicated. I want to meet her kids but they are an hour from the station and I only have 3 hrs free. But I know too how much I always want people to see my kids too.
Another, a bit like the prayer boards, of co-ordinating and working with others!!!

Will try to let you know how it goes next week.

It is all about open doors and how and when to walk through them

A poem by Lisa Borden

Without Ceasing by Lisa Borden

And this is how we pray
Backs nestled into the hammock
Faces turned toward the stars
The warm air lifts against us
And we are quiet, quiet
As you, God, speak to us
About how big you are

And this is how we pray
Sitting on the leaf strewn ground
Peering across the pattern of sun and shade
The clear pool under the giant fig
Where the monitor lizard slips through the water
And we whisper our worshipful thanks
Again and again

And this is how we pray
Standing in the kitchen
Speaking out the worries in our minds
Telling this perfect parent God
Just how small our faith feels
Conscious of how sweetly ludicrous
Our doubts must appear

And this is how we pray
Curled into our duvets
Safely tucked in on this wind blown night
Thoughts far from here
With our friends who sit in vigil
Waiting for a precious life to pass
Maybe even tonight

And this is how we pray
With longing
And with hope
With stress
And with joy
With daring
And with simple words

(Check her out on "Put the Kettle on")

A Prophecy I liked

From Emerge Wales:

I had a vision recently from the Lord. In this vision I saw the River of God was very very wide. At the edges it was shallow and moved very slowly. But the deeper out you went the faster the current got. In the centre of the river it was like a torrent moving so quickly. The Lord explained this is what it is like in this season, for those who have one foot in and one foot out of the present move they show little or no progress (comparatively) over time. Those who are in the shallows are gradually moving but it takes years to see the change. They have to move forward through a lot of effort. But for those who have chosen to give themselves fully to this, they have ditched the old hag, the old wine skin and have thrown themselves in 100% they being swept away. They just let God take them. Before long they have moved into the distance and are in a new place. This vision is exactly what we're seeing. Those that debate the whack and try and do the old hag of religion seem to be plodding along. Their meetings look the same year after year. Others are going backwards, slipping back, loosing their footing, becoming critical because it doesn't look like they want it to look. They fear it. They resent it. They don't want to let go. But those that have really plunged in to this are in a turbulent fast flow of the river which is changing them so rapidly it is becoming hard to recognise them. Great faith and joy is manifesting in them. They are becoming a company of burning hearts - so melted in the fire, so in love with Jesus, so jacked up on the Ghost. Their testimony in heaven will be this - that their fire never died. They are burning for Jesus and burning for the world. It's a wild fire revolution that cannot be stopped.

And it has totally spoken to me about how we can so often hang on to what the man at the front says, be led by the hand always and not be willing to jump into that river of God and let Him just take us and go with Him. Its not even about running with Him but about letting Him just take us away and no longer be in control. Oh how we struggle to keep in control of all things!

Far From The Madding Crowd

Tabi and I had to watch "Far From the Madding Crowd" for her English Lit GCSE. Thankfully I didn't have to read the book too. How Hardy became a classic I will never know! Though I have a good friend who would disagree and thinks he's brilliant. Each to their own. And why if we all have so many different tastes in what makes good literature do we have certain people picking what is a "classic" and what to make young people study of GCSE and 'A' Levels, which often put people off reading for life?

Anyway I was struck by 2 things:
Firstly Bathsheba is so upset that Boldwood shoots her husband and is going to hang for it that she gets his case sent back and makes sure he is then locked up in an insane assylum for the rest of his life. This at least eases her conscience but I am sure is no fun at all for poor Farmer Boldwood, and if not insane when he went in definitly would've gone insane.
And it got me thinking of how often we manipulate situations because they ease our conscience and may not be what is best for others. But we feel better about it.

And the second thing was when the sheep go off in the clover field and get really, really sick eating something that poisons them and how Gabriel Oak is the only person who knows how to deal with their gassed up stomachs without killing them. And of how we are often compared to sheep - sheep who have gone astray, sheep in need of a shepherd.
And it struck me that so often we don't let the Holy Spirit come along and get the bad stuff out of us in the way He knows best, but that so often as church we think we know the right formula and so deal with it as we have always done and actually can cause more harm than good. Instead of waiting, which is what they had to do, asking in the right way (as Bathsheba had upset Oaks and banished him - oh don't we often do that with God too??), and then letting Him do it in the way He knows best.

Which side of the divide?

For this reason, we are meeting with intercessors at the New York Stock Exchange and the Federal Reserve Bank and its 12 principal branches around the U.S. on October 29, 2008. We are also going to intercede at the site of the statue of the bull on Wall Street to ask God to begin a shift from the bull and bear markets to what we feel will be the "Lion's Market" or God's control over the economic systems. While we do not have the full revelation of all this will entail, we do know that without intercession, economies will crumble.
Quote from Cindy Jacob's recent intercessor's appeal before the event and also on a blog link that is very anti Christian after the event

And it got me thinking how as Christians we think the world will view us. I know this one is an extreme event but I think so often because we know what we mean then we expect the rest of the world to see things the same way. So we go off and do some major amazing prophetic symbolic praying and the world goes "what weirdos!".
I think too we do this with especially evangelism. We tell people the story from a church point of view and expect them to get it. And I know that if we heal people in Jesus name and interpret their dreams in Jesus name a few will come to know Jesus, but not everyone.
A friend of mine said that it is the way we view Jesus that empowers how we view mission and so empowers how we do church, but actually we do things the other way round and it is the way we view church that engineers how we do mission and in turns engineers how we see Jesus. Jesus comes at the bottom of the pile. (Quote from a Michael Frost book)
Now I don't say we stop doing what we do but I do think we need to be doing it because Jesus is the first place in all things.

The Financial Crash - how much of it is our fault?

I wanted to give you our testimony regarding money and the present financial crash.

A while back the company Ian was as working for got sold, which meant that all the shares the employees had bought over the years were up for being sold for an interesting amount. We decided to sell and got enough that paid off our mortgage and released Ian to be able to leave that company and start exploring things that God had been nagging him about for a few years. It gave us a nice little cushion to go exploring.

Well we were greedy and now our money is held in Iceland until that all gets sorted out, but actually Ian has been blessed with enough work that we have been able to live nicely. Thank you God! But there was a bit of a worry that we would have to pay a whack of tax on money that we couldn’t get hold of. Well Sunday afternoon Ian spent the time working out his tax returns and due to the fact that he had bought these shares years ago it looks like we will only have to pay about £5 in tax! Wow isn’t God brilliant.

And this is the whole thing of where God uses those monetary systems in place to also bless us.

It has taught us a lesson about who we do rely on and just how much our great God loves us and also about not being greedy.

Like Stewart said we do need to be part of the banking system if we live in the West but we can bank ethically and here are some places to be able to do that:

Reliance Bank Ltd - www.reliancebankltd.com

Kingdom Bank - www.kingdombank.co.uk/

Triodos Bank UK - www.triodos.co.uk/

God is just so brilliant though!

But even though God is brilliant we do need to do some repenting, as a nation as well as individuals of our greed and the way we have mistreated the poor across this world, to the point where is it just so "normal" that even as Christians so many of us don't think twice about where our money goes, but just put in in the bank that is either easiest to go to as its near where we live, or because our parents always did, or whatever, but we dont really think about it too much.

Dear Father God please forgive us for our ignorance and for our greed.