occasion_flyer08 Behind Enemy Lines: Colombia
Now I have your attention, can i remind people of that the Occasion is happening on the 11th October 9-45am to 4pm and as it is the fifth year we are pushing the boat out.
Press release Press release Press release Press release
Frontier Youth Trust calls for urgent investment in young people.
9 months of research into the future of Christian Youth Work in England
has culminated in a urgent appeal to Government Ministers to take youth work more seriously and to Denominational heads to motive their Churches to action.
FYT is calling for Churches and Christian organisations to commit 25% of their income on working with young people, particularly marginalised young people, in order to take the needs of those outside of the church more seriously.
‘With the media tending to demonise young people with such negative reporting , many of the general public are afraid to be in conversation with them. Christians need to sloth off their fears and engage with a generation that will soon give up entirely on the church if we are not careful,’ says Dave Wiles, Chief Executive of FYT.
Working in partnership with ‘2009: Year of The Child ’, Frontier Youth Trust is currently developing a FREE resource to assist Churches in celebrating young people in their communities and empowering them to reach their potential. Entitled, Young People’s Sunday, the resource will offer material and tools to help churches celebrate young people throughout 2009.
Church leaders are asked to pledge their commitment to working towards these objectives and specifically respond to the challenges with a firm undertaking to take appropriate action. Churches are also being prompted to lobby politicians to implement a commitment to long term funding of Christian faith based youth work by writing to MPs and Government ministers.
For further information, or to receive a resource pack for Young People’s Sunday, please email frontier@fyt.org.uk for details.
Are people aware that contact point
The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold psp
The Accidental Spy trailer is being rolled out nationally over the next few years. Contact point will have every young person in Englands basic details, such and name dob, address, parents, school, doctor, lead worker ect. It is in response to the report following Victoria Climbie’s death and will automatically update as soon as a parent of yp access a service eg doctor, school, dfes. At one level it will be a great tool for suitable trainned and authorised staff such a youth workers to find out who else is supporting the young person. On the other hand there is no right to privacy for the young person or parents to opt out. There is a sheilding process to protect vulnerable yp from their info being made available, but every yp will be on the system.
I am preparing for a MA lecture on Flow Spirituality and wondered if this makes any sense to anyone else but me?
In How not to speak of God Pete Rollins explores some of the mystic tradition and for me mission and the Christian mystic tradition have always been closely aligned so here I want to explore some of the implications for mission/us when we embrace a mission spirituality shaped by this and how that that fuels the kind of mission I am engaged with through Church on the edge
Meister Eckhart God rid me of God – the God we know cant be God because God is always more, so what does it mean to engage in mission with the unknown God, where is always more?
If we reduce theology to a formula we see God as transcendent- beyond and then God as imminent – close, almost as if the only way to get our heads around it is a formula that says god is sometimes transcendent and withdrawn and sometimes imminent and close, but what kind of God is this – the mystic tradition teaches that God is imminent because she is transcendent, God is in all, and so close we cant see – God is hyper-real
The unspeakable is very thing we must not stop speaking of – desire is not born in the absence of God but in the presence of God, so we speak of God not to tell others so much as to discover the hyper-reality of God for ourselves, religion is the response to the God event, and this God event is a missionary event, where we are embraced by the Father, who sends the Son, and where the Spirit is left to engage us in the ongoing embrace. God is a missionary God – missio-dei and as such if we truly desire God our mission is not so much as to find him as to reveal him to others but by embracing God in others so we reveal more of the hyper real God to ourselves and help others see the trancenent God that is imminent.
Get it??????????????????
Asbo baby had her fringe cut by my mother in law and now bears an uncanny resemblance to Joan of Arc.
I finally made it to beer and hymns this year – albeit cider and carols, and it was awesome, and a real highlight. I didn’t get to a lot as FYT had a stand, and sadly missed Pete Rollins, nowadays I find it impossible to switch off my mission head, and was disappointed with the limited imagination of most of what I went to. It was great to go to some of all age orientated alt worship, and at one level it was good but it was still full of christian jargon, language, and I would have to agree with the title of one of Pete Rollins sessions Changing something so that everything remains the same. There was a great comment during one communion from a girl, as the leader used the liturgy to introduce the communion she said “we’ve all heard this story” clearly impatient with the process. It sums up much of what I experienced in talks and worship, whilst cider and carols would fit right in as an approach to mission in our current context where many people still have the echo of a christian memory.
On the reverse most of people I was camping with found the sessions stimulating and worthwhile, the question is where do I and they go now.See Spot Run on dvd The Narrow Margin on dvd
Grenbelt has always been a thin place for me where Flow and earth meet. This year I am really excited as usually I find for me it is either a good year for music or a good year for talks but this year both seem fab to me. Especially looking forward to David Dark Birds of America download
Drag Me to Hell movie download and Pete Rollins
and CMS has interesting series around emerging church and mission which is worth checking out including a sessions from asbo, tsk, richard subworth, mark berry. I am also doing a session on God as Flow on Sun 12-1 and FYT will have a table in the resouces area so hope to catch up with lots of people which is always the best bit anyway .
Hope to see
————–page break——————–Highwaymen the movie 100 Tears movies
A research team, led by Dr Judith Aldridge at the University of Manchester, has found evidence which directly contradicts the core assumptions of government policy on gang and knife crime. Based on two years’ work with members of six gangs in an English city, the research finds that in reality, gangs are loose, messy, changing friendship networks – less organised and criminally active than widely believed – with shifting and unstable leadership. The guardian has published podcast interview online with the researcher. here
Dear Jim,
Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything…
…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they suddenly happen, and we can share in them; but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.
The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and your witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it.
The great thing after all is to live, not to pour out your life in the service of a myth: and we turn the best things into myths. If you can get free from the domination of causes and just serve Christ’s truth, you will be able to do more and will be less crushed by the inevitable disappointments. Because I see nothing whatever in sight but much disappointment, frustration and confusion…
The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see. If we can do God’s will, we will be helping in this process. But we will not necessarily know all about it before hand…
Enough of this… it is at least a gesture… I will keep you in my prayers.
All the best, in Christ,
Tom