Category Archives: Life

Campaigns about positive images of young people:

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www.metro.co.uk/19under19

19 Under 19s is a campaign by the Department for Children Schools & Families (DCSF) aimed at revealing the true image of our nation’s teenagers.

Local authorities and community groups were invited to nominate young people, aged 19 or under, who are making an active contribution to their local area and, crucially, a positive difference to their own lives. From these nominations, DCSF selected the most inspiring 19 to become the face of real youth in England.

Not only does each of these 19 Under 19s have a great individual story to tell, but together they reveal an important, but too-often overlooked, truth about today’s teenagers.

Namely, that rather than hanging around on street corners or engaging in anti-social behaviour, the majority of young people are instead using their free time to get involved in a huge variety of positive activities. These range from sports coaching, dancing and drama to vital roles in local youth groups and community action projects.

Through Aiming High for Young People and the work of the Youth Taskforce, DCSF is investing a total of £679 million in creating opportunities for young people at a time and a place that suits them, including Friday and Saturday nights.

ACTION: Consider nominating any young person you have given an Alternative ASBO to.

www.good-hood.co.uk

This is run by the Member of Youth Parliament for Birmingham. It is becoming a fairly aggressive campaigner (in the best way, not negative!) for the Press to change their representation of young people to become fairer and less discriminatory using the Press Complaints Commission.

ACTION: please visit the website and keep an eye on the website. Maybe you’d like to get in touch with your Youth Parliament and ask them to link on this campaign.

www.youngpeoplessunday.co.uk

A positive response for the Christian community to use – to encourage engagement and prayerful support for young people, highlighting the contribution young people make in your community. FREE downloadable resources – sermons, prayers, images, creative ideas, video clips etc.

ACTION: get downloading now and give to your Vicar, Minister/Youthworker and organize a Young People’s Sunday service.The X-Files: I Want to Believe psp The Moving Finger the movie

Not Another Teen Movie ipod

Advent Grace

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We give thanks for the journey of this food
The waiting involved
The hiddeness of the seed
The fragility of the egg
From the seed to the fruit
From the egg to the bird
From the field to our plates
Giving us life and energy

As advent reminds us of your conception in us
The miracle that God makes his home in us
Help us remember the miracle of the seed
planted in the depths of the earth
Help us remember new life
Which grows and feeds us.

We give thanks for the small God
We give thanks for the small seed
We give thanks for the fragile egg
We give thanks for life.For Love or Money the movie Ocean’s Eleven dvdrip Imprint movie download Wizards of Waverly Place: The Movie video

21 Grams move

What is Good?

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In the discussion about Christian’s wielding power over others through the means of democratic government, the question comes up of what is good.

The crux of the question is: Is forcing people to behave in a particular way, so that people’s lives are easier, more comfortable, ‘nicer’, etc., “good”?

I can see that for most people a “good” thing is something that makes life ‘better’ for people. On the other hand we see that ultimately ‘good’ is having a relationship with God, which makes ‘evil’ the state of not having a relationship with God. ‘Good acts’ are therefore the things that we do that come out of our relationship with God and ‘evil acts’ are those things that we do separate from God’s influence. These two views of what ‘good’ is are virtually opposed to each other – the first claiming that good is independent of God, the second that it is dependent on God.

There is nothing wrong with having a subjective definition of ‘good’, it’s quite useful to be able to say “hey that’s good”. However, if we are trying to do good and we believe in God then the idea that we can do good apart from God is actually rather a distraction and can take us away from the good that God wants us to do. In fact, we can end up behaving in ways that oppose God in order to do what we feel is good. Take the simple statement “love your enemy” – we can suddenly turn that on it’s head if we believe that we can do ‘good’ by killing our enemy and stopping them doing the evil things that they were going to do. 🙁 (as if somehow ‘good’ can fill the gap left by the evil things that weren’t committed by our enemy)

This relates to my previous post ‘Freedom The Four Feathers on dvd

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls rip

Adaptation. divx Alive or Dead full ‘, where I ponder whether freedom is a prerequisite for good and whether anything that is forced cannot be good.

Freedom

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It seems to me that God created us with the intention that we have freedom. Before the fall Adam and Eve were entirely free, free to do whatever they wanted – note that they only wanted to do good stuff.

When I think about Jesus’ approach to things, the same seems true – he appears to only give us freedoms. He hasn’t tried to override our free choice – he wants us to freely choose to accept His ways. He challenges us but he doesn’t seem to have made (forced) anyone to do anything. When we do what He wants it seems to me that we do it because part of us wants to do it. Our motive is inside us and the outcome is the good that we do because of that good motive inside of us.

So perhaps we shouldn’t force others to do anything? Obviously the Crusades come to mind, but also other types of politics. Should we force people to pay taxes for good causes by using our power to vote in government elections? Sure, the result may appear to be good, but isn’t there a problem with us impinging on people’s freedoms, and claiming to be acting on behalf of Jesus?Scrooge dvdrip Ben move Thunder on the Hill rip

Synecdoche, New York full

21 Grams rip

Randomness

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There is a link between creativity and thinking outside the box, I have often used edward de bonos ideas for creativity thinking for youth work, and it is great for coming up for ideas for parties but when you explain such random ideas to your friends on the invites you do get the odd strange look. Anyway following on from last years weird beard new years eve party this year thanks to creative thinking processes we are doing One for the road – Come as or with your favourite roadsign!

The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold movies

Jagged Edge video

Criticism of Involvement in Government

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.!.

I’m just posting this to add to the archives on the topic ‘Government’ which I (Mark) haven’t added to recently.
Found this great criticism of the activities of Jim Wallis (of sojo.net):
http://www.garynorth.com/public/department61.cfm

One note I want to add is that his criticism of ‘the social gospel’ is specifically a criticism of social works via government. He doesn’t appear to criticise doing socially good things personally (oneself).

Hope

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i love this story that Keith posted over at Under the Acacias :-

Pastor Jean-Baptiste tells this story of when he was a teacher in a Christian school:
“There were two Muslim girls in my class. They were intelligent girls, but they would fall asleep in class. I called them to come and chat.
‘Monsieur’, they said, ‘it is because we are hungry.’
I checked out and found there were 20 people in their families with hardly any food. I was given some money and bought their families five sacks of millet. I told them to use the millet for the whole family, but that there was one sack for each girl.
The father of one of the girls thought I wanted to marry her, and that was why I had given the food! I told him that it wasn’t that, but that they were intelligent girls and I wanted them to come to school with a full stomach so they could study.
That girl became a Christian. Today she is the minister for Human Rights in the Burkina government. And she loves Jesus.”

Young Peoples Sunday

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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.

“A Letter to a Young Activist” by Thomas Merton

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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