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Posts from March 2007


Praise God for Peace!

This is something I never thought I'd see and hear... It's taken a while to sink in, and listening to these words makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I'll be honest brings tears to my eyes... Praise God!

Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams Statement - Video

Peace between neighbours
Peace between kindred
Peace between lovers
Peace between person and person
Peace between wife and husband
Peace between woman and children
In the love of the King of life
The peace of Christ above all peace

Technorati Tags: Culture: News

Posted by : safe space : on 30/03/2007 at 00:22 in Culture, Current Affairs, News | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)


Carmina Gadelica

Two prayers adapted from the Carmina Gadelica...

Pilgrims Aiding
God be with you in every mountain pass
Jesus be with you on every lofty summit
Spirit be with you in every flowing stream
Every headland, ridge and field.

Each sea and land, each moor and meadow
Each pause for rest, each rising up again
in the trough of the waves and the crest of the billows
each step of the journey you find yourself on.

God guide me
God guide me with deep wisdom
God check me with your justice
God heal me with your mercy
God shield me with your strength
God fill me to overflowing
God cool me in your shade
God pour your grace over me
Jesus Christ of the line of King David
Who went into the temple in peace and in anger
Innocent one who gave himself for the garden of creation
God who laid down his life for me.

Technorati Tags: Prayer: Rhythm: Spirituality: Worship

Posted by : safe space : on 29/03/2007 at 19:44 in Worship/Prayer | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)


a third place?

I'm up to my ears at the moment preparing for a series of three sessions I'm doing at the weekend for Revive's community weekend away on "Community as..."




Anyway... in tandem we are thinking about creating a "third place" a place of fun, conversation and meditation in a Pub run by the football club... as I was preparing the above "seminars" I dug out Ray Oldenburg's "Celebrating the Third Place" in which he says...

Third places exist on neutral ground and serve to level their guests to a condition of social equality. Within these places, conversation is the primary activity and the major vehicle for the display and appreciation of human personality and individuality. Third places are taken for granted and most have a low profile. Since the formal institutions of society make stronger claims upon the individual, third places are normally open in the off hours, as well as at other times. The character of a third place is determined most of all by its regular clientele and is marked by a playful mood, which contrasts with people's more serious involvement in other spheres. Though a radically different kind of setting for a home, the third place is remarkably similar to a good home in the psychological comfort and support that it extends.

This seems to sum up accurately some of our thinking in terms of "safe space" and how we live and serve in the community... specifically how we create "safe spaces" for conversation and exploration in the community... one of his other books is called "The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community "... oh to be a "Hangout in the Heart of a Community"... this is not the same as "doing" Church in a Cafe, nor is it the same as a Church "doing" a Cafe, I think this is much more about creating places to be... places of hospitality, welcome and safety... not our place or theirs... but a third place... neither owned nor neutral.

[update] just chatting with Lou about this and she talked about the old style village Pub... how this was a place of community and whilst it was run by a Landlord/lady it actually belonged to the community... a "Public House", now Pubs have become places designed to sell alcohol.  People used to go to the Pub (and I worked in a few of these old style Pubs when I was a student) for a place to be... to chat, to play, to belong... not simply to buy and consume alcohol.  Perhaps we have simply lost our "third places" now we have to intentionally re-discover/create them.  This really does tie into our vision of a place of hospitality and community, but in an age where they have (largely) been lost to culture, where the sense of a community place has disappeared or been overrun by commercial "need"... is it really possible to breathe the life of community into culture?

Technorati Tags: Books: Emerging Church: Mission

Posted by : safe space : on 27/03/2007 at 17:09 in Books, Emerging Church, Mission | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)


pioneers or perfecters?

At the time when some people felt that they had worked out and designed the ultimate Carriage, the most perfectly engineered, most efficient and beautiful, the fastest horse drawn vehicle... a few mavericks and pioneers where building a dangerous, messy, inefficient, slow and unreliable alternative... the motor-car!  The question is with whom does the future lie?

A paraphrase from Bill Bolton who is currently doing a Blah Tour - The Entrepreneur Imperative (Entrepreneurs and Mission)

Technorati Tags: Blah: Church: Emerging Church: Mission: News

Posted by : safe space : on 23/03/2007 at 14:50 in Church, Emerging Church, Mission, News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Community or Communitas?

In "The Forgotten Ways" Alan Hirsch calls for a move from thinking about being Missional Community to being Missional Communitas...  He says that...

the related ideas of liminality and communitas describe the dynamics of the Christian community inspired to overcome their instincts to "huddle and cuddle" and to instead form themselves around a common mission that calls them on a dangerous journey to unknown places - a mission that calls the church to shake off it's collective securities and to plunge into the world of action, where its members will experience disorientation and marginalization but also where they encounter God and each other in a new way.

Wikipedia lists communitas in the following way...

Communitas is an intense community spirit, the feeling of great social equality, solidarity, and togetherness. Communitas is characteristic of people experiencing liminality together. This term is used to distinguish the modality of social relationship from an area of common living. There is more than one distinction between structure and communitas. The most familiar being the difference of secular and sacred. Every social position has something sacred about it. This sacred component is acquired during rites of passages, through the changing of positions. Part of this sacredness is achieved through the transient humility learned in these phases, this allows people to reach a higher position. Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience.

There has been so much written about community and mission recently, with claims that with the death throws of Christendom still fresh in the memory the church is having to re-evaluate who it is and who it is called to be... to rediscover the sense of being Missional... to find the answer to being community... but I'm feeling stirred to ask some questions... what is our sense of communitas? where is our sense of shared liminality and spirit? how can we abandon the need for "huddle and cuddle" and truly embrace the dangerous journey?  For me this means that we shouldn't be expending our energy creating gatherings to which the needy will be drawn, this isn't about creating safe spaces in our places but is about creating safe space between me and another... safe not because it is risk free, but safe because it is open and honest, safe because ALL are vulnerable not because none are.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote...

the renewal of the church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the sermon on the mount.

A Communitas has a calling, a vision if you like... it doesn't exist for it's own sake but because it has a passion which it cannot disregard.  I guess it may not be rational, nor may it be able to hold it's own in the face of structural critique, but nevertheless it makes a difference... it acts and it transforms... but just don't ask it to justify itself in the terms of modernity, it won't be able to!
Benedict's 72nd rule says...

Let our members put their zeal for Christ into action by being careful to prefer one another to themselves

and Tom Sine wrote...

We will need to aggressively work for the re-monking of the church to enable followers of Jesus Christ to intentional set the focus and rhythm of their lives out of biblical calling instead of cultural coercion.

I wonder if this "re-monking" means a shift from seeking a community where "I" feel safe, fed and comfortable... to nurturing communitas where "I" join with others called on a dangerous journey... where "I" becomes servant to "them"?

Technorati Tags: Culture: Emerging Church: theology

Posted by : safe space : on 23/03/2007 at 12:30 in Culture, Emerging Church, Mission, Theology | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


Sex slavery widespread in England according to BBC research

From The Beeb...

Young women tricked into coming to England, often by boyfriends, are being sold off in auctions at airport coffee shops as soon as they arrive.  They are among the thousands of women brought into the UK to be sex slaves, usually with no idea of their fate.  The trade was one of the findings of a BBC News website investigation into slavery in 21st Century England.  Modern day victims of slavery are often young women from eastern Europe, thinking they are coming to England to work as cleaners or au pairs, only to be forced into prostitution.  The Home Office estimated in 2003 that 4,000 women were trafficked into the UK for sexual exploitation. It is thought the figure may have grown since.  Police forces from Cornwall to Northumbria have found themselves having to rescue women and prosecute the traffickers who brought them to England to work as sex slaves.  And as well as foreign citizens coming to the UK, charity workers in Manchester told the BBC they believed British women working in massage parlours had been sold abroad, because they owed the owners money.  Child protection organisations and human rights groups also believe there are thousands of child sex slaves in the UK.

On Tuesday "The Truth Isn't Sexy" has its Parliamentary launch.  They say...

Networks of criminal gangs are exploiting impoverished communities across our world and are buying and selling women and children as though they were commodities. Promised a life freed from poverty, these girls are easy targets. All it takes is an unfortunate response to a carefully worded advert in a local newspaper, a new boyfriend skilled in the art of manipulation, or a scheming family. The girl is then passed from the hands of care-less traffickers and sold on to brothels.  The atrocities these innocent women suffer can be compared with the worst type of slavery. Many of the girls have no idea that they will be involved in the sex-industry and those who do are often misled about the violent and brutal entrapment that awaits them.  Often having to service 30 to 40 men a day, they are kept locked up in brothels unable to access help. They are brutalized and threatened until they are broken and compliant. Technically this is organised rape.  Trafficked girls usually have no control over their earnings. They are told by their owners to pay off the highly inflated expenses of the journey; a journey they were either duped into taking or took without the knowledge of such costs being incurred. However, working off these ‘debts’ is almost impossible owing to constant fines and additional charges for food and board in the brothels. As well as the financial trap, they are caught in a physical and mental trap that uses violence and emotional coercion to maintain their enslavement.

It may interest you to know that there are approximately 16 million more people trapped in slavery today than there where 200 years ago when the UK abolished it's slave trade.  Please do what you can to support the campaign and its partners. Technorati Tags: Anti-slavery: Mission: News: TheTruthIsntSexy

Posted by : safe space : on 19/03/2007 at 10:48 in Mission, News | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)


Carnedd Llewellyn and The Glyders Carnedd Llewellyn 3.JPG
Originally uploaded by Mark Berry.
This weekend I have mostly been climbing Welsh Mountains!

Posted by : safe space : on 18/03/2007 at 22:16 | Permalink | Comments (5)


Chalice and plate Chalice and plate.JPG

As posted earlier we have had a Chalice and Plate (Paten) made for us by The Canterbury Pottery, using a St Brendans cross in the place of their normal Canterbury cross... I don't know what you think... but I am really pleased with them and would thoroughly reccomend the The Canterbury Pottery for all your communion ware needs ;-)

Posted by : safe space : on 17/03/2007 at 10:58 | Permalink | Comments (3)


A prayer to close community silence...

Silent Meditation Closing Prayer by Laurence Freeman OSB May this community be a true spiritual home for the seeker, a friend for the lonely, a guide for the confused. May those who teach here be strengthened by the Holy Spirit to serve all who come, and to receive them as Christ Himself. In the silence of this Community may all the suffering, violence, and confusion of the world encounter the Power that will console, renew and uplift the human spirit. May this silence be a power to open the hearts of men and women to the vision of God, and so to each other, in love and peace, justice and human dignity. May the beauty of the divine life, fill this community and the hearts of all who pray here, with joyful hope. May all who come here weighed down by the problems of humanity leave giving thanks for the wonder of human life. We make this prayer through Christ our Lord. AMEN.

Technorati Tags: Prayer: Rhythm: Spirituality

Posted by : safe space : on 15/03/2007 at 10:40 in Church, Worship/Prayer | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)


This site has a great collection of photos of Labyrinths as well as all sorts of other information... though not specifically Christian, so be warned if this kind of thing bothers you ;-) ... Technorati Tags: alt.worship: Culture: Photographs: Prayer: Labyrinth: Religion: Rhythm: Spirituality

Posted by : safe space : on 15/03/2007 at 08:51 in Church, Culture, Emerging Church, Web/Tech, Worship/Prayer | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

