jonnybaker

here we go... (2)

i should of course also mention that the tour de france starts this weekend and runs from july 1- july 23. itv4 are providing a daily update with some live coverage on itv3 at weekends. with lance armstrong retired this really should be an interesting year. i know some blog readers are bemused by my interest in the tour de france but i still think it is one of the most amazing sporting events. i confess that i actually have a tour de france blog in my newsreader that feeds me all sorts of trivia though the year that i ignore but it should come into its own now...

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here we go...

the world cup is really hotting up now. i am really looking forward to the quarter finals this weekend. i can't understand all the moaning about england. we won our group, we won the next game and here we are. what else matters?! ok so we haven't played the most beautiful football i admit but this where the action really gets going. we play portugal again - i remember the agony of being knocked out by penalties last time we played them (will we have to suffer the agony of penalties again?!). i think it will be another close game, but dare i say am feeling quite optimistic. i think the tournament is still wide open. can germany pull off a surprise to beat argentina? - i wouldn't put it past them. italy will likely beat ukraine. not sure that france have enough to beat brasil but they just might - they are on a roll. here we go...

steve's presentations

steve has uploaded as quicktime movies slides of a couple of his presentations on alternative worship. as we have come to expect from steve they are excellent.

second column in the church times re greenbelt

my second column for the church times featuring something to do with worship at greenbelt...

bill viola new exhibition

bill viola is back in london with love/death: the tristan project. it runs across two gallery spaces - haunch of venison and st olaves college. i have been to the half at haunch of venison - hoping to visit the other half soon. bill viola is one of my favourite artists. his work is in video and is always very thought provoking and often has spiritual themes - angels of the new millenium, triptych, the messenger, passions and so on.

the current work is ten new pieces.

two pieces in particular really grabbed me. one was passage into night which is a slowed down video that lasts about 50 minutes of a person walking towards the camera. the figure gradually gets closer filling the screen until all that remains on the screen is the black robes with small movements. an increibly simple idea but stunning.

the other is purification. on two large screens a woman and man go through seven stages of ritual purification. again this lasts about 50 minutes. it's very slow but utterly compelling. harry and i couldn't move on - we ended up watching the whole sequence. the sequences of cleansing and washing are very moving. i found myself praying and asking for cleansing myself. it also made me wonder if we should have more ritual related to confession in our worship. it's hard to describe just how powerful it was to sit and watch this video piece. you simply must go and visit if you are in london. it's free and running until september 2. i took a few pictures of these two pieces and have added them to flickr.

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don't forget to book before the end of june!

don't forget to book for the blah... emerging churches tour with ryan bolger and karen ward before the end of june. prices go up after that date. you can book online following the links below or download the booking form and book that way.

bristol 14 july

london 15 july

manchester 17 july

birmingham 18 july

download booking form (pdf)

flaming lips up to their usual antics at wireless festival

flaming lips up to their usual madness, originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

had a great evening at the wireless festival in hyde park last night. managed to see some or all of gnarls barkley, flaming lips, terry callier, dj shadow and massive attack. flaming lips certainly win the prize for the maddest antics - the lead singer rolled around in an inflatable ball, there were people dressed as spacemen, snta claus, aliens, superheroes and more, confetti filled the sky, green balloons bouncing everywhere - fantastic stuff...

highlights for me were seeing DJ shadow again - it was his first gig in 3 and half years. they managed to set his stuff up in 20 minutes which was an amazing feat in itself. 9 screens linked together provided the usual magical backdop. a new album is due in a couple of months. gnarls barkley's crazy was the singalong moment of the night. massive attack were brilliant as ever.

a few more pics on flickr

come clean - worship trick 73 [series 2]

good spot by gareth...

come clean is an online confession, a piece of digital spirituality. weirdly it is an advert for soap and things but it's still fab. type in your confession. see it appear on the hand before being washed under the taps. i don't think the agency have quite caught up with the notion of absolution. if you want you can view everyones confessions or look at them as a screen saver so careful what you write... would be much better if the confessions were literally wiped clean and forgotten. but still worthy of worship trick status.

greenbelt worship

worship for greenbelt is coming together. lots of us have been busy planning over the last few months. it's not all there yet but as you can see from the greenbelt worship pages there is a lot going on - diverse, creative, gb regulars mixed with new groups. should be good...

flock - browsing gets smart

i have been trying a new browser - flock. and i think i am going to switch over to using it from firefox...

if you blog, use del.icio.us, flickr and a news reader all of these are integrated into flock in a very smart way.

first up, when you switch from firefox or whatever it imports your favourites, bookmarks, and toolbar.

then the first thing you notice if you have a flickr account is that either your photos, your contacts photos or even better any new photos from your contacts are on a strip at the top. it scrolls easily along and you can lose it at any point... it really is good. you can also look at the strip of photos in two sizes.

if you put in your blog account details, click a button and you can blog directly in the window that opens (in both wysiwyg and html). and what is particularly sweet is that you can drag any photo with a choice of sizes from the flickr bar at the top. this is genius... i can't remember if i have said this before but if you don't use flickr to upload your own photos you can still blog anyone's photos if you sign in as a member as long as you link back to that flickr page  (this way of dragging photos writes that code for you). of course you can do the same with photos from your computer and all the usual things.

if you follow blogs an other web sites in a newsreader you can do that from the browser (other browsers do this too). click on the feed symbol in the address bar and a sidebar appears that you can add the feed to. then arrange them in folders as you like and save any entries as articles for future reference. now that wireless is available so much more, having this all integrated into one place makes a lot of sense. you don't have to open another programme and update and so on... it just all happens. the interface is great.

if you also like to save your favourite sites either as bookmarked favourites or on something like del.icio.us so that others can access them then the beauty of flock is that it integrates the two. add something as a favourite and it gets added to your del.icio.us page as well as bookmarked. sadly this doesn't seem to be working properly for me yet on the mac version. i'm sure it will get resolved. but it will be very good when it works properly. it just makes perfect sense. it is also very simple. in the address bar is a blue star. click it and it turns orange to show it is a favourite. double click it and a box opens where you can add description, tags, and choose favourite folders for it to go in.

it has good search bar tools much like firefox and to cap it all includes a very neat flickr uploader. you can upload individual photos with descriptions, tags, as a set and so on. and all of the interfaces look good, the speed is fast. in short it is brilliant. i have only been trying it for three days and it has crashed once. it is in beta so i guess some bugs are to be expected but browsing just got a whole lot smarter.

it is available for pc and mac btw and is free. click on any of these screen shots and you'll see what it looks like and the various bits i refer to

Technorati Tags: flock, software

england win group

well done england - won their world cup group - through to the last 16... but made hard work of it and owen looks like his world cup is over. sensational goal from joe cole though!

thinking about energy healing

it's a few weeks since we ran the dekhomai stand at the london mind body spirit festival and i've had questions buzzing around my head since then but not enough time to reflect on them. we had a get together of everyone involved on the team last week - the stories people shared of their encounters with visitors to the stand were so encouraging. god was clearly present with us and very gracious to us and those that came to us. stories of encouragement, insights (words of knowledge) into people lives that guided how to pray for them, and physical healing, and just the power of offering a free welcome and blessing were all part of our experience.

i guess what i am interested in is how can insights from cross cultural mission inform how we interact with spiritual seekers and some of the practices on stands at the festival. one of the areas that was particularly intriguing was energy healing (reike seemed the most popular). i am a complete novice in all of this but the impression you get is that there is a sense of a universal life force (which is what reike means) or spirit and the healers by meditating and holding hands over particular areas (energy centres) of the body expect the energy to flow into that area to bring healing. of course there is a lot more to it than that and a google search on reike will lead you to many sites of explanation...

but how do we react to this as christians. at a gut level i had two responses - one is this looks like prayer with the laying on of hands and the second is that this is some sort of dodgy couterfeit healing. this sort of polarisation is probably a pretty typical surface response that we need to quickly get beyond. fortunately others have been doing and thinking about mission in these environments for several years and have loads to teach plebs like me. john drane has been an inspiration and i have recently come across phil johnson and matt stone from downunder who have been offering us some encouragement. sadly i don't seem to have enough time to digest all the stuff that is around on this but i hope to be more clued up by next year anyway.

but on the subject of energy healing phil is really helpful. he wrote an article back in 99 (word file) that i think is excellent, and moves beyond the polarisation (it works so is good or is demonic and therefore bad). he suggests a missional take could be that the life force is the spirit of god present in creation and that we could follow paul in acts 17 by suggesting that christ is the fulfillment of the pagan quest - in other words naming the unknown healer as the spirit of god. i like the instincts here though i need to chew over it some more. reike healers came to our stand to receive healing and several were surprised how strong the energy was in our stand - this was precisely the moment in which we were able point to christ our healer and the spirit of god present to heal.

the labydome - worship trick 72

following our latest labyrinth creations, and picking up ona rather mad conversation we were having on saturday steve has designed the labydome. i am making it a worship trick though i'll be very suprised if anyone ever creates one though you never know!

a quote

this morning i was preaching at st marys which i do about three times a year. the current series is on passages that changed your life. i chose matthew 6:19-34 with the text seek first the kingdom. as part of it i dug out this quote from howard snyder's book liberating the church which is still a great quote after all these years...

The church gets in trouble whenever it thinks its in the church business rather than the Kingdom business. In the church business people are concerned with church activities, religious behaviour and spiritual things. In the Kingdom business people are concerned with Kingdom activities, all human behaviour and everything God has made, visible and invisible. Kingdom people see human affairs as saturated with spiritual meaning and Kingdom significance.
Kingdom people seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice; church people often put church work above concerns of justice, mercy and truth. Church people often think about how to get people into church; Kingdom people think about how to get the church into the world. Church people worry that the world might change the church; Kingdom people work to see the church chnage the world.
When Christians put the church ahead of the Kingdom they settle for the status quo and their own kind of people. When they catch a vision of the Kingdom of God their sights shift to the poor, the orphan, the widow, the refugee 'the wretched of the earth' and to God's future. They see the life and work of the church from the perspective of the Kingdom.
If the church has one great need it is this: to be set free for the Kingdom of God, to be liberated from itself as it has become in order to be itself as God intends...

minet park labyrinth

last week's labyrinth was a trial run for today's at minet park festival in southall where grace had been invited some months back to create an outdoor labyrinth. this time we went for a more complicated pattern - the same one as at chartres cathedral. it came out ok though the mower was much harder to control, and the grass was much more scraggy (if you want to mow a labyrinth pick some nice turf). i actually mowed it on wednesday and it had improved somewhat since then so you could make out the path ok... the festival was pretty quiet with a trickle of visitors to the labyrinth so it ended up being a pretty chilled afternoon in the sun. i have added a couple of pics to the labyrinth set in flickr though there was no church tower this time to get an aerial view...

teenage joy - england through to the next stage of the world cup

goal, originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

a house full of teenagers tonight (harry's friends) to see england win their second game. mayhem as england (finally) get the breakthrough!

the convent

the follow up to the monastery takes the same idea only this time 4 women spend 40 days with nuns in a convent. the first programme was last night and was equally as compelling as the monastery. the whole episode is online on the bbc two pages. the nuns were great. they came out with some lovely wise words and offered a quiet strength, showing grace and acceptance. and to state the obvious it was a reminder of how much people need god...

1001

thanks to mark for the tip off about 1001 - a flickr uploader tool from the makers of ecto. i'll give it a try... on the subject of which has anyone tried their other piece of software - endo?

faithful betrayals

managed to catch up with pete rollins at blah in manchester last night along with some other friends from sanctus1 and lancaster. he was presenting faithful betrayals. the notion of a faithful betrayal is that sometimes when god breaks in to our lives it causes such a rupture with what we know that it is like a betrayal. but because god is in it, it leads beyond what we knew before and leads us to see in a very different way. the best example i can think of in the bible is when peter has a vision of animals that are pronounced unclean in his scriptures and in the vision god tells him to kill and eat. if he is to obey the voice of god he will be disobeying the word of god in the scriptures. a dilemma. he does trust the spirit in that situation and it leads to him seeing that the gospel is for the gentiles. that's the notion of a faithful betrayal... the best example i can think of in my own experience was when i read the book don't be afraid any more by troy perry the founder of the metropolitan church (a gay church). in that book there is a passage where the spirit is outpured at a gathering of the denomination with healing, prophecies and so on. when i read it (with my evangelical background) i was shocked - could god really be present in that way in a gay church? it caused the same kind of rupture - i had to radically rethink and find that god was beyond my limited understanding of god. i subsequently attended a service at the metropolitan church in bath where i was at the time - sure enough as far as i could discern god was present and i worshipped there humbled and ashamed of my own prejudices. so faithful betrayal - a term i've not heard before but one i'll remember... musings from roland are on the sanctus1 blog.

i noticed in the build up to blah a sort of anti-intellectual stance emerging from conversations on blogs. i felt a bit sad about that. people like pete are a gift to the church. and he is totally immersed in living out what he is talking and writing about in ikon, a community who clearly want to wrestle with their faith and love ideas as part of that. half of his book describes practice anyway - very unusual for an academic/philosophical book. a split between praxis and thinking is a dualism that i think is profoundly unhelpful... i definitely want to and think the church needs to engage its intellect and its hands and feet as we seek to follow in the way of christ.

obey your television

obey your television