if you were at spring harvest...

if you came to the teaching that joy and i were doing on the theme of apprenticeship/discipleship i have uploaded our slides for you to download as a pdf file apprentice. i really enjoyed working with joy - we were very different stylistically (- spot the difference in our slides!) but i think that difference brought very different edges.

if you came to the sessions i led on prayer, my wife jenny is better in this area than me. a few resources you might like that she has written are tune in chill out, and heart soul mind strength. you can download the breathing prayer here and there are a couple of examens here. sleeping with bread was the book i mentioned on the examen.

if you came to the worship we led, we loved having you there. grace has an archive of prayers and liturgies some of which we used - see wounded and slow for example. and i run a series of worship tricks - 1 | 2 | 3  which you can scroll through for ideas. if you had to describe the worship i guess it was contemplative but it comes out of a movement known as alternative worship. i have co-written a book or collated a book called alternative worship. and in recent years proost is a web company i help run that has a ton of resources - music, books of liturgies, and movies. harry was amazing this week and people loved his poetry, half of which was written on site. he goes under the name dubb and is on myspace here. i think we invented a new genre of worship mixing chants with rapped invocations! we will be putting an album out on proost of his stuff in the summer. laurence keith goes under the artist name harronell - his music is beautiful and he has an album harronell on proost that you can buy to download. listen to the track archangel on his myspce - one of my favourite tracks of last year.

if there was anything else we did that you want to know where to find it let me know in a comment or e-mail.

i work with cms and chatted to lot sof people about the current exciting shift to community

it's the first time i have been at spring harvest for 7 or 8 years i think. for those of you who haven't come across it, spring harvest is an evangelical mainstream christian festival. it caters for families really well with a very good childrens and youth programme. then there's a mix of bible teaching, seminars, and a celebration in the big top with lots of singing, preaching and all that (i was in the bar last night having my own celebration as chelsea beat liverpool so brilliantly at anfield!!). it won't surprise those of you who know me if i say it's not where i am most at home these days. in fact i feel like i hardly connect with this world - i don't even know any of the songs. and it seems pretty similar to when i was last here. the worship we were doing was on the edge, an alternative - always a place i feel more at home. called reflective readings we attracted a crowd who really didn't like the big top either because of taste, or because it was simply too noisy. we ended up with an older crowd but we so enjoyed them - they didn't have any of the usual postmodern angst!! a highlight was an evening where we went and lit a fire and built a cairn on the beach...

Comments

[Robb]

Interesting about the crowd. We had a very similar experience when we first started experimenting with Alt Worship in our local parish church [seem like a lifetime ago]. The people who came were predominantly retirement age+.

[Mike and Dave]

the difference in slides is hilarious! presentation is 100% of the message! - mike

[Simon]

Wow... I've just come back from doing similar stuff at SH (although not the worship). It's really encouraging to hear they let you do your stuff, because SH is so self-consciously monochrome it's incredible. I met many people who are part of this tradition but just happen to express their faith in a non-prescribed way. And there are even more people there for the wonderful children's and youth work, but who don't personally identify with the spirituality on offer. Choral evensong would have been a blessed relief... But it gives me great hope that Grace was there - I just wish there had been something similar in Skegness!

I was working with Mark Greene from London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. He's an ex-Ad Man, so his visual stuff looked like yours, whereas mine looked like Joy's (so it may be temperament, rather than generation). On the third and fourth days the PowerPoint broke halfway through and we had more comments afterwards on how wonderful it was to be able to concentrate on the people presenting rather than the visuals than we ever had on their greatness or otherwise. 'Presentation is 100% of the message': if this is so (I doubt it), what does it say that we draw attention away from real, PRESENT people and towards mediated images?

[jonny]

thanks simon... our projectors were rubbish so you could hardly see my nice slides anyway! i wasn't in any way meaning to be negative about joy. she was a great communicator - no notes, totally on her material, and really good to work with. my point was that it was enjoyable working with someone who had a different style and imagination to me, and i think the difference enriched the presentations.

[Tim Smith]

I really enjoyed the sessions you and Joy did at SH, it's a shame I missed the first one. Thank you for the work you put in.
Like you I enjoyed some of the other expressions of worship. The All-Age Worship with John Hardwick ( www.johnhardwick.org.uk ) was great for us as well as the children. His poem with actions 'Good Friday was a sad sad day' was far more moving than I expected.
Steve Leach was also a very different expression of worship with dance music. Maybe not something I would do every day but I'm very glad I went along
I came along to grace a couple of years ago and will make the effort to come along again.
Tim

[Alison Parker]

Hi there, Jonny,
I Came to all but your first learning zone session and really benefitted from them. I missed the first one 'cos I'm an activist, but the activist sessions were too unengaging for me. Enjoyed the Alternative worship too very much. I am a little younger than your average crowd last week at the age of 49. I'm a methodist minister in Basingstoke. Still my reason for posting a comment here is 'cos I promised my friend Heather I would thank you for all your efforts especially the last service on Wednesday night. She is in her 70s and a bit technologically challenged.
Yours in Christ,
Alison

PS My husband (A Pragmatist/Theorist) also came to the last two evenings.

[David Derbyshire]

Sorry I missed you at Spring Harvest. I went to the second week as all the three birth chalets in the first week had gone. I have just blogged about my time there. I only went to the Big Top once and apart from the artwork there was not that impressed. But I thought the PrayerHouse was very good indeed. I think you might have connected with that.

[jonny]

thanks david - yes i know some of the people who were doing the prayer house in the first week - it sounded good.