Graeme Codrington's blog

The Archbishop of Canterbury on Global Warming

Graeme Codrington — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:44:06 +0000

This post has now moved to: http://www.futurechurchnow.com/2010/02/06/the-archbishop-of-canterbury-on-global-warming/

Inter-generational vs youth ministry

Graeme Codrington — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:24:40 +0000

Every now again, I interact with youth pastors on an issue that doesn't seem to get resolved. Simply put, it goes like this: should we abandon youth ministry in favour of inter-generational ministry? Or, at other times: should we abandon inter-generational ministry in favour of youth ministry? It's one that goes around one - as long as you're looking for a binary answer (i.e. "yes" or "no").

The truth is that there are at least two keys to solving this one once and for all. Firstly, we need to change our mindset about "models of church". Sure, we should have a model for church, but we should have a mindset that says these models are always fluid, always up for change, always morphing, growing, evolving... whatever verb you're most comfortable with. So, at some stages in your church's lifecycle, there might be a stronger emphasis on family ministry. But, then at another stage, later, there might be a focus on youth ministry. It should ebb and flow.

The second key to resolving this is to realise that church mimics the family (its one of the strongest analogies used in the New Testament, afterall). And in a family, there are some activities that are done together, and some that are done separately. This is true in the church. We need to have both family and youth ministries - some activities together and others apart. Some based on age and lifestage, and some based on our shared identity in Christ.

For some further in depth discussions on this topic, see a great blog post here.

For one of the best new books on youth ministry, check out Andrew Root's "Relationships Unfiltered" (buy at Amazon.co.uk) - and see a review of the book here. For the most amazing set of youth ministry resources, check out my good friend, Mark Tittley's Youth Ministry resourcer website.

Technorati Tags: adult youth youth ministry

The Adoption Option

Graeme Codrington — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 16:35:43 +0000

This post has been moved to our new blog site, and is now available here.

Technorati Tags: adoption testimony theology

Brian McLaren faces criticism for observing Ramadan fast

Graeme Codrington — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:44:02 +0000

Brian McLaren is an author, speaker and activist, well known as one of the thought leaders of the "emerging church" movement. His books have given words to what many people have felt about church, Christianity and Christ-following. I know him personally, and know him to be humble, wise and holy (in the sense that his life is wholly devoted to God).

Brian has recently announced that as of today, he will be observing a month of fasting, joining Muslims around the world as they observe Ramadan. He has not done this is align himself with Islam (obviously), but rather as a way of observing a Biblical command (to fast) and a Christ-like reaching out to others of different faiths. Christ's approach to those of other religions was not confrontation, but rather engagement. It did not involved doing anything opposed to His own faith, but did involve stepping into the world of the "other".

I admire Brian for his desire to build these types of bridges, so that in every possible way he will find a path to bring the light of "Issa al Massi" (Jesus the Messiah, as referenced in Arabic and in the Koran) to Muslims. I see this as being in the Spirit of both Paul and Jesus.

Yet, as you can well imagine, he is opposed in this quest, and his detractors have used to opportunity to (literally) call him apostate and a son of Satan.

Brian's reply is unbelievably gracious and Christ-like. Read it here, and be encouraged that there is a new kind of Christian emerging in the world.

Technorati Tags: apostate Brian Mclaren Emerging Church grace islam ramadan

An amazing reflection on the death of a loved one

Graeme Codrington — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:22:52 +0000

It has taken me five years to realise the gap left by my father’s death will never be filled
by Matthew Parris, in the 12 August 2009, Spectator magazine

It is five years since my father died. I thought I would get over it, but I haven’t. This is not a plea for sympathy — I’m fine, all’s well — but simply an observation, a report. Unusually for a man of 54 I had never, before Dad’s death, lost anyone close; and I had no idea what to expect.

I guessed, though, that the experience would not differ from other violent emotional traumas: first the shock, then a blank aftershock; then busy-ness — displacement activity; then perhaps a relapsing into grief. And after that and over many years a slow but steady process of what sensitive people might call ‘healing’ and the rest of us would call getting over it.

The shock, it turned out, though expected, was the phone-call. At the bedside of a dying man I expected no theatre, and found none. Just as I’d supposed the immediate feeling was only bleak, banal — no trumpets or violins, no wailing or floods of tears, but a kind of bleakness, a grey hour in a grey dawn. And so it proved: the rain coming down softly (I remember) outside in Catalonia. Blank.

Then (I thought) might follow a few weeks’ false-normality: still numb, but with arrangements of a practical nature to busy myself with. One would have too much to do to mope.

And so this proved, too: there’s plenty to fill close relatives’ days when somebody dies, and hardly time to miss the deceased. And it rained at the funeral too, and there were hundreds of Catalan and Spanish mourners to air-kiss at the door of the little church before Dad’s coffin was borne away in the hearse: red tail-lights in the rain. And I still wasn’t feeling much.

But waiting, I suppose, for the lapse into grief: a month or two of wallowing.

This never came. I went back to England and back to work. Ordinary service was resumed. There was no time of quiet, after-the-event confrontation with what I had lost, no delayed grief once I had, as they say, ‘time to grieve’. There we are, then, I thought. One down — and how many more to go? The waters had closed over my father’s head and the ripples subsided. I missed him, of course, but from now on, with each month that passed, I would surely miss him a little less. Time heals all wounds, etc. So now, I thought, begins that famous healing process.

I thought wrong. At least a year after Dad had gone, I started waking up in the night, missing him. Silly, because it’s not as though we were together much after I’d left home, and anyway Dad found all of us — all mankind — intermittently irritating. But I’d lie there and think of the things I might have organised for him; the ways in which his last years might have been made more comfortable. Should he have moved to the seaside, which he loved? Should I have taken him to the opera again? Should I have tried harder to persuade him to accompany me on one of Concorde’s last flights?

It took me perhaps a couple of years to begin fully to understand, with an intensity that grew, that the world had changed when he died; that there was still a big gap where he had been; and that it was not closing over.

And now, five years later, I see clearly that it never will. Now never a week passes — hardly a day — when I do not remember him: see a shoreline and think how he would have liked to walk there; hear some Brahms and remember that he liked Brahms; spot an ocean liner and recall how he would have wanted to take a pointless photograph of it; read an item of news about technological innovation or some new advance in engineering, and think how interested he would be to know of it. Not only in the night, now, but during the day, even at busy times, and at happy times, he enters my imagination, a welcome guest.

Quite simply, he has left a space that will never be filled; therefore he is, paradoxically, still here because the space is still here, and I can feel it all the time. The gap Dad left is not a vacuum, a void, a soft area of low pressure to be filled. The gap is hard-edged, chiselled by him into my life, measured by his worth, and ineradicable.

With this realisation has come another: that this sorrow is not itself a cause for sorrow. Regret is not a cause for regret. We ought to be sorry. We ought to regret. Death is not a ‘wound’ to be ‘healed’ or a ‘scar’ to ‘fade’. Once someone has been in the world, they have always been in the world; and once they have gone their absence will be in the world forever, part of the world; in Dad’s case part of mine. This is a good thing.

How foolish, then, is all this talk of ‘getting over’ death. How empty, how wrong-headed the exhortations we make to those who love us that they should try not to miss us when we’re gone. Why not? You do miss someone you love, don’t you, when they’re gone? How self-negating is the wish that others should not feel sad when they remember us. Of course they should feel sad! They can’t talk to us any more.

It is right that we make an imprint on the minds and lives of others, right that we should be needed while still alive; and therefore right that the imprint remains and the loss hurts, and continues hurting.

So I’ve decided that I don’t want to ‘come to terms’ with Dad’s death. It’s bloody awful that he isn’t here. It still cuts me up, and this is a fact of love. I’m perfectly capable of keeping things in proportion, as Dad always did, but I don’t want to ‘get things into perspective’, if by that one means wanting them to grow smaller. It’s a fact; his life is a fact; the gap now is a fact; it’s not getting any smaller; I’m sad, but I’m happy that I’m sad.

Source: 12 August 2009, Spectator magazine
Matthew Parris is a columnist on the Times.

Technorati Tags: death eulogy loss memory reflection

Keith and Kristyn Getty - modern hymn writers extraordinaire

Graeme Codrington — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:00:05 +0000

This post has been moved here.

Technorati Tags: hymns music worship

Evangelising the generations

Graeme Codrington — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:45:48 +0000

This post has now moved to: http://www.futurechurchnow.com/2010/02/06/evangelising-the-generations/

Technorati Tags: evangelism generation x generations lausanne youth

Homosexuality is 'natural'

Graeme Codrington — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:57:17 +0000

Previously on this blog, I have looked at the various Biblical references to homosexuality. The most compelling argument in the Bible against homosexual behaviour is found in Romans 1. Those who condemn homosexuality find their strongest argument in the fact that it is "para phusin" - "against nature".

This phrase is contested, of course (a lot more contested than most preachers ever acknowledge when they preach against homosexuality). According to Paul, for example, it is also against nature for men to have long hair! In the context of Romans 1, there is also contention in how to translate the context. Paul is referring to people inflamed by lust, who give up their natural instincts and pursue same sex encounters without love and "against nature".

One of the foundations of this argument has always been that we don't see homosexual activity in animals. But this is not true. Recent research indicates that thousands of animal species exhibit homosexual behaviour. Read one hews release here and an older medical report here. This includes animals as "advanced" as dolphins, deer, lions, swans, and primates. And it is not "aberrant" behaviour, but natural in response to a variety of circumstances, including overpopulation (as humans are experiencing in most countries around the world), gender imbalances (as China is now experiencing with 40 million more young men than women), and threats to societal harmony.

One of the most interesting animals is black swans, where male homosexual swans will often "kidnap" a cygnet and raise it. Swans, of course, are monogomous throughout their lives. Even more interesting is that the research shows that animals raised by homosexual or lesbian parents fair better on average than those raised by a male-female couple.

This is not proof that God designed homosexuality, of course. Nor is it proof that humans are allowed to be homosexual. But, it does destroy a major argument that people who want to stand against homosexuality have used in the past. That argument is no longer available to them.

Technorati Tags: bible interpretation homosexuality interpretation

Use and abuse of the Old Testament

Graeme Codrington — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:43:39 +0000

A theme on this blog is how we intepret Scripture, and how our interpretations have shaped some really bad practice by the church. Well, more for fun than for serious comment, here is satirical newsman, Jon Stewart commenting on Governor Mark Sanford's selective use of the Old Testament to hold onto his position - as Governor and in the Republican party.

Although satirical, Stewart's comments about how selectively Christians use the Bible are well made - and should be listened to by the church!

See the video below - or at the Daily Show website here.

Technorati Tags: bible interpretation deconstruction Global view humor old testament politics republican

The Jesus Manifesto - by Len Sweet and Frank Viola

Graeme Codrington — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:36:21 +0000

I was sent an email today that contained an excellent manifesto from one of my favourite thinkers and authors, Len Sweet.

It's titled: "A Magna Carta for Restoring the Supremacy of Jesus Christ
a.k.a. A Jesus Manifesto for the 21st Century Church"
by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola

You can read the original at their blog: http://ajesusmanifesto.wordpress.com/

It really is worth it. Thought-provoking and powerful. I like it a lot, and think we need to take our Christ-centric nature more seriously.

Technorati Tags: Christianity Church Emerging Church jesus theology