Despite our country’s economic problems, the UK is still one of the wealthiest nations in the world – and it’s easy to dismiss these kind of problems, think they are too big for us and that they aren’t anywhere near our doorstep.

However, the reality is somewhat different.

For the last two years or so I have been heavily involved with a project called the Sutton Foodbank. It’s a project involving many of the churches in Sutton working together, with a desire to serve their community.

It’s part of a larger project run for several years nationwide by a charity called the Trussel Trust, a network of Foodbanks all across the country.

The aim is to provide three days worth of food for those who for whatever reason – benefit delays, homelessness  or any other reason – don’t have any. It’s purpose is not to be a long-term supplement for people, to be an ongoing supply of food, but to stand in the gap when things get difficult.

The first few times I went to the Foodbank to help out, no one turned up. We had a whole load of food, and no one to give it to.

I began to think no one needed our help. Being completely honest, I was glad.

Not just because it appeared like there was no one out there in need, but because I simply didn’t know how I would react when faced with people in such dire circumstances.

But then it began. People started arriving. One, then eventually two, three and sometimes four people each week, as word started to spread.

There was one week in particular where it really hit home though.

A woman came in – for confidentiality purposes I won’t reveal her name. As we sat down and chatted to her about her circumstances, we found out that she was homeless, with mental health issues. She told us that she would be eating her meals in a hospital, because she had nowhere else to go.

This was difficult enough to hear. But there was one more detail.

She didn’t even have any cutlery to eat her food with. No knife, fork or spoon. She couldn’t even eat the food we’d given her, because she had nothing to even eat it with.

I was taken aback.

Suddenly the reality of this whole project hit home.

A woman, from the local area – from one of the richer parts of the country – was not only homeless, not only had no food or money, but also had not even any cutlery to eat her food with.

It was truly shocking. I was deeply moved.

Suddenly I realised the importance of what we do at the Foodbank. I finally experienced at first hand the importance of local mission, and ultimately what it means to participate in serving God even in your own community.

All we could ultimately do at the time was give her a teaspoon to take away with her food – that’s all that was on the location at the time that we could give her – though it meant just as much to her as the food. To her, that spoon made all the difference in the world.

But the situation taught me a valuable and even bigger lesson.

I realised that no matter how prosperous or problem-free we may think our communities are, that there are real people, with real problems, in real need out there.

As people trying to follow the way of Jesus, it’s our responsibility to play our part in serving our local communities.

It might be with a local Foodbank, possibly serving on a local Street Pastor scheme, or something much smaller. If you investigate and have a look around, I’m sure you will find some project in you local community which allows you to play a part – and if there aren’t any, then why not look for a need and talk to other churches about maybe starting something?

It doesn’t have to be full time either – my involvement with the Foodbank takes up about two hours a month, as well as a few meetings dotted over the year. It’s not like you have to give up your job and all your time.

It only takes a couple of hours a month - and it can make a huge difference to your local community.

Like the spoon we gave this woman, it may only be a small thing – but it makes all the difference to the people whose needs it meets – and in the process, you might find that you change as well.

Simply serve. Sometimes it’s all we can do – and it’s all part of our journey of discipleship, making the kingdom of God more of a reality in this world.

As a consequence we ourselves end up becoming a little bit more like Jesus.

This mission story is one of a series of exciting posts about what God is doing up and down the country. Why not browse the archive or even tell me about your own story - I am always looking for new things to share. Mission stories are published each Wednesday.

James Prescott

James Prescott is a writer & creative passionate about helping people discover their identity. He blogs regularly and is a regular guest blogger at the Big Bible and other sites. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

  

The first are those who don’t understand what it is they are trying to communicate. These people either treat the website like an extended noticeboard that happens to be online  or they write content that is more dense and complicated than the worst written Victorian prose.

The second type of people are those who are so aware of the difficulties and challenges of writing content for the web that they decide it is a job best left to highly paid professionals and so don’t bother to write anything at all.

This is a shame because writing really effective content for your church is actually really, really easy. There is only one thing to remember: give each new subject or theme a new page to itself.

Why does this secret work?

The reason why this works becomes clear when you think of something like T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land. One of the most famous poems from the twentieth century, The Waste Land is a sensory and literary feast. It has all sorts of allusions, stories, different voices and narrators. It is hustling and bustling and demands concentration and time and energy.

Which is why it is hard to read. Worthwhile? Yes. Manageable? Definitely. Easy? Not a chance.

When we are writing for the web, therefore, we need to become the anti-T. S. Elliot. We need to make our content lucid and crystal clear. We need to remove distractions from our reader by not making them hold 5 different subjects in their head at the same time.

When someone wants to find out about an organisation or church, they will read their website. When they want to be taken to a higher level of literature, they will read a poem. Don’t try to be a poem.

Instead, treat your reader nicely. Give each new subject a page to itself and write about it in short paragraphs full of easy to read sentences. Make generous use of headings. Don’t make the act of reading your website into one that demands a Masters degree in advanced Norse literature.

Doing this means that your website will be easy to read and your readers will be able to find what they want more easily.

As an added bonus, your website will probably rank higher in search engines because splitting your content up like this is not only better for humans but more effective for computer processing too. Therefore, more users will come in and stay to enjoy your content.

With this simple secret, you can revolutionise the way your website is read and experienced. Why don’t you give it a try – your readers will love you for it.

Tell me about the origins of The Big Bible Project and how you have got to where we are today?

In 2010, in North-East England, The Big Read emerged as an ecumenical initiative, which brought together Christians from across various churches to study Lent for Everyone: Luke – a book written by the former Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright. Rev Dr. Pete Phillips, Director of the Centre for Biblical Literacy and Communication, a part of CODEC (Christian Communication in a Digital Age): a research initiative based at St John’s College in Durham exploring the interfaces between the Bible, the digital environment and contemporary culture.

In July 2009, Bex and Pete got talking – on Twitter, before/during/after #digisymp, an event held at the College. As Pete watched The Big Read – and Biblefresh – emerge, he saw the potential for there to be a national event, and contacted me to see if I’d be interested. In July 2010 I came on board with a brief to “do something digital with Lent for Everyone: Matthew.”

As we recognised that we needed to help people use the digital tools that would help them engage in the conversations, The Big Bible Project was created and The Big Read went digital and national, making full use of the free digital tools which many of us already use in our everyday lives. We have used the fact have little resource to inspire our creativity to find other ways to do things – using free tools, encouraging participation from others…

This year, you are encouraging churches and groups to read through the Gospel of Mark together. Do you have any indication yet of how many people will be taking part and what sort of things people will be getting up to?

If we take a look at last year’s figures: Over 24,000 people engaged on the Project website over Lent, others chatted on social media, 5,000 accessed the book via YouVersion’s smartphone app, and nearly 20,000 copies of the book were sold. There’s an online group being planned by @Layanglicana & @Minidvr, and we’d encourage others to join in/set up their own groups.

We have over 200 people already in the Facebook group, and are starting to get comment on #bigread12 hashtag. Last year we had a “I’m doing it” Google map and are considering re-setting that. We need some measurement to justify what we’re doing to our funders, but to a certain extent we have to let go of the figures and put the material about there. Most attempts to measure exact data make it more difficult to access, and we’re more interested in getting the material into people’s hands than “our brand”.

What is the importance of social media and websites in the Big Read?

We are currently developing our social media layering, but it will be more evident this year. We will be tweeting daily, encouraging comment on the blogs, conversation in the Facebook group. This kind of thing doesn’t happen with one person behind it – a ‘conversation’ requires others to help push the discussion. Millions of people are using these tools daily, and we want to encourage the Word of God, appropriately communicated (as God is a communicating God), to be flooding the online spaces. As Christians it’s important that we seek to do this well, echoing Christian values whilst we do so.

How do you think social media affects/ has changed discipleship and Bible reading in the 21st Century?

We live in a digital age and need to engage with it. Church has always been about people/relationships, so we’re well equipped for the ‘social age’ (but maybe need a bit more training in the digital aspects). Over the past few centuries we’ve allowed ‘Church’ to be defined as geographical/building spaces, and the digital allows us go global, whilst also augmenting local relationships. On The Big Bible Project site we have around 60 people (#digidisciples) blogging regularly what it means to be a ‘disciple in the digital age’.

CODEC research has demonstrated that numbers actively reading the Bible is around 20%. It is only relatively recently that the idea of ‘individual Bible reading’ has become the ‘preferred’ type of Bible reading… and digital tools do make this easier, with tools such as YouVersion and Bible Gateway, but we also have an opportunity here to have ‘bigger Bible conversations’: inquisitive, open, respectful I think is what we’re looking for with The Big Read…. Allowing the Bible to inform and transform our lives.

Have you got any stories of conversations that happened online spilling out into the local communities where people live?

I always see conversations as a blend, and I am quite likely to start a conversation with someone on e.g. Facebook, then continue it at church. It makes it easier to meet new people as you’ve already got a topic to get you going! If you’re talking about things that you are passionate about, that authenticity wins through. I’ve never been good at inviting people to those ‘evangelical events’, but through talking about my church on social media, I’ve had 3 people ask if they could come with me to church! We are seeking more case studies for the #digilit section.

What would be your dream for #bigread12?

That we would get lots of people participating!  That people would think about thought patterns they may have fallen into by staying in their comfort zone, and be prepared to engage with what other Christians think… and maybe also those outside the church!

What plans have you got for the project in the future?

We’ve just been given the Biblefresh content, so are taking the opportunity to clarify our site/structure, to fulfill our aim to encourage and equip more people to engage in ‘Bigger Bible conversations’, and to use appropriate resources (such as those provided by 12Baskets).  We also plan to seek continued collaboration, unrestrained by denominational ties, and work towards more academic research which will have a practical impact!

Come join our conversations at http://bigbible.org.uk

This mission story is one of a series of exciting posts about what God is doing up and down the country. Why not browse the archive or even tell me about your own story – I am always looking for new things to share. Mission stories are published each Wednesday.

Having convinced you all that having an internal story on your website is the only worthwhile way of having a church website, the next obvious question is how this works in reality.

After all, writers are highly paid, skilled individuals who spend years honing their talent: J. K. Rowling did not knock out Harry Potter in half an hour on the bus between Morningside and Leith.

Whilst this is true, writing a story for your church website is a much easier process.

Let me show you how.

It all comes down to finding some key messages

The secret of writing effective content for your website is to make focus on 3 key messages that you want to communicate through every paragraph, page, sentence and headline on your website.

Let me put it in a way that’s easy to understand.

If you could only tell someone 3 sentences about your church that you think it is essential they understand, what would those sentences be?

• That your church is welcoming to strangers, broken people?

• That your church recognises the struggles associated with issues of sexuality and commits to wrestle alongside people rather than condemn them?

• That your church is committed to helping the poor?

• That your church believes that the Bible really is God’s Word and is capable of speaking in living, active, life-affirming and freedom giving ways today?

• That your church holds tight to the important bits but is loose on cultural rules?

The key phrases you choose will obviously change to reflect the community you are writing out of. The important bit is that you have key messages. This makes sure that you are clear about who you are as a group of people and what makes you unique.

Then write your content making sure every paragraph addresses one of these key messages.

Write them out if you need to. Stick them on post-it notes above your computer. Paint them in giant letters on the wall. Do whatever it takes to make sure that these key messages permeate your content at every level.

If you do this, then your story will begin to emerge and a huge burden of the pressure of writing a story will be taken away. You are well on your way to writing killer church website content.

Such thinking, however, is alien both to the concept of church and the reality of how the internet works.

The truth is that we live in a story-saturated world.

It’s not necessary the type of story saturation that we find in a children’s novel, where Frodo and Sam are climbing up the slopes of Mount Doom knowing that the events that lead them there have a crucial and pivotal role in the narrative of the on-going peacefulness of Middle Earth.

Nonetheless, we have all become careful and pertinent readers of the stories that we find on the internet – on a subconscious level, we are aware that the whole design, content and appearance of websites works together to tell us something unique about the website we are reading.

Rather than being an extended noticeboard or classified section, web users are expecting websites to give them immersive, compelling experiences that communicate the value base of a whole organisation.

Example: Apple.com

Let’s take an easy example to see how this works. The Apple website has gone through many changes in the last few years as different products have been launched. However, the website works together as a coherent whole – and very clearly communicates the fact it is Apple’s website.

There is no doubt in the mind of the reader that this is Apple. It can’t be Amazon, it can’t be Ebay and it can’t be Dell. The design, down to the colour choices and shapes of each letter, all work together to tell the story of a company that makes devices aimed at making the everyday lived experience of people simpler, more stylish and chic.

This message is embedded within the content, too.  Apple’s content focuses on the image and feel of its products. The Macbook Air is not a thin tablet that just happens to look good – according to the way the words are crafted together, its slim-form is precisely a function of its beauty.

What the idea of story-telling means for church websites

At this point, you may be reading this article and finding it relatively interesting. You may be unclear, however, what this all means for your church website. Surely story telling is just something to be done by mega-corporations (or at least mega-churches!) who have seven-figure budgets to be wasted on things like creating a story.

You would be wrong.

Let me put it as clearly as I can: without an internal story and identity to your website, there is next to no point in having a website at all – and you will be wasting every penny you have spent on the website.

It is the sense of coherent identity, the realization that there is a story to be told, that encourages people to find out more about your church and to become part of it.

If we stop to think about it, we already know this. Evangelism has never been inviting people to an event, church service or institution. It has never been simply advertising the times of the next tombola. It has never even been simply presenting the facts of salvation as information.

Evangelism is story telling. It is the constant re-telling of the huge sweeping narratives of creation, redemption, judgement and grace – stories full of energy, passion, excitement. It is the echo of the faithfulness of this God in history, the refusal of God to give up on humanity.

And then it is the focusing down of this story onto the local community of the church. It is looking at the huge – and seeing our place in it. When we talk about Evangelism, we are inviting people to come and take part joyfully in this little section of redeemed humanity – to find their place in the story. Why have we lost this art when it comes to designing and writing content for our church websites?

Some practical tips

By now, you are probably convinced of the need to revisit your church website and look at how well and how effectively it is telling the story of your church, how each word and each design element sums up who you are as a community.

To get you started on this, here are some questions, which I encourage you to think about as a church. Write them down, brainstorm them, draw pictures – if needs be, print them out in A2 and stick them above whatever computer the church website is designed on, so that you learn to encapsulate the recounting of your story in every decision you make.

• Who is your church? What sets it apart from the church in the next town, the church opposite the road or another church in your denomination? Is it simply that you have freshly pressed Italian ground coffee as opposed to the instant stuff that those heretics drink – or is there something more going on?
• What makes your church attractive/compelling/interesting? If you could only say two things about what God is doing through your church that get you excited, what would they be? Make these elements the cornerstone of your online identity.
• What’s the big hope for your church? To reach a certain area of the city you minister in? To see a group of people touch and transformed? To be peacemakers to a community wrecked by conflict and divided amongst religious or ethnic lines? These hopes are a central point for your story – they are what the mission of the church is about and what you are inviting people to come and take part in.

As you work through these questions together as a team, you will find more and more questions spring out of them – chase the questions, be relentless in the search for the right words to encapsulate your identity.

Learning to tell your story through your website will always be an imperfect, unfinished task. You will always be able to find better words, fewer words, more precise words, better use of colours, images and fonts. However, the process needs to start somewhere.

Don’t wait until next time you think about doing a web design or when you have time left. The success and effectiveness of your online presence depends on your ability to tell the stories of your community in such a way that people listen. Make it your resolution to start planning and writing this week.

Over the years, the blog dithered around as I experimented with different things to try and find my voice. During that time, I got increasing recognition – some of my posts went viral, including Mark Driscoll on Congregational Governance and 10 reasons why social media matters to your church; and, last autumn, I was honoured to be runner up in the Premier Christian Radio New Media Awards for best under 25s blog.

Now, to mark the beginning of 2012, the blog has reached a new level of maturity as I launch version 3.0 today. Let’s look under the hood to find out what new features this version brings to the table.

New look and feel

Over the last few incarnations, the blog has been moving towards bigger text, chunkier fonts and large images. This is to make the text easier to read. However, this evolution was slow and partial – a lot of clutter and dark themes meant that it continued to feel crowded. No longer – I have been through and ruthlessly axed elements from the page and introduced new elements to break up navigational pathways into clearer steps. Hopefully this should make for a much more comfortable reading experience and reduce the number of distractions that you are bombarded with.

The dark blues and blacks of the colour scheme have become greys, yellows and whites, giving a feeling of space and comfort. The big chunky fonts have been maintained, but they have had a major typographic overhaul to make reading them more readable and pleasurable than ever before.

The DoDifferent logo also received a much needed make-over. The logo has been essentially the same since I first started doing this way back when dinosaurs still roamed the internet, and was beginning to look dated. Therefore, this design boasts a new logo which once again establishes DoDifferent’s reputation for creating new and innovative web designs for churches and charities.

New focus on church web design, good practice and mission stories

One of the hardest things to do when blogging is to find a voice, that thing that sets what is happening here, in this corner, on this website, apart from what is happening and being written on countless other websites across the web.

Over the years, this blog has matured from personal stories to a space for me to work through a change in theological outlook to a place for me to share advice about web design. Now, five years later, it has pretty much found its niche as a place to discuss and demonstrate best practice for church communication, web design and social media. It is a treasure trove of resources for church websites and mission, where ideas can be found and stories of best practice can be told.

Another aspect of this is I am interested in the idea of how the internet can help us communicate what God is doing around the country. Therefore, part of this website is dedicated to telling mission stories of new and innovative things that churches are up to in different places, and this is an area where I am looking to expand.

Therefore, expect to see much more of this sort of stuff in the future – I will also be getting in practitioners, experts and thinkers to discuss what they are learning and thinking about at the moment. My ultimate goal is to drive forward the quality of thinking about church web design and what it means to think about websites and social media as part of the mission of the church.

New mailing list

As part of this goal, I have also formed a new mailing list. Signing up for this will let you in on some of the latest, freshest thinking on church web design, as well as qualifying you for special offers and discounts. Signing up is free, simple and secure – and, if you don’t like it, you can always unsubscribe again.

I hope that this mailing list will become a large section of the new site and create a solid, interested, thoughtful community of people sharing ideas, resources and techniques – together, we can be much stronger, braver and resourceful than if it was just one or two people working on the website. In fact, why don’t you take time to subscribe now and be ahead of the crowd.

Numerous improvements under the hood

From a technical point of view, this website has seen many, many improvements under the hood. Here are just a few:

• the website is now coded in HTML5 and CSS3. What this means is that articles are now described in the code as being articles, citations are now described as being citations etc. This all goes a long way to making the web more relevant, accessible and logical.
• a major overhaul of the WordPress backend to include custom post types and better routing. In particular, the use of custom post types allows me to include different types of content from plain text posts, making for a more flexible, more dynamic website in the future. You can currently see these in action on the portfolio section.
• Easier to navigate archives. The archives now cover a substantial amount of material and this version of DoDifferent makes this material easier to access than ever before, with a categories overview page that describes different categories and what they contain, and cuts deep into the historic material. The aim is that his has reduced the amount of clicks that are needed to get to any one bit of content. Over time, this system will get further refined and spaced out.

Farewell to Internet Explorer 6

One consequence of using all this new technology is that I have now completely dropped all support for Internet Explorer 6 (which was nominal to say the least) and am providing only partial support to Internet Explorer 7 & 8. This is because these browsers are slow and, most importantly, not standards compliant.

Standards are a way of doing things on the web that makes websites accessible, reliable and more technologically advanced. Or, to put it simply: websites designed with standards are just better. It is the difference between a tent bought in a supermarket post-Christmas sale and an advanced, insulated tent bought from an outdoor shop. Both are technically functional, but I would only want to take one with me if I went hiking through the alps.

I put a lot of thought into this decision – especially for IE 7&8, because a lot of people who visit the website still use these browsers. However, I am wanting to do something new and fresh in encouraging people to use web standards to do innovative things with websites. Part of this includes encouraging people to use modern versions of web browsers in order to fully experience what is possible on the web.

Therefore, if you are reading this with Internet Explorer versions 7 or 8, I encourage you to update to the latest version of Internet Explorer or to a browser such as Firefox or Google Chrome. I promise you that this will not just make your web surfing experience faster or more secure, but you will also experience the internet in whole new ways – it’s like making the change from black and white to colour television.

More improvements to come

There are many more improvements to come over the course of the next few weeks including fine tuning, more compelling archive pages, author boxes, better facilities for guest posts and social media improvements. In the mean time, I would love to hear your opinions about the new design, options and ideas for other things you would like to see – simply share them in the comments section down below.

When we were planning our Carol service this year, we asked two community leaders to feedback what they would come to; as they planning process went ahead, however, it became clear that they did not want to come to something, but wanted to run their own thing.

Church or community?

Initially all the Christendom-moulded cells in brain reacted to this badly, but then as I thought about it, and had some conversations with others, I realised that we had to respond positively to this, not negatively. The result is that I threw my energies into the community carol evening. They were keen, in fact amazingly so, to have the traditional story told.

So we will have traditional carols, we will have the Biblical story told (threw Bible verses which me and one of the leaders worked on), I will do a short ‘sermon’/talk on poverty, the local URC minister will say a closing blessing and a offering will be taken to support local homeless charities – both of which are Christian.

So rather than me delivering flyers asking for people to come to our service (which often get a zero response), we will go to the community, we will engage in a service that they have planned, advertised and got others involved in. We have not asked the community to come to any of our services, but on Sunday several members of the local community came along to the carols by candlelight service that we had put on, primarily to keep the church happy.

But not asking people to come to us, they have done, they were of course always welcome to come, but they came because we have gone to them first.

Michael Shaw is a minister-in-training in Bristol, England. He also blogs and tweets at @mikepcshaw

As this in a second language, and one I don’t yet fully at home in. It meant that I had to think about every single word I used, especially in the prayers.

The question that was continually at the front of my mind was ‘how can the story of Advent best be told through everything that happens in this service?’.

I wanted to reflect on the reality and welcome of God even at times when we feel broken, bent, weak and full of worry.

To put it briefly – I had to relearn how to think liturgically.

Amongst the many things this meant yesterday as I was preparing the service was I rediscovered again the power of being reminded in our liturgy that we are coming to worship in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. (‘in Namen des Vaters, des Sohnes und des Heiligen Geist’). Likewise, at the end of the blessing, I sent people out in peace to ‘love and serve the Lord in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit’.

Why does this matter, I hear you cry?

I think it matters for several reasons.

1) God is already near.

Firstly, it reminds us that when we come to worship we come into the presence of the God who is already there. We’re not having to shout up to a God who is distant, removed or angry, but we come into the presence of the living God who has already come near to us.

I lose count of the number of times I’ve heard (and, if I’m entirely honest, I’ve said this too at times) the complain “I didn’t get much out of that worship time”.

Coming to worship in the awareness that we are worshipping in the presence of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit reminds us that we are coming in the presence of the God who is already there.

God is already touching our hearts and lives and minds, already loving and reaching out to us.

It is out of this existing presence that we can pray ‘Come Holy Spirit’ – the prayer isn’t as much about getting God to turn up as positioning ourselves to hear his voice.

The good news of the gospel is that we don’t need to rely on our emotions for the assurance that we’re loved and accepted: we come unashamed into the presence of the God, whether or not our emotions agree.

We step into a dappled pool of divine grace and find living water – and it’s a pure abundant gift.

2) God is already community.

Secondly, we come to worship a God who is defined at the very core of his being by community. We come to worship the Three who are One and the One who are Three.

We come not as individuals but as the family of God’s children, welcomed into the exuberance of the divine life.

A lot of people struggle with the idea of God as being split, the angry God on one hand who wants to sentence people to hell and the victim Jesus who manages to persuade God not to.

But coming to worship in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit reminds us that God already exists in peaceful community, already exists in perfect divine love and that, through the welcome (or mediation, to use the dull word) of Jesus, we can join in this community of perfect love and perfect acceptance.

3) Worship isn’t just something we do.

Another thing of coming together in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is that it is immensely freeing. Not only do we have the comfort that God is already there, welcoming us and loving us and accepting us, we are also swept up in the cosmic drama.

The Reformers often talked about salvation as being joined in the life of Christ – Calvin talked about a ‘glorious exchange’ whereby we are drawn into the divine life of the Trinity by the power of the Spirit (to see this made obvious, just trace the role of the Holy Spirit in Romans 5 through 8).

Because we are united with the Holy Spirit, when we worship, we are taking part in the Son’s adoration and worship of the Father through the presence of the Holy Spirit. 

The Scottish theologian J.B Torrance puts it this way:

[To] participate by the Spirit in the incarnate Christ’s communion with the Father is to participate in the eternal Son’s communion — a relationship which is both internal to the Godhead and externally extended to us by space.

In this understanding of worship, we can discern a double movement of grace — (a) a God-humanward movement, from (ek) the Father, through the Son (dia), in (en) the Spirit, and (b) a human-Godward movement to the Father, through the Son in the Spirit.

This double movement of grace… is grounded in the very… being of God… What God is toward us in these relationships, he is in his innermost being. (From Worship, Community and the Triune God of Grace, Intervarsity, 1996. Emphasis mine)

Worship – it’s all about grace.

Therefore, I was reminded preparing for the service yesterday how worship is entirely a gift of God, entirely an act of grace.

God has already come near, become God with us, made himself near to us.

Because of God’s work, we as children of God are set free and enabled to reflect our gratitude back to God in worship.

That’s why it’s good to remind ourselves that we worship in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – God has given us an abundant gift of life: our only response is to breathe deeply and learn to be children.

By the time he was 12, Patrick Willey was the main carer for his disabled parents in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. Patrick looked after his mum until she died in 1995, but he continued to care for his dad until his death in 2005.  Patrick took the death of his parents hard; he was certain that God was punishing him and began to suffer severe bouts of depression.  Three years later his personal circumstances unexpectedly changed for the worse and as a result he ended up sleeping rough through the winter on the streets of Rotherham.

More than once he tried to commit suicide, but each time, something held him back.  Driven by despair in the early hours of the morning he knelt in the middle of a dual carriageway, waiting to die.  Suddenly, Patrick felt someone drag him off the road onto the verge.  His rescuer told him “it’s not your time yet”, but looking around Patrick couldn’t see who had spoken or stopped him from killing himself, as Patrick says “there was no-one there to argue with”.

Not long after he heard about a place in Rotherham called the Lighthouse; they made him welcome, gave him a warm meal and then some temporary accommodation.  When the Lighthouse became able to independently house homeless people, Patrick was the first one offered a home of his own.

One night as Patrick was alone in his room, he saw a bright orange cross appear on the wall of his room.  In Patrick’s words “I knew I had to get right and the next morning I went down to see Darren (manager of the Lighthouse) and told him.  Before that I respected the Christian stuff, but didn’t believe because of the hatred I felt (toward God).”  It was the first time I ever prayed and I had a feeling like no other, I just knew I had to change now”.

Today Patrick has a real faith in God’s love for him and has been employed by the Lighthouse to mentor homeless men, helping them to learn to live independently and free from drugs and alcohol.  The Lighthouse is able to offer Patrick and eight other men a home because of their partnership with the Christian charity Green Pastures.

Green Pastures is based in small offices in Southport, where the charity manages £18m of property, all used to give formerly homeless people a place of their own.  Green Pastures provides modest properties that are suitable for housing homeless people; bedsits for individuals, flats and houses for couples and families.  Unlike a commercial landlord, it does not ask for deposits and references, which often make it impossible for homeless people to start to rent and because the charity owns the buildings, when one tenant moves on the property is still there to provide accommodation for another person or family.  This means it has the potential to impact homelessness for generations.  What makes Green Pastures unique is the model they use to help local churches and charities reach out to the homeless and poor in their communities.  This is best summed up as Partner, Invest & Give.

The charity supports 29 partners, enabling them to provide independent housing and care to around 400 men, women and children, all of whom were either sleeping rough, sofa surfing or in unsuitable temporary accommodation.  In total since 1999 they have housed over 1,000 people. Green Pastures is also working with another 20 potential new partners that want to house the roofless and rough sleepers in their towns. Partners are carefully selected to ensure they will offer the support that tenants need, this can be assistance with keeping appointments, help in learning to read and write as well as giving people opportunities to tackle the problems that caused them to become homeless in the first place.  Green Pastures and its partners also work closely with social services and other statutory bodies to ensure tenants receive the most appropriate help.  In Stoke they partner with the North Staffs Community Chaplaincy project who provide accommodation for ex-offenders who are being released from the local prison.  NSCC have seen re-offending rates fall to just 12% when the national average is over 60%!  Partnership with Green Pastures has enabled NSCC to offer a real alternative to hostels for ex-offenders, giving them a demonstrably better chance to start again.

Properties are bought through Green Pastures Housing CBS Limited, an exempt charity and an industrial and provident society.  This company issues unsecured loan stock to raise the finance to buy properties to house homeless people.  The company pays 5% interest on these investments and uses the money to buy property.

The final part of Green Pastures model is the gifts made by people, businesses and churches to support the charity.  Green Pastures has some partners like Boaz Trust who work with destitute asylum seekers and refugees fleeing oppression who have no right to UK benefits, but still desperately need accommodation and care.  Gifts enable Green Pastures to provide a home for the people Boaz support, even though they have no means of paying for their housing. Gifts also enable the charity to employ vital partner liaison staff, who help new partners get started and assist existing partners with unexpected difficulties.

Jesus often used the phrase “a time is coming and now is”, which reflects the contrast between the gradual growth of the Kingdom’s influence and its certain fullness.  The outworking of those two themes for Green Pastures is to give local churches the tools to house homeless people in their communities, allowing them to start to take responsibility for the poor.  This is implicitly a prophetic action that influences this present time but also speaks of “Your Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”.  It says “we don’t yet see every expression of the church challenging poverty, but because it is the nature of the Kingdom to reach and transform everything – it must come”.  On the ground it looks like hard work and heart ache and many, many opportunities to give grace to people who by any rational standard don’t deserve it.  But the prize is rescued lives like Patrick’s and a church that believes they can be yeast in their communities.

If you would like to support Green Pasture’s work by partnering, investing or giving please visit www.greenpastures.net 

This was a guest post by Green Pastures. If you would like to write a guest post for this blog, please drop me a line and I would be delighted to talk with you. I am particularly interested in guest posts about web design, theology or stories about what God is doing where you are. 

As someone who has benefitted (if it is right to use that word) a lot from what the modern worship movement, and especially the Vineyard section of it, has to offer, I am slightly ambivalent to the whole discussion, though I can see how it could be a problem

What I found interesting, however, is the juxtaposition between the concern about the over feminisation of modern worship songs and a recent blog post by Mark Driscoll – the Seattle based pastor who is known for having a vendetta against ‘effeminate’ worship songs (and worship leaders).

Driscoll’s article presented his views of what makes a good preacher and, to my eyes at least, presents a far more worrying, far less obvious, form of gender in-balance: the over-masculinization of preaching.

Finding new preachers – ‘American Idol’ style

In his article – and I urge you all to read it before reading further here, as it is important to see the context of these things – Driscoll describes how the church is currently going through the process of finding some new preachers to cover some of the Sundays that he is out of the pulpit, and talking about how they are running an “American Idol” style day where each “contestant” will have 30 minutes to preach in from of “judging panel.”

Leaving aside the question of whether this is an appropriate forum for a church to explore God’s call on someone’s life (I would suggest pretty obviously not),  I was intrigued and slightly worried by some of the criteria that Driscoll laid down for the marks of a good preacher.

Now, in fairness, there are some points where I pretty firmly agreed with him. For instance, having one big idea, make sure you are preaching a sermon not a commentary, don’t show off with how smart you are and don’t fill a sermon with jargon – these are all essential points that need to be said over and over and over again.

Presentation in preaching

However, I was disturbed by some of the sentiments underlying his markers. For instance:

You don’t need to be a model, but you should look presentable. If you have bed-head, your fly open, keep losing your place in your notes, your shoe is untied, your mic battery dies, and you say, “Um,” a lot because you’re unprepared, I may feel sorry for you but I’m not following you because you don’t seem to have a clue where you are going.

Of course, appearance is important. Of course we should treat the opening of God’s Word as a holy and sacred act. However, I think that we should get this into context – there are some great preachers I know who have a lot to say and through whom God speaks his Living Word who, on the basis of their delivery and their presentation would probably fail Driscoll’s sermon test. There is a duty of the preacher to try to communicate without adding in barriers – there is the responsibility of the congregation to listen earnestly for God to speak whatever the presentation.

As a side note, it also interesting to note how many terms the phrase “follow you [the preacher]” appears in the article – would be terribly old school of me to assume the role of the sermon was actually for the congregation to discern the voice of God speaking his fresh word into their situation, rather than to follow this or that preacher?

Truth telling in preaching

Tell the truth and don’t be a coward. Look me in the eye and don’t flinch. Don’t apologize for what God’s Word says—just say it. Say it like you mean it. Say it like it’s true. Sure, I may despise you, but at least I’ll know what God said. Get over your fear of man and assume that I may just hate you.

Again, it’s not so much what this says as the black-and-white nature of it that irritated me. Of course the responsibility of the preachers is to say honestly and truly what God says. However – and it is a big however – I disagree with the assumption that seems to be encapsulated in this statement, namely that such truth telling has to be brash and aggressive. It seems to be faulty logic to think that just because you have managed to offend someone, God’s Word has been spoken.

Preaching as a brawl?

So, anticipate those objections and answer some. Brawl with me a bit, show me you can go a few rounds, get me in a corner, and work me over until I give in and obey God. But, you have to work at it.

This is the point that most irritated me – the idea that preaching should be about brawling, going a few rounds, getting someone into a corner and working someone over is just a total anathema to me.

I would say that it is a pretty fundamental conviction that the gospel of Jesus is one of peace – it is one that looks at a violent and angry world (where verbal ‘brawling’ is a common place activity) and calmly and quietly points to the saviour who invites us to come with him because he has the words of eternal life.

Faced with this, isn’t preaching got to be more about whispers of new creation, promises of new life, shouts of joy and hope and redemption and the message that the grave is empty – and that that very fact is enough to change everything? Have we lost faith in our gospel so much that we have to reduce our proclamation down to shouting and brawling in the hope we can verbally bully someone into right belief and faith?

There are also unhelpful assumptions about authority here. Not only are people more likely to agree with someone in a higher perceived authority (which, of course, is how cults work), but Driscoll aligns disagreement with the sermon to disobedience to God. Surely it is the height of masculine arrogance (not to mention faulty logic) to assume that, just because we say something out of the Bible, it is therefore God’s truth? We need to allow for disagreement with a preacher to not immediately equate to disagreement with God – not just because of human weakness, but for the simple reason of having a healthy spiritual environment.

Authority and power in preaching

These examples point to the heart of what I found so objectionable about Driscoll’s article – the idea that preaching is a power based show of verbal wit, talent and authority. Preaching seems in Driscoll’s worldview to be something down by testosterone filled men who will make the truth become real because they are the best, the most pumped, the most powerful, the most self-assured, the most self-confident, the most eloquent or the most interesting – it’s even there in the whole idea of having a competition to see who is good enough to get through to preaching in the real world.

Perhaps this is why many in the Young, Hip and Reformed movement (of which Driscoll is a part and which is coming up with many similar statements on preaching) are so against women. They have made preaching something so masculine, so tied up with high testosterone levels and aggressiveness and authority that they cannot possibly imaging a woman (especially the highly idealized women presented in Neo-Reformed literature and theology) fulfilling these roles.

We need to get back to remembering that it is the Holy Spirit who does the convicting in the act of preaching a Sermon. We need to remember that authority doesn’t lie in the assertiveness, presence or confidence of the preacher, but rather in the obedient act of the whole church gathering around the Scriptures and expecting God to preach.

Of course how we deliver sermons matter – we should do everything to enable people to come to a place where they can meet God. But we absolutely need to get away from this toxic over-masculinisation of sermons and recover a healthier view of preaching – and that means we need to get rid of the ridiculous, unhealthy, cynical, destructive view of the master testosterone-filled preacher and learn as whole congregations to learn to listen to the voice of God. This image is, quite frankly, un-reflective, un-theological rubbish which is not worth the paper it is written on.

Perhaps when we do that, a lot of the objections to women preaching (which are often couched in terms of the un-Bibilical category of women having authority over men) will go away – one can only hope!

Preaching, after all, is an act of the whole church.