The Grove Is On Fire

Job: Residential Coordinator - Youth For Christ

This job was advertised by the head of YFC on Twitter as "Run Fort Rocky & have the most fun & preach the Gospel." Blurb:

We are looking for an energetic evangelist with excellent interpersonal skills. We are looking for someone full time, with a passion and a gift to communicate with young people and an ability to lead and recruit a highly motivated team of volunteers to coordinate and deliver residentials for Youth for Christ including the Fort Rocky project. The successful candidate will be highly personable, a creative problem solver and have the ability to manage projects and communicate clearly.

Closes 1^st of Feb.

Teenagers are Desperate for Good News

This is the best sort of righteous fury rant one that centres on telling people the good news of Jesus.

A Non-Comment Policy

You know what's rubbish? Going to a website and seeing a dozen entries in a row all with the text "comments (0)" at the bottom. It's like walking down that street in your town centre that used to contain shops and businesses but now the Woolworths is boarded up and even the pound shop looks empty. What's even worse is the occasional entry with one comment. You click on it and it's someone saying "great post!" or "I know!" or "I have a great Russian based pharmaceutical website". That's like seeing a light on inside Woolworths and finding out it's just sunlight glinting on the broken pick 'n mix display. The point is, having comments enabled on a website rarely adds anything attractive for a person visiting the website. Having zero comments obviously adds no content. Having one comment adds the promise of more content, but then you click through and find your journey wasted.

But isn't this quite a low view of your website and your readers? Sure, if no-one ever comments and when they do it's nonsense then comments are pointless, but you reader are going to find intelligent things to say frequently enough right? Let's assume that happens, say a thriving comment community develops. Now every article contains the text "comments (14)" at the bottom. Now when you finishing reading an entry you have to decide whether to click afterwards on the link to read the comments. And when you have to make that decision you've immediately lost the elegance of knowing once you're read the entire front page you've read all the recent content there is. There isn't one page to read, there are however many articles with comments greater than zero pages to read. And that may not seem like much of a hassle but it's hassle I'm not bothering people with.

They aren't the only reasons though. A reason I probably take too much pride in is that it's nice that every single word on this site that is not in quote marks was written by me. It means I can't blame someone else for what I say; I have to take responsibility for it. But more it means everyone knows who wrote this content here.

There are other things too, all the niggles. Spam comments, offensive comments, comments that aren't technically spam but are nonsensical. Ethical problems with deciding whether things get culled or don't get culled. When a big part of this website is collecting and curating things that are interesting, having to do that to comments that turn up becomes a real effort. These things are a hassle that I can't be bothered to deal with.

But what about a right of reply? Well, obviously you can reply, but you might have to do that by email, or on your own web site, or via twitter. And I'll probably reply to you, or link to you, or quote you in full here. And then we'll actually be having a thought through conversation. It'll be nice.

Practical Theology of Youth Ministry Training Day

CYM and King's College London are hosting a training day on practical theology and youth ministry on Tuesday the 12th of March at King's College in London. As you might have guessed I imagine I'll disagree with at least some of what's being presented here, but that's partly why I maybe going along.

2012: Year Of Youth Work In Preview

January: The last two weeks of January see your youth club win a once in a life time trip to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. You don't spell this out clearly in the consent form, leaving two mothers and a nan standing outside Iceland for three days wondering why their children weren't there.

February: Your minibus breaks down, the parts that need replacing are the alternator and cambelt and you'll need to jump start the engine (remember the battery is under the seat). Unfortunately you'll forget this prophetic knowledge untill after you break down. Still, at least now you can be more confident speaking to the AA.

March: Justin Bieber comes out. Of hiding! To publicise his 9th album Justin Bieber goes into Where's Wally style hiding with whichever fan finds him winning a life time supply of phone calls to friends proving that they've met Justin Bieber (he's a big fan of Dostoevsky, who would have thought). He gives up after two weeks when his Kindle battery finally dies. Practically for you, this means those three fourteen year old girls can finally attend youth club without turning over the entire church building just in case he's hiding under the pews.

April: Being cool goes out of fashion. Seeing as your entire outreach ministry is based around being cool you're forced to radically rethink how you do things. You try not being cool for a bit, but that's considered cool, and so out of fashion.

May: Camarthenshire, Northumberland, and the London Borough of Barnet are the last councils left funding youth work. This leads to mass immigration, giving Northumberland the highest ratio of youth worker to young person ever. It also means the Berwick Upon Tweed Argos never has any table tennis equipment in stock.

June: Finally, the new pool table arrives. Except it's a swimming pool in the shape of a table. Confusion reigns as you can't return it. But then the young people being young people come up with a brilliant new game that combines the best of pool, the best of water polo and the best of that game where you have to hook ducks with a fishing rod in fairgrounds.

July: As exams come to a close the greatest change in schooling in the history of the world happens, completely ruining your entire schools work plan. However as this year in preview concerns youth work not schools work we're not at liberty to tell you what happens.

August: After watching hours and hours of the Olympics your young people become obsessed with trying out these new sports. To save money you use the same equipment for fencing, javelin throwing, and the pole vault. This is a terrible idea.

September: The great mystery of the pool table is solved when you come to open up the baptistry and find instead a pool table built into the floor below the pulpit. You can't get it out, so you make the best of the situation and baptise the people in the youth centre pool table. A few weeks later you find the church warden sneakily improving his putting on the baptistry.

October: Call of Honour Battle Warfare Ops II is released. Your boys work starts to shut down as more and more teenagers stay in playing online. You buy a copy so you can continue your series "temptations we all face" over XBOX live. Turns out one temptation we all face that you hadn't written a session on is rage-quitting team firefight when your so called team-mates repeatedly snipe you in the back of the head while pretending they haven't turned friendly fire on.

November: Your numbers still haven't picked up since the April cool debacle. And then realisation dawns, it wasn't that cool isn't fashionable anymore, it's that you being cool isn't fashionable anymore. You resign.

December: Yourself to getting old. Sorry. You resign yourself to getting old. Phew. You still manage to finish the year with a job.

Three Mantras From the First Two Years

Slightly off topic –if there is such a thing for this blog– but I found this article about what a school's learnt from giving every child an iPad fascinating.

Inspiring Teenagers To Read The Bible

My friend and yours (well, not necessarily I guess) Nate Morgan Locke writes on how to encourage your young people to read the Bible. Good for those who've just started to read the Bible through in a year.

New CCF Aims and Funding Streams

The Church and Community Fund, a Church of England funding body, has just opened up to applications under its new aims. If you're building up a Church of England church in its mission to your local community and you need money to strengthen or grow this, then it's probably worth taking a look.

How Do You Begin Your Day?

If your experience of getting up is oh look at this social media that's appeared on my phone then this article is helpful. (via)

Why and How to Read Calvin's Institutes

Do it! What he fails to mention also is because the Institutes is translated it's much easier to read than many early English theologians (John Owen, I'm looking at you here).