The Grove Is On Fire

The Law/Gospel Rant

This is brilliant, and true, and something I need to remind myself of everyday; it's all the gospel. Getting this makes the difference between producing life or death in your ministry.

"Remember this: Discipleship will put you in despair without the Gospel. Discipleship that's rooted in law will just drive you into despair or Pharisaism. Discipleship needs to grow out of the Gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit magnifying Jesus and the love of God. You can recognize law preaching because it's always full of references to the Bible being a 'handbook for life,' full of principles for a successful life. If your Bible is just a handbook for life, throw it away.

"The Bible is the story that delivers us the Gospel. It's point is to get you to Jesus, the one mediator between God and man. It's a big book to get you to a short message. You buy the whole field, but the treasure is the Gospel, not the book of Judges or financial principles from Proverbs. Once you have the Gospel right and you know what preaching is all about, then you can read and preach Leviticus or Malachi or whatever you want, as long as Jesus is in his proper place and the message is the Gospel, not the law, or the old covenant, or this week's good advice.

"I really think we have an army of preachers who think that people ought to come hear them 'preach' about various life questions and issues. How to have a great family. How to get along at work. How to use money. How to discipline kids.
Why would I want a preacher to tell me anything about these things? Why are preachers talking about sex, politics and what Jesus wants you to eat? Can anyone admit that the preacher's ego is often inflated to dangerous level when we let his/her advice about politics or parenting become legitimate material for preaching.
Preach the Gospel, brother. Then sit down, be quiet and let's do something else. We can pray, sing or go eat. All good.

"The Bible is about the Gospel. You are about the Gospel. Give me enough of the law to make the Gospel good news, though I'll admit I'm not one of those people convinced that we need to try and recreate Bunyan's conversion. I'm with Spurgeon on that one. Our job is to keep the Good News out there."

And then later:

Law youth ministry is a waste of your time. If all you're doing is trying to make kids behave, make good choices and buy into the church as a place to hang out, then by all means, get another job. Or be honest and just say you're a moralistic therapeutic babysitter carrying out the wishes of the church to not have any kids make bad decisions.

(via from whom I pretty much just copied everything for this link)

Texting Raises Crash Risk 23 Times

Really, the title says it all, but if you want to read the research, here's the New York Times reporting on it.

Official Hashtags

If you're

1. A geek
2. On Twitter
3. At Soul Survivor this year

then you'll be pleased to know that the official Soul Survivor hashtag is #soulsurvivor. Unsurprising there then. Also, point of pedantic note, if you use the word "soul survivor" in your Tweet, you don't need to hashtag it with #soulsurvivor. That goes for everything.

Agents of Atlas Not To Be Cancelled

If you even have the slightest interest in comics, then this is brilliant news. Agents of Atlas, the best comic going at the minute isn't going to be cancelled. The first six books should be coming out in paperback in the next few months, or you just start buying now. Alas, if only we were still in the 80's when young people where still buying comic books I could somehow claim this was research.

Ring-Tailed Lemur

Keep Councils Out Of Youth Clubs

Here's an article where a Conservative Councillor argues that councils should stay out of youth clubs. It's one of those articles where the comments can be as informative as the article and where it's a useful read because it tells you the opinions of some people, not because they're necessarily right. Interesting if your work involves government funded youth clubs (via).

American Idol - Where the Self-Esteem Movement Meets Simon Cowell

I'm a sucker for a well-written article about the failure of self-esteem and so here's a man called Winston Smith writing one.

Wet

The Grove Is Still On Fire

It was, a year ago to the more or less day that I launched this website, for better or for worse haphazardly firing out words about youth work and other such stuff. This is what I promised last year.

They'll be no 'resourcing' here, no informative sessions plans or curriculum built around self-esteem and the book of Judges, just links to things that might be helpful and tirades into the ether.

So, this is what this is then; a weblog about doing Christian ministry with young people from me, a youth worker from a reasonably reformed evangelical background.

Apart from the incorrect use of the Oxford comma, I'd like to think I've very irregularly kept to what I stated there, though at some point I'm sure we could all do with a few articles on how we can learn how absolutely amazing we are from the book of Judges. Irregular is the correct word though, it turns out the website I want to write takes more time than the website I can write. It also turns out that being married takes up a lot of time, and it's probably the wiser and more joyful investment. All that said it's been quite fun writing this and shall hopefully carry on that way, and as I reflect back on the year that's been and slip into rose-tinted rhetoric mode, I can't help but... oh whatever. Here's stuff I'm particularly proud of over the last year:

• An Open Letter Of Complaint To Nandos. Or where Mark has a strop about the heat of Nando's food (still relevant, I went there yesterday and extra hot couldn't set fire to a dried out pyromaniac).
• Preaching and Not. Or where Mark complains about the lack of people using the word unction when it comes to small groups.
• Translating the Qu'ran. Or where Mark points out how it's apparently alright to translate the Qu'ran to fit what people want to here now.
• Kids, Here Is How To Use A Condom. Or where Mark doesn't actually explain how to use a condom, but does talk about legalism
• 1 Thesstians. Or where Mark rewrites the Bible current youth work methodology.

The archives are over here as always if you want to plough through some of that stuff, or you can wait for the made for TV adaption to come out some time next year where Brad Pitt will be playing everyone not me, so that even when they get a big name star to play me I'll still look appropriately mundane.

Charities Public Good Test Is [Possibly] A Waste Of Time

The Charities Act 2006 introduced a requirement for existing charities to demonstrate that they are providing public good.

I'd completely forgotten about this, but the government hadn't. The Church mouse has some of the low down on the recent trial of it. In short, there is no reason to worry about it if you're a Christian charity, but it's worth being aware of.

Youth Work In the UK

Ian Fry gave a talk on the state of youth work in the UK a while back that I missed because I was on a boat. I've just found some notes on the talk, which makes me more annoyed that I wasn't there, because it sounds like interesting stuff. (Aside, Ian Fry is apparently leaving Oak Hill and being the head of their youth work training to go work for a church somewhere. No idea who's going to replace him.)

A Toast To This Most Maligned Of Theologians

Happy belated Calvin Day everyone!

The best French person ever, just got slightly more dead.

Amy Carmichael's Dream

Greg Stier has an account of a dream

Amy Carmichael was a missionary to India in the late 1800's through the early 1900's. Read this moving and convicting dream that she had about the church's reponsibility to rescue the lost. Powerful.

Assumptions and Worldviews

Matthew writes about the underlying assumptions of the new Torchwood series. First, the new Torchwood series is astoundingly not bad. It's not even average. Apart from the last five minutes of every episode where they seem to feel compelled to rush to throw the heroes into mortal danger, it's pretty brilliant. Second, Matthew's right with his criticism of the whole Dr Who universe; it places knowledge of creation as its object of worship.

Dealing With Forced Marriage

This is news to me at least, the government has an initiative set up to combat forced marriages and protect those who might be force into them. Last year 1,600 suspected cases were reported (with presumably many more unreported) and a large amount of them involved young people. They've just released a massive guidance document (pdf) that if you're really geeky you can read, but the advice for youth workers is essentially be aware of it and then treat it as you would any other child protection incident where there is risk of immediate harm.

Job: Hilton Church Youth Worker - Inverness

There's a job going in Inverness to be a youth worker for somewhere called Hilton Parish Church, the details are on the advert.

(Aside: I went to Inverness about three weeks before I launched this website, and as I wandered around the area I had a great vision of God coming down to Noah and commanding him to build a skate park for the local youths, and it was then I decided to name this website buildaskatepark.com. Alas, that domain name was being squatted on which was a fair sign it was less a vision and more an over-active imagination caused by too much miserable weather so I went for the Byker Grove reference instead.)