The Grove Is On Fire

Anti-Social Behaviour

In this last month both Frank Dobson (MP, Labour, Right Honourable) and George Lee (Candidate, Conservative, Subject of Cringe-worthy Media Campaign) have sent pre-election letters to my house, both accompanied by surveys asking us to list what is wrong with our area. Both of them single out anti-social behaviour as an ill of society, George Lee going as far to list it as one of the options to choose when I pick my top five most feared crimes. I'm slightly worried by this trend, partly as a youth worker, considerably as a Christian, but mostly as a very anti-social person. If the next government –whoeverthatis– is going to criminalise anti-social behaviour even further then I need to start cutting out the following behaviours:

• Checking Twitter on my phone over dinner.
• Only speaking to people I already know at a party.
• Avoiding making conversation with people in queues.
• Not always having a shower in the morning.
• Singing out of tune.
• Flagging a bus down when you're the only person at the stop, getting on it, realising you've not topped up your Oyster card, and getting off it again.
• Not following who's still in Britain's Got Talent and X-Factor.

Bible-Centred Youth Worker Conference 2010

Should have mentioned this at the start of the week but I'm currently away at the Bible-Centred Youth Worker Conference. Hopefully lots of holy stuff to follow but so far the most telling moment on who's at this conference; when on the first night the leader said "and now we're going to turn to God" an even split of people lent forward to pray, picked up their bibles, or got themselves ready to stand and sing.

Teenage girl: Alpha has 'cult element'

So a teenager from an unnamed school wrote in her school magazine on her concerns with the Alpha course in her school. Two thoughts; first, large parts of Britian find the idea of trying to persaude someone else that Christianity is true outrightly wrong. The second is that we still generally have freedom to disagree publically on these matters.

E-Mail Feedback

It's been drawn to my attention that I'm a complete and utter moron. On an unrelated note, it's also been pointed out that untill recently any e-mail sent to me from the address given on the about page failed. Fairly poor there. So if you sent me an e-mail in the last few weeks via there, send it again, through the now all working, all singing, all standing in the corner of a room while everyone else dances, . Or don't. Whatever.

If It Makes You Dappy

So, this guy called Dappy in a band called N-Dubz abuses someone he's never met by text message after standing up with Ed Balls last year saying that text message bullying was wrong. I have nothing to say about this.

(Also; is cyber-bullying the only place where the word cyber is still used?)

CRBs and People Who Don't Live In Britain

The Diocese of London have produced some quite handy guidelines about how you go about doing criminal record checks for people who haven't lived in the UK for more than a year (pdf).

Finding Meaning in the Pentateuch

I'm getting this book as a late Christmas present, and it's interviews like this one in Christianity Today that persuaded me this was a very good idea.

I wrote my book in part to show my friend and others like him that serious scholarship leads one to find Christ in the Old Testament because he is really there. The author of the Pentateuch put him there when he wrote the book. I've found that if you show someone that Christ is really there in the Pentateuch and the Old Testament, they will come back to see more--not merely because they have come to revere the Pentateuch as a foundational book, but more importantly because they want to see more of Jesus.

The Bible's 63,779 Cross-References

This is pretty sweet and very beautiful though you wish you could see labels on the data.

Mark Driscoll: Schools Worker

And it's relieving to know, we all have probably done assemblies like he has.

2010: A Year of Youth Work in Preview

January: Apple launches some new product or something or other, in the rush to secure one, which is definitely needed because it will definitely make you definitely more relevant to the young people, you crush four other local youth workers and two curates. On the surface you apologise, but on the inside you secretly hope their young people will now come to your youth group. On the inside of that you hope they won't come this week, because you'd like a quiet night so you can play with your new iWhatchamaclit.

February: Valentines day, no-one turns up. You panic, have all the young people got girlfriends and boyfriends that they are on dates with? No, it just turns out that when you do a talk on dating and have to say the word "sex" you get all embarrassed and go a bit red and stumble over the words, and this year none of your young people want to put you through that again.

March: The Anglican Church schisms! Matters of biblical interpretation, sexuality, and gender are put aside as the church divides into two clear camps. Those against the use of "your mother" jokes in family services are best represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury in his masterpiece of a sermon on "Ephesians 5:4". The Archbishop of York in Exile surprises everyone by saying that he's heard that sermon before, apparently from your mother.

April: The new Doctor Who series starts and your youth group is empty for two Saturdays in a row. You decide that the time of people not Jesus pretending to be Lord of time is enough, and embark on creating your own time-travel device to go back in time and replace the Doctor with a more wholesome programme. After three failed attempts the flux capacitor finally works and you return back to 2010 triumphant only to realise it was due to your meddling in the past that Torchwood now exists.

May: Has a bank holiday at the start AND the end of it. TRY TO REMEMBER THIS THIS YEAR.

June: The third Twilight film comes out and your youth group is empty for three Friday nights in a row. You decide that the time of immoral films is enough, and embark on filming your own wholesome teenage drama sensation. Sevens weeks of non-stop work later and the rough cut sitting in iMovie looks remarkably like High School Music 2. According to the one young person still coming to the youth group you drag yourself away from your film to run, that's the worst of the High School Musicals.

July: In a new record, it's the 28th of July before you have to move youth club into a nearby dilapidated portacabin while the church repairs the damage caused while playing a messy wide-game in the vestry.

August: Soul Survivor only introduce one new song this year, which surely means that this year your youth group will definitely learn to play it well and also definitely not only play that one song...

September: Youth slang development suddenly takes a dramatic acceleration leaving you and your young people baffled with what everyone else is saying. The only person who can cope with this is the sixty-eight year old grandmother who volunteers on a Thursday, who it turned out never knew what anyone was saying anyway.

October: Thousands of pilgrims flock to see the famous marble carved Deepdale Mary weep tears of blood. The local church is thrown into controversy when it's revealed by the press that it's all a scam to boost tourism and tomato juice sales. The Bishop of Sheffield gives a sermon on the evils of using the holy mother like that. He's welcomed into the Your Mum's Church of England the next day; the Bishop of Sheffield in Exile saying ruefully "it was just too easy to pass by".

November: Sudden heavy snow leads to the closure of all roads in you area during youth club, and none of the parents can arrive to pick up their kids. Stuck between sending your kids home in the arctic conditions or having them stay over night without parental consent you start to panic. Fortunately, you're still meeting in the dilapidated portacabin and over the last two months the young people have built up a level of cold tolerance that even an eskimo would be proud of. They all skip home cheerfully.

December: Former young people David Cameron and Gordon Brown are shocked to find themselves barricaded in John Lewis fighting off hordes of the undead in the much over-hyped zombie apocalypse of 2010. Striking up an amusing antagonistic buddy relationship, they battle their way through to Waitrose and escape through the "buy now pick up later" pick-up point. When asked by the press how they managed to get through, David Cameron responds by saying "well, he was only three days from retirement, and I knew I he couldn't buy it now." The interview fades out as Gordon Brown jovially wrestles him to the floor, breaking his now best-friends fibula in three places with a well placed boot.

Let It Snow

Snow teaches us of the new creation.

For the last two or three winters I've seen this is a picture of the renewal of creation - and that's just added to my excitement. A world which is recognizably our world will be transformed into a wonderland of beauty and delight. The dirty and drab will be transfigured. Everything will be made new. How can this be? I don't know. But the falling of snow is perhaps a faint picture of the possibilities.

Job: Youth Outreach Worker - The Church in the Westlands

There's a job up for grabs in Newcastle-Under-Lyme (or that place that runs into Stoke on Trent as it's sometimes called) for a Youth Outreach Worker. You'd be working for an Anglican church in partnership with a Methodist church, and also have the joy of getting to know my sister-in-law's parents. This is the advert and this is the job description.¹ The closing date on the advert is wrong, as this is the second time of asking, I don't know when they new one is, but I'm guessing in the next month or so.

¹ It's always a sign of a good place to work when there is a written job description as well as an advert. There is a good chance they actually know what they want you to do.

Late-Night Teens 'Face Greater Depression Risk'

Apparently if teenagers go to bed at a decent time they're going to be less depressed. As John Piper says – and I'm paraphrasing here– No Friggin' Way.