The Grove Is On Fire

75 Ideas For Reaching Out Into The Community

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Last Saturday I had the privilege of doing a workshop on "Five Ideas For Reaching Out Into The Community" for Growing Young Disciples. The big point was to keep the good news of Jesus Christ central to you so you share it and are encouraged by it. The side point was to realise that any idea might be good or bad. Does it enable you to intentionally sharing your life and so the gospel with people? Great! But keep the gospel central. The presentation slides are here if you want to see them (they're converted into plain webpages).

Anyway, recognising that there were masses of people at this event and so struggling to make it interactive I thought the best thing would be to crowd-source as many ideas as possible to reach out into the community. After all, if the point isn't so much the idea as trusting in God's goodness for us and doing what seems like it would work, my five ideas aren't going to be any better than anyone else. So here are a list of 75 ideas that have been tried or at least thought about being tried by the various people at this workshop, as copied out from various scraps of paper by me (therefore all errors or parts of incomprehensibility are entirely my fault).

75 Ideas:

• Just gossip the gospel
• Set up a café event weekly for a particular area of unreached community (e.g. internationals) to get to know them and talk about the gospel / invite church events
• Baking party
• Neighbours coffee morning
• Skills help us cooking / computers skills
• Hand out marshmallow eggs at easter and putting a scripture verse on it with your church name
• A series of language classes called "find out more about... life in the UK, the christian faith, etc..."
• Have workshop events with workshops for different skills and run by people who can be Christian role-models
• Sending someone an encouraging prayer / bible verse text or facebook message
• BBQ outside church
• Serving coffee and tea outside
• Bible book group at Costas
• Carol singing and leafleting
• International night
• Barbecue outside church
• Bible reading challenge
• Films and food night
• Starting a game of frisbee / crocker in the park with your youth group and invite others hanging out in the park to join in. Try and chat with people afterwards about when the group meets to look at the bible
• Free food stand. Have tables to sit at with tracts and people share the gospel
• Teaching young people woodwork - Jesus carpenter of Nazareth
• Start a community choir in the church hall
• Mums and toddlers gospel centred groups
• Dads and kids saturday am groups
• Men's (and women's!) curry nights / craft / cheese and wine events
• Surveying with one big questions & invite people
• Do a talk put on at a venue church / hall that answers this big question from the Bible, perhaps over dinner
• Invite people to a 'participation event' e.g. darts match, pool game, 10 pin bowling, with a mix of christians and non*christians
• Go for coffee
• Blog
• Grill a christians
• Write on facebook
• Art sessions, model animals to go in the ark, self portrait
• Local area holiday clubs, lead into regular bible clubs
• Run parenting courses to help local parents work with their unruly children. Hopefully they'll see the practical help the gospel has for parenting
• Chat openly with people at work about what you do on a weekend. Non-Christians spark conversations and ask questions
• Survey of just six simple questions ask to people relaxing on park benches
• Victorian Christmas family event (or other theme)
• Fostering
• Visit old people's homes, offer to prayer. Meet with them in groups and individually.
• Cooking lessons, e.g. how to make a dish from scratch like a curry using individual spices not just curry powder
• Holiday club
• Parenting courses
• Host an exchange student e.g. through rotary exchange scheme. This one has some real world application, someone there had an international student who could do with hosting in South-West London. If that's you, you can contact me and I'll put you in touch.
• 30 minute tea-break
• Conversational english with foreigners to grow in skill and meet God's people
• Scrap heap challenge two teams make push carts side by side kids and parents then went to race round church or local area
• Inviting neighbours in for mulled wine and mince pies at christmas
• Speaking at an old people's home
• Going out on the street and telling people about Jesus
• Dialogue dinner for special occasions e.g. Christmas easter explaining the gospel for people to invite their non-christian friends
• English language support club
• CRAVE * open house come for dinner big friends and enjoy (same time same place each week) BIble study after if you want to stay.
• Regular events to have fun and make group more known. Eg subsided paint balling
• Go to problem family (find them from local authorities or church) ask about them start to visit. Sometimes offering practical help where necessary needs a few helpers so no to onerous.
• Being direct
• Street preaching
• Go through commandments and getting them to admit they aren't good then showing them Christ
• living out my faith and showing them the crazy love of jesus
• love people
• go to parks - parachute, puppets, clowns and songs. Tell bible stories, dramas, songs and memory verses, simple crafts
• Reading the bible with people after dinner at our house. We read 1 chapter every night and if guests come then we do the same with them.
• Mums and toddlers
• Ceilidh using a local band
• Join a sports club / team
• Perhaps sports with less teams members or individual ones, e.g. Squash which means you are more likely to be able to get to know people
• Adopt a student, for communities that are near by university, families can adopt a student and feed them dinner once or twice a week! Also good for single parent families to be looked after by larger families too.
• Playing street games like football.
• Food! Make pizza with them and talk about Jesus as you eat it
• Go into an old people's homes - sing hymns know with them.
• Cake, eat it with people and give it away and talk about Jesus doing it.
• Assemblies
• Paintballing - use groupon (you get discount) good chats about death come up
• Christmas pudding night - make them together then talk

How To Get A D1 Minibus Licence

Tuesday, 8 November 2011

A couple of years back I wrote what would soon be my most popular event article. How To Drive A Minibus Legally. That article is slightly out of date (I'll be updating it in the next fortnight) but it's still mostly good, it'll also help you make sense of some of the terms in this article. If you come away from reading it thinking I need to get a D1 licence to drive a minibus, then this article is for you.

Upgrade Your Licence

First, you need to upgrade your current licence. Go to the post-office or go online and obtain a D2 form. This form allows you to add provisional categories to your licence. You want to add the D1 category to your licence but as it is no extra to add other large vehicle categories you may as well add a full D category (that's for regular buses not just minibuses) and the full C category (that's lorries and cool things like that) to your licence. (Just tick all the boxes in the first bullet point of section 1). The D2 form is slightly confusing because there are large sections that you don't have to fill in if your current licence is up to date, so don't worry if you leave loads of sections blank. Here is a copy of the form so you can see it (pdf).

Second, you'll need to download a D4 Medical Examination Report form and take this to your GP (or ring them up if they aren't round the corner from you) and make an appointment with them to get the form filled in. Really, they should have the form at their surgery but you should take the form with you because they won't and that way they'll know what you're talking about. A GP will go through the form with you and assess whether you're healthy to drive a minibus. These are questions like "are you especially likely to collapse from a fit, stroke, or heart attack in the next ten years?" and "have you got full use of your limbs, eyes, and brain?". The eyesight test is slightly more rigorous than it is for a car (I have to wear glasses to drive a bus but don't a car) but other than that it's fairly straight forward. Your GP will charge you for this and the charge is set locally. My GPs charged me £20 because I was fit and healthy and it only took ten minutes, your mileage may vary. (There are plenty of GPs who advertise online that they do this service, sometimes for up to £90. These seem verging on scams.)

With your two forms completed stick them with your driving licence and counterpart in the envelope that comes with the forms and post them off to the DVLA. You won't have to pay anything unless you're also updating your photo or something. You'll want to photocopy these forms first as there is nothing the DVLA like doing more than losing forms it seems¹. In two weeks you'll get a shiny new licence back. Your plastic photo card licence will look no different, but your counterpart will have the added provisional categories.

Pass Your Theory Tests

When your driving licence comes back, you can now go online and book your theory tests with the DVLA. That's right, theory tests, there are two of them. Kinda. Like a normal driving theory test there are two parts, the multiple choice question part and the hazard perception part, but unlike a normal driving theory test you take both part separately, that way if you fail one part of your test you don't have to re-sit all of it. The multiple choice part and hazard perception part are both longer than the normal test, the multiple choice contains 100 questions and the hazard perception contains more clips (twenty? I can't remember). You will need to revise for the multiple choice part, because it'll ask you all sorts of weird questions. The only real way of revising is to buy a book or an app that teaches you the questions. Because there is one theory tests for all kinds of buses you'll have to learn about air-brakes and double decker buses, things that are completely irrelevant to driving a minibus, but consider it an education. The hazard perception is just as easy as the regular one, as long as you understand how the hazard perception test works you're fine. You can book them online on the DSA website. You'll need to book the "Passenger Carrying Multiple Choice" and "Passenger Carrying Hazard Perception" tests and the best thing to do is book them for the same day with a couple of hours in between so you can have a break. Most theory tests centres I've been to are fairly laid back and so if you finish one test and are in a hurry or running late for the other one they'll let you go in if there is space, but your centre may vary.

Find A Driving Training Company

Now, while you are waiting for your theory test dates go on the internet and find a local company that'll teach you how to drive a minibus properly. They'll almost certainly teach you how to drive a regular bus and a lorry as well, so look for that when googling (other search engines are available). I used Wallace School of Transport and I passed in exactly the amount of time they said I would, so I can't fault them. If the company is anything like the one I used they'll get you to come in for an assessment lesson and then after that's done give you a quote for how many hours it'll take you to get up to standard. I took me twelve hours, but your mileage may vary.

Do Loads Of Driving.

The company you drive with will sort out a test date for you, and then in the week or so leading up to that you'll do lots of driving and it'll be tediously dull. I drove a minibus from Wembley Stadium, down the A40 and then drove round the streets of Ealing, Northolt, and Harrow for two hours, then I drove back to Wembley stadium down the A40 and reversed into a space for half an hour. Then I did it again the next day. And the next day. And so on. And while this is going on your told to check your mirrors every twenty-thirty seconds. Seriously, if you want to practice learning to drive a minibus in your car just look in your mirrors every time you do anything in your car.

Do you really need to do all this training? Could you just go out as a learner in your minibus? Well, yes, if you can find a way you can drive a minibus legitimately you could just do that a lot, but there a lots of little things that you probably won't pick up on. Things like putting the handbrake on and the gears into neutral every single time you stop for longer than five seconds (to stop the vehicle accidentally jumping forward) or things like being able to explain what a tachometer does. Also you won't be able to drive around the test centre unless you're with a company, and knowing what the test centre is like is pretty useful to passing.

Take Your Test

Your test will take about an hour. It's like a car test but longer and with less manoeuvres. At first you'll be asked to answer some questions about the vehicle, then you'll do this reversing manoeuvre and then you'll go for a drive for around forty-five minutes. In that time you'll be asked to pull up at a bus stop every now and again as if you were setting down passengers. You'll also do hill starts and you'll have to do a section of self-navigatiion, where you follow road signs to wherever they tell you to (I had to drive towards Wembley for a bit). Then you'll come back and hopefully you've passed. And that's that! You can now drive a D1 minibus, and you can send your licence off with the pass certificate to get the category formally on your licence! Huzzah! You can now drive a minibus for pretty much anything you want to (as long as you don't want to take fare-paying passengers for the sole purpose taking fare-paying passengers, but that's another story).

¹ The DVLA are amazingly lovely when you speak to them on the phone but this is probably more down to their beautiful Swansea accent than there helpfulness. It seems that the massive bureaucracy of the DVLA can't cope very well with not losing forms.

Book Review: Why Johnny Can't Preach

Friday, 4 November 2011

After hearing much about this book, I happened to find a copy underneath a scrabble board while tiding up the youth club. I consider this and a free few hours I had that day, a sign I should take it and read it (although if you happened to have left your copy of this book at my work, it's now on the youth office bookshelf- come get it). Why Johnny Can't Preach is a little book with a fairly simple premise that's contained in the title; most pastor's can't preach these days and this is a bad thing. The author, T. David Gordon, speculates that less than 30% of people in ordained ministry in the USA can preach properly. Why is this the case? Well, his theory goes like this; people can't preach because people can't communicate composedly, people can't communicate composedly because they don't understand significance, people don't understand significance because they don't read properly and they don't read properly because, in part, modern life doesn't do proper reading. This factors are more interwoven in his argument that I've simplified here, but that's the gist of it.

There's a lot in here that's helpful and useful and challenged me, but as much as I think about it, his argument basically comes down to this; pastors can't preach because they don't get prose and poetry and so the solution is to develop a deeper understanding and passion of great literature. And I want to say at that point "really? That's what's wrong with preaching in most churches? That the vicar hasn't read the sonnets?" I wonder if some of it is that Gordon writes thinking most pastors are people who essentially get the gospel, love the bible, love their church, and by and large do most things faithfully, but for some reason balls up on preaching. And so with a significant bit of shaping and directing, their preaching would be brilliant. That's why so much of the emphasis of the book seems to be on the style of the sermon and not on the content of it. That's not to say he's arguing that what is wrong with preaching is just a stylistic issue, just that if they get their reading and thinking right, their preaching will be consequentially in good style; it will be well composed and well communicated. But what if the problem actually starts with the content? He does though, tackles this in chapter 4 of the book, and all of a sudden this book is brilliant.

Chapter 4 is called "A Few Thoughts About Content" and what thoughts they are. I'm going to quote extensively here, because it's probably the only way to do the section justice, but when I say this chapter is worth the price of the book, I mean it and mean for you to go on to Amazon and purchase it now. The point he makes on content is this; the aim of a Christian sermon is to hold up Christ and present him, and his work and character, as the joy and satisfaction of every good thing. He puts it like this:

What is offered to the congregation, in rightly ordered Christian worship, is nothing less than Christ himself. Now, since Christ rescues us from both the guilt and power of sin, one aspect of his work is the work of sanctification, whereby he renews us into the image of God and conforms us to his likeness. So Christian proclamation properly includes the shaping of a Christian moral vision, and preaching Christ crucified does not exclude, but intentionally includes, shaping such a vision. But it is never appropriate,in my estimation, for one word of moral counsel ever to proceed from a Christian pulpit that is not clearly, in its context, redemptive. That is, even when the faithful exposition of particular texts requires some explanation of aspects of our behaviour, it is always to be done in a manner that the hearer perceives such commended behaviour to be itself a matter of being rescued from the power of sin through the grace of Christ. When properly done, the hearer longs to be rescued from that depravity from which no sinner can rescue himself; and the hearer rejoices to know that a kind and gracious God is both willing and able to begin that rescue, which will be completed in glorification. (p.70)

Fill the sails of your hearers' souls with the wind of confidence in the Redeemer, and they will trust him as their Sanctifier, and long to see his fruit in their lives. Fill their minds and imaginations with a vision of the loveliness and perfection of Christ in his person, and the flock will long to be like him. Impress upon their weak and wavering hearts the utter competence of the mediation of the One who ever lives to make intercession for them, and they will long to serve and comfort others, even as Christ has served and comforted them. (p.78)

His then list of four ways in which contemporary preaching goes wrong is as enlightening as anything in the rest of the book. I found myself cheering him on under my breath in places.

It's slightly frustrating then that the book is shaped the way it is. If the book started with and was rooted in the ideas of chapter 4, and then led us into the rest of the content it would be perhaps the best book I've ever read on preaching and ministering in general. He has reasons for doing it the other way around the, saying that if you get your reading and thinking right, you'll read the New Testament right and you'll learn to preach Christ rightly. But this, I think, fails by his own argument. His book doesn't place Christ as the centre of how to preach, and when he does talk to us about the excellencies of Christ it feels that it's an aside, not the root of his argument. Which is what he's precisely arguing we shouldn't do when we preach. He tells us that the content of our preaching needs to be Christ so we can show him to our congregations, but then when he comes to tell us how to preach he puts Christ in as almost incidental. But surely if his argument is true (and it is), then Christ needs to be at the centre for how we preach now just what we preach. Get Him right and then consequentially people will desire to master their reading, thinking, and diligent study of the text of the scripture.

For all that, the book is well worth reading. As I wrote, Chapter 4 alone is almost required reading on preaching, and there are large other parts that have stuck with me. Do I live by the delete key? Do I read too much garbage? These things are true and things I need to think through and in some cases repent of. But don't let this book be the only book you read on preaching, especially if you're an intellectual type who'll feel smug that you already read the works of long dead authors.