headwayyouth- phil smith's blog

Festival Day 3

Day three here at cliff and all has gone good. my youth group are still smiling and one of the more unchurched of the group told me yesterday that God has dealt with his anger problem :-)

I did a seminar today re the future of evangelicalism and it went okay. To be honest it was difficult, the discussion i wanted about reshaping what the world think about when they hear the word evangelical wasn't possible; many of the people in the room couldn't really see the problem with the word... still seemed to go well!

still smiling

four days after istanbul i'm still smiling... for the liverpool fans out there my mate just sent this photo from the victory parade (note the reference to jamie carragher, this is nothing theological- though i'm sure some clever git is going to discect that statement!)

Festival day 1

blogging via the mobile while at the festival so apologies if this does look quite like it should. Day one at the festival has been great. This morning I went to hear martyn atkins (mission thinking guru) talk about the emerging church and he raised some particularly prominent issues for methodist churches to face over the coming years. In particular martyn talked about where methodist churches (most of which have on average 35-50 members) should go when all statistics say growth is happening in units that are smaller (cell groups) or larger (large charismatic churches with parallel congregations). this evenings meeting was even more exciting, two good friends of mine are running the youth programme here and it was incredible. I took my youth group along, all of which are unchurched and largely uninterested, and they loved it. At the start they had the compulsary games then thye had a time of worship led by some guys from reading. This was the highlight for me. The guys took good old soul survivor worship and aded a guy MCing and beat-boxing, it was quality and a really authentic act of worship for those of us whose musical tasted are broader than soft-rock.
after the worship yaz, who's a youth worker in ely preached on john 4 and it was awesome. After that there were workshops in allsorts and to cut a long story short the uninterested youth group are suddenly vaguely interested... Quality!

of camping... whoopie!

later today i'm taking my wonderful youth group off the the festival at cliff college. Should be real good, though not convinced that i'll get a) much sleep b) much time to blog... sorry!

If you are vaguely near derbyshire over the weekend. pop in, it should be fab. i'm doing a seminar on mondya on the future of evangelicalism... hmmm

beautiful game

yes i know i said i wouldn't fill this blog with dear diary entries but just this once...

what a fine, fine night for those of us who once held residents in the red side of liverpool. from despair to utter delight... smiling today like a cheeky chappy!!!

browsing...

been busy browsing the internet this morning looking for some resources for a seminar i'm doing next week (evangelicalism... where do we go from here?) and simultaneously looking for resources that might be useful in the future.

In the non to distant future hopefully they'll be a fairly good resource directory in this site, but while i'm putting it together a couple of things to keep you going

low-tech but wonderful church cartoons

hi-tech stuff from web designers embody. Found this particularly good

the death of the turntable...

Just listening to sasha's live essential mix from saturday night and slightly truamatised as a puritan dj (vinyl and all that...) that all he's using is his laptop!!!

"Using a software package called Ableton Live, Sasha will be remixing and re-editing tracks from his library on the hoof creating a two hour, improvised set."

Could this be another nail in the coffin of the turntable... let's hope not!

feedback

headwayyouth blog has been up and running for over a month now and feedback has come back from all sorts of people (thanks for this... especially roger!) and i've had some time to think about it and where it should be heading... so over the next couple of weeks the site will change a little to become more readable, focussed and effective... If you have any feedback about the blog or ideas, please comment!

Wesley Day... how exciting!

Well, on this historic day, many years ago in 1738, a fairly ordinary Anglican Vicar felt his heart strangely warmed as he heard some guy preach on the book of Romans. The result was a complete turn around in his life and consequently in the make-up of industrialised britain.

I've been reading a biography of wesley over the past month and one thing i've learnt is that he was more of a radical than we could ever imagine. It's estimated that he travelled about a quarter of a million miles on horse back preaching the gospel around britain, and most place he visited he caused a riot! His preaching caused people to hurl stones and entire towns to insist he moved on.

One thing that i didn't know was that prior to wesley, hymn singing was not practiced in the church of england, but having experienced alternative forms of worship elsewhere, wesley believed felt that hymn singing was not heretical and would be of benefit to the people of britain, so he introduced the practice which overtime has become commonplace in most mainline protestant churches.

302 years after wesley was born i think it might just be time to recognise that the practice which was relavant to him has now become irrelevant and and needs to be jettisoned in favour of new ways of being church that relate to our culture as those practices related to his... if only we were as brave and radical as he!

Vini's

a few weeks ago i posted about vini's, well last night was the first one and it was great. they hired a bar in tall trees hotel in yarm which had a bar in the middle of it (and more importantly for us drivers a full size snooker table!!!) and had a dj playing for some of the night, a band doing an accoustic set and a chill out room.

on top of all that jon burns spoke for five minutes. while he was speaking there were video loops from different films where people were struggling to breathe displayed on screens situated around the bar, and he spoke about how the world and/or people in it sometimes suffocate you and how the hope for vini's is that it will just be space to breathe... it was quality and really connected with the guys that i took along.

One thought i had during the evening was that someone needs to map and publicise these things nationally (i'm part of an alt/emerging newsgroup and for the past week or so it's been full of messages saying things like... "does anyone know an emerging church in..."). anyway i got browsing this morning and remembered the freshexpressions site. it seems they have got going with this mapping process... they've not been going long and there is already 195 entries on their database but i guess there are two main problems...

1. what my dad qualifies as alternative i tend to consider conservative (eg. seeker services)
2. are churches which pride themselves on a lack of structure going to register. i typed in "grace" and was politely told "Sorry your enquiry produced no results"

Still it's good that someone is doing something!