Blog archive February 2005

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28.02.05 / 01 / kubik photos on smallfire

kubik photos now on smallfire.

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22.02.05 / 01 / photos of me at kubik

...not by me at kubik. daniel ehniss who was responsible for that last comment has posted some photos of me at kubik. my good host mark reichmann is in the middle background of 'session 01'. was cool to be with you guys. more later.

btw it's snowing in london now.

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19.02.05 / 01 / frauenalb photo album

new photo album, stuff taken at Frauenalb where i am staying while with Kubik. for daniel to be more jealous :)

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18.02.05 / 01 / kubik

kubik has wifi in their bar so i can blog after the service. Photos eventually on smallfire of course. the hour or so of alt worship was familiar stuff for english people - interesting to see the old 'breathe in love/breathe out hate' thing projected on the wall in german. someone was very kindly translating the spoken stuff for me, but that section needed no translating! [they got it from sue wallace's book 'mulit-sensory prayer'. the overall theme was that, as god once walked with us in the garden before the fall, so he still walks with us in the city. nice traffic video [everyone has a traffic video ;) ]. afterwards the bar reverts to being all bar and people are hanging out eating chips. It's thinned out, but it was almost too full for the service - hard to move freely. the problems of success ;)

there's someone here from a radio station - she's interviewing people, will interview me tomorrow when it's a bit quieter. tomorrow pm we're having a get-together of german emerging-church people/bloggers [almost synonymous terms now].

i'm staying in a guesthouse next to the ruins of a monastery [convent maybe] in the edge of the Black Forest. there's a foot of snow - went for a walk in the woods.

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14.02.05 / 02 / abundant flyers

i made a start on the Abundant section of Small Fire with a couple of pages of flyers 1995-1997 and flyers 1998-1999. they give some idea of what we were up to. all this stuff is fairly pivotal in my life. i wouldn't be writing this without it.

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14.02.05 / 01 / urban mass

vaux last week yielded some nice photos. vaux is one of the few places where i get to be my real self.

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13.02.05 / 01 / minor prophets

Grace went well tonight. Subject the Minor Prophets, ie Hosea to Malachi, whose sculpted busts hold up the galleries on each side of the church. 12 prophets, 12 stations each done by a different person/persons, underneath the relevant carving. The congregation were given an explanatory sheet of Biblical and historical background, and left to wander round at will and eventually into the cafe. Once again we had nearly 50 people - most of whom are regular visitors now. Of course we always expect them to suddenly stop coming without explanation. But we're picking up visitors from other local churches now, which has never really happened before - the localness helps with the regularity i suspect.

The service was an answer to those who'd say that alternative worship doesn't do the Bible or teaching - sizeable chunks of biblical exposition and long excerpts from the books themselves, stuck up around the walls. Indeed we were invited to read the whole of the book of Obadiah in four minutes, because it's the shortest in the OT. I think by the end we'd all read about six-books-worth of parts of the Bible seldom touched on in conventional sermons. The subject matter seemed unnervingly topical: war in the Middle East, rogue states, revenge for atrocities, the rich walking over the poor.

I did some stuff on Jonah, ignoring the fish and concentrating on the prophet who was angry that God wouldn't destroy his enemies. I'm always delighted by the internal linkages of the Bible - Romans 12:19 quotes Deuteronomy 32:35, but the illustration is Jonah chapters 3 and 4.

We joked that we could make the 12 stations into a boxed set for sale by Group. Jonny said that few churches have the carved heads around, so I thought we could have inflatable prophets in the kit. We could just print the faces on balloons to tie up around the place. Look, Nahum just burst. And Zephaniah is flying round the church making farting noises.

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09.02.05 / 01 / long long hours

“Architecture is very, very tough,” says Zaha Hadid in BD. “If you want to do really interesting stuff, it requires long, long hours to get there. It’s much more difficult than people imagine. You think if you spend one more hour you’re going to get there, two more hours you’re going to get there. Maybe it’s not true, but that’s how you’re trained."

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04.02.05 / 01 / sleep pattern

did the BBC's circadian rhythm test and it came up with this image

which is evidence for what i already knew - that i struggle to get up before 8am, and getting up at 6.30am to make early meetings kills me. i should use this at my forthcoming annual appraisal to explain why i shouldn't do morning meetings. it even gets the timing of my sleepy patch in the afternoon right.