Richard's Blog

Looking rather good this Easter is the BBC's contribution to Easter - a series running through Holy Week tracing the final days of Jesus' life and his resurrection.

The superb reJesus site has been chosen to be the main point of contact advertised by churches wanting to make best use of the opportunity to get people talking about Jesus.

They link to the BBC press release - it's a pretty impressive looking cast and screenwriting combination and it's major enough to be done in conjunction with HBO.

Will be linking to further material/information as it's released...

Here's this week's challenges for Tearfund's Carbon Fast for Lent - how have you been getting on with the other days?

I'm looking forward to downloading this one myself, since I was leading our Soul Time children's group on Sunday morning and therefore had to miss it.

David Rowe - a member of All Souls (one of our Church Wardens in fact) was preaching from the book of Hebrews on the nature of faith.

Download the mp3 via the link here or via the podcast link on the front page of the website.

The last fifth of six talks on The Healing God today, looking at the role of the Holy Spirit as the empowering presence of God.

Download the mp3 via the link here or via the podcast link on the front page of the website.

Since I'm taking a 'family week', I won't be around to blog the next few days of the Carbon Fast, but here they are together for your to consider and follow...

• Sat 16th - Use local shops or farmers markets  instead of driving to out-of-town shopping parks. They will thank you: supermarkets won't notice your absence.
  
  
• Sun 17th - Tell politicians to take action on climate change today. Check out Tearfund's campaign work.
  
  
• Mon 18th - Put the heat on your electricity or gas suppliers and ask them if they have a green plan. Make the switch and feel cosy.
  
  
• Tue 19th - Take a shower instead of a bath: you'll heat less water.
  
  
• Wed 20th - Snub plastic bads. Get into the habit of taking your rucksack to the supermarket or got retro with a trolley. Ask your supermarket to remove unnecessary packaging.
  
  
• Thurs 21st - Switch off lights as you leave the room.
  
  
• Friday 22nd - Only fill your kettle with as much water as you need.
  
  
• Sat 23rd - Cut the air miles. Don't consume any food that you know has been imported by plane unless it's FairTrade.

Sun 24th - Grace Maglasey and her husband Andrew struggle to grow enough food because their village in Malawi is caught in a cycle of floods and droughts. Join in with Grace's prayer today:

"We pray that those of us who farm should harvest a lot of food so that this year we will not have hunger. In the name of Jesus, Amen." 

How many times have you stood in shops or shopping centres sweltering in the heat and wondering: (a) how on earth they can afford to waste all that money on overheating the place and (b) why no-one has every heard of global warming?!

Good to read I'm not alone - a good piece from the online marketing guru Seth Godin entitled profligate.

Carbon Fast - Day10

Give your dishwasher a day off or promote it to a Grade 'A' appliance.

Tearfund Carbon Fast

All the Carbon Fast challenges so far...

BBC online (a great source of the weird and wacky as well as serious news) has followed up the recent "Lolita Beds" Woolworths debacle (if you missed it, read about it here - quite the most mind-numbingly bad naming of a product I've ever heard of!) with an article about how people feel about being given "notorious names" .

They interviewed various "Lolitas" and even found a "Lucifer" - the latter said that he "fell apart" when he discovered that he wasn't, after all, "Luke" (what he'd been called all his life to that point" but "Lucifer".

And names, apparently, can be self-fulfilling. Children named "Lethal" (honestly) are apparently more likely to grow up to commit violent crimes (surely not?).

Naming our children was always going to be made harder by Catherine's profession - years teaching children and therefore having a whole set of "experiences" relating to names where children had ruined the name for her! I shan't give examples here - no doubt someone somewhere reading this would have a child of that name..!

The biblical attitude to names has lots of rich themes - there's the meanings of names from their original roots (Joshua meaning "God saves" etc.); there's the way that names represent families ancestral roots and there's the intimacy of being "known/called by name".

It's the latter that has always intrigued me.

If I forget someone's name (something I live in fear of more than most things as a pastor) it's much worse than almost any other snub - I might forget everything else about them, but their name is a connection at a much deeper level than what their job is, how many children they've got or how they came to faith.