St. Joseph’s Church, Merry Hill, Wolverhampton

I’m typing this into Word 2007 – having first started Word, and then gone to the Publish… menu and then registered my St Jo’s account! Which is quite neat. And it’s easy. The only stuff you need to know is as follows:

In the “Publish” menu, choose “Blog”.

A dialogue box will ask you to register an account. This is only needed once – Word will keep the details and will re-use them later. The correct details are:

(but with your correct login and password for St Jo’s).

That Blog Post URL is, for the record, http://saintjosephs.co.uk/xmlrpc.php.

Say OK, say OK again to the security warning (you can choose to not get the warning again), and you’re off and running, with a copy of Word that can save Posts directly. Click the “Publish” button and it gets posted. And you can of course edit and click Publish again later and it updates correctly on the site.

You might ask, “why should I bother?” but it’s actually a pain cutting and pasting from Word docs into, well, any HTML/Web site because Word sticks so much “extra stuff” in to make it look like the original, even if you don’t care about that. This route does everything for you – you can paste a picture or image or whatever in and it gets uploaded correctly and looks just fine, it seems.

And some people like using Word rather than the Wordpress editor.

The only shame of course is that it only does posts (ie blog articles) rather than pages for the menu too. But it’s something and you could always do a “publish as draft” to lose all the Word rubbish and get pictures etc uploaded and then use the Wordpress editor to cut and paste from the draft post to a page.

Not often I say this, but thanks, Microsoft!

It’s always a bit difficult actually working out the outcome from a PoV event. I’m sure everybody gets something slightly different from them – I hope everybody gets something! – but from the moderator’s chair certain things kind of bubble up and the dynamics mean that I probably get a different perspective.

But first of all thanks to our guests and also to all who came, and in particular a couple of special attendees. First of all I was particularly pleased that Rob Marris MP came along – and did a lot of listening – because he’d been on the panel previously, so we must be doing something vaguely right in the event. But even better we had a real touchstone -  who’d not only had his life turned around from drug-dealing and crime to a positive position, and also found Christ as part of his journey.

Personally speaking I found moderating this one harder than the previous events. Perhaps it’s because I’m spectacularly ignorant on the topic. Perhaps because it’s a broad subject with as many narrow paths to explore as you might think of – authority, parenting and family involvement, respect, value systems, motivation, video games and technology, music and brain behaviour, peer pressure, judgement, the role of Government and the individual, the role of the church as an organisation and as a family and as a set of individuals, financing, postcode prejudice, “us and them”, race, gender, sexuality – and I think we touched on all these. Perhaps the moderator should have tried to focus things somewhat but he didn’t.

Dave’s big messages it seems to me were two-fold: first of all that engagement with young people is essential, and that means an active grabbing-hold-and-forcing kind of engagement to stimulate action (and this is true whether it’s attempting to address Youth as a whole or an individual such as your own child); and second that it’s incredibly rewarding.

Laura added a huge reinforcement of this – as somebody who has shaped her life to do these things. And she’s proof that while the great examples of people who have turned away from dangerous paths are hugely valuable, there’s a hugely valid role for engagement from any part of the community.

Robin made the point that what the City Council is trying to do is get engagement from politicians in understanding the “coal face” of the work and spreading best practice – and to ensure that the schemes that again stimulate action and reaction are those that they want to progress. And leading from the front, demonstrating that you’re not on the sidelines, is essential.

So what else? I personally found the point about not-quite-fracturing of the family but the geographical and logistical distances involved in parenting in the modern world rang very true. It’s a long way from your daughter who’s IM’ing her friends to your father who thinks IM refers to Yahweh; and it’s not easy to engage with the young people in the community when you’re working on a bid document in a meeting room at 8pm at night in another city.

I also thought the point was well made that there’s a lack of understanding about what fulfilling tour potential means to you personally. Enabling somebody to survive – feeding, clothing, housing your 19-year old – might fulfll the base of Laslow’s hierarchy of needs but more is needed for them to understand that there are other layers to that hierarchy. And the point was made that actually there is a lot of provision – which surprised me because supply-side is where so much discussion sits – and too little real demand. “Young people need a kick up the backside”, the professionals say – they’re passive consumers, not active providers.

But for me a lot comes back to a central message from Romans: serving is important, and we should use the gifts we’ve been given to do so, whether that’s wearing size nines and applying them to backsides, or coaching the 5-year-old kids’ footie team, or dishing out water to clubbers, or something else entirely. And in doing so we’re showing what we could be as well. Where that leaves me, I don’t know! But at least it’s made me think…

Geoff’s updated his Pints of View blog and we’ll continue to do the same here too! Ain’t the Internet great (and incidentally WordPress is great too, telling me that he’d done it automatically because he included a link back here…)