St. Joseph’s Church, Merry Hill, Wolverhampton

We’ve had an enjoyable and challenging day together looking at all aspects of our vision, activities and our path forward. During the meeting I posted up on to my Twitter feed a huge bunch of notes. Absolutely not definitive and many of the outcomes are subject to much further thought, discussion and prayer, but do feel free to take a look at twitter.

For those that are interested, I use #stjo as the search term that makes it easy to find things related to St Jo’s on Twitter – this is known as a “hash tag”. If you put something St Jo’s related on to Twitter, just put #stjo somewhere in it.

This isn’t a very spiritual post until the end, but I do hope that it will make you think about how we connect in the modern world. For those that think and feel then this strikes me as being an ever more-important topic. And it also brings up an interesting question around symbolic thinking and how possible it is for some people to fathom the modern world.

I recently spent a couple of days with my Mum and Dad. Dad has recently had two major upheavals in his life – a new mobile phone and a new Personal Video Recorder (a digital video recorder, that is). Both of these were forced upon him – the first by the closure of service on his previous phone network (the obscure “Fresh”) and the second by the death of his video recorder. Both have been hugely traumatic. That may sound over-dramatic but they really have stained a usually pretty unblemished life.

He’s a clever man. He’s read and digested more history than I can think of, reads a broadsheet every day, used to run a 230-person textile company. But he cannot even begin to understand how electronic devices work or how to make them work. There is something simply fundamentally missing from his ability to process the way in which abstract symbol-based technology is used. Any attempt to explain how a menu system works – this menu, then that one – as a tree, or a branching path, or a chain of waterfalls to go down in sequence just leads to a “but it doesn’t mean anything” response. Is this a generational thing? I don’t think so – Mum does her email, has an iPod and buys audiobooks from iTunes Store, books from Amazon, and so on. I honestly can’t work it out. It does incidentally mean that he has absolutely no comprehension of what has been my vocation – what I knew I wanted to do from the first time I saw the purely-symbolic world of programming.

Anyway Dad’s a little bit scared of trying things because he doesn’t know how to get out of somewhere, doesn’t know what the buttons on the remote or the handset might do, can’t interpret the display. And he wants, needs, to work out how to make things work. His mobile has been a lifeline more than once, and in the past he’s enjoyed receiving and sending texts. Similarly, missing an episode of University Challenge matters to him. So fear and anger and frustration tend to build up.

There are two points to this that matter. First I think we do have to think quite hard about how to bring people that simply can’t engage with technology with us in society. There will be a divide – but there need to be ways of bridging the divide in some way. It’s not enough to just subsidise availability of service. Yesterday on the Today programme they said “you can write to us too; the address is on the website” – and later realised the difficulty with that and actually gave the address. Making sure the disconnected are re-connected, or not further disconnected, is important.

The second thing here is that we are all disconnected in one way or the other. So many pressures – on our time, on our behaviour, on our finances – disconnect us from what’s important in life. Our own unwillingness to try to engage with each other, our angers and fears and frustrations, our inability to love, divide us. Finding ways to bridge the divides between one and another is really important.  We have the way of Jesus to follow. Let’s take that path, and put our trust in the bridges He can build for us.

On the 16th December at 7.30pm St Jo’s is host to the Wolverhampton Chamber Choir’s “Christmas Cracker” Festive annual charity concert in aid of MacMillan Cancer Support – “Christmas delights in song and verse”. For full details please see the flyer - it sounds and looks brilliant.

Great if you can buy tickets in advance, if you can’t then you can pay on the door. Refreshments included!

A few of us went to see Fish Tank at the cinema – the tiny studio screen at the Lighthouse – a couple of weeks ago. It’s a remarkable film -  one girl’s experiences of vulnerability, pain, violence of all kinds, isolation and determination, in a sink estate in Essex (Barking, I think). For me I thought above all it showed how an individual remains able to connect at some level in a world where there is so little of anything to forge connections from. It’s a world devoid of anything directly spiritual. Just imagine what she could be if she knew something of Jesus and had the power of the Holy Spirit to give her something to strength her; if you’re reading this without those things please accept from this writer at least their reality.

On the way out I quipped “So, it’s back to Penn, then”. And it was indeed the case that the three of us there, all St Jo’s regulars, don’t even live in Merry Hill. Perhaps that difference is gave Fish Tank some of its impact but it brought home to me just how easy it is to be remote from a different world that is just far enough away from my day-to-day life to be invisible. It’s closer still in the area that St Jo’s aims to directly serve but I fail to engage with it. I’m probably scared of it, to be honest. Fish Tank pretty much terrified me, on one level.

Going to see a film and gaining a bit of an insight into that world, and giving me some understanding of how people do or don’t function within it, is all well and good – and has given me a better basis for more substantial prayer. But what next?

St Jo’s hosted a really successful – in that everybody had loads of fun, and loads of people came – Community Day on Sept 19th. Everywhere was open, everything was free, everything was for the whole community.

Here are some short clips of people talking about the event. Why I didn’t record more video of the actual things going on, I don’t know, although I had had only 5 hours sleep each night for the last week and was still jet-lagged. That also explains, in my mind if not objectively, why I couldn’t even remember what day it was. Sorry!

Thinking about coming to New Wine this Summer?  Over the last few years a group from St Jo’s has gone to the New Wine Summer Conference for a week’s holiday, camping, teaching and lots of fun!  A group is going this year to New Wine at the Bath and West Showground outside Shepton Mallet in Somerset between 2nd and 8th August (Central and South West , CSW or Week B).  We would love more people from St Jo’s to join us.

Check out the video at http://www.new-wine.org/ for an idea of what the week involves!  Its a great opportunity to receive in-depth Bible teaching, experience different styles of worship, go to some really interesting seminars and chill out with Church family.  The kids work is awe inspiring – being both large scale but also having a great leader-to-kids ratio meaning that children get the experience of a small group setting whilst being with hundreds of people their age.  The traffic-free site also means that they can have a lot more freedom than at home.  There is a great ‘Marketplace’ with lots of Christian resources and organisations, cafes, an arts venue for creativity and lots of world mission groups.

St Jo’s will be allocated a ‘village’ to camp in and generally we make a big circle shape so that we have space in the middle for socialising and playing!  You can bring your own tent or hire a tent or caravan which is put up for you.  It is also possible to use our area as a base and stay off site at a local B&B.

The best thing to do if you are interested in booking for the week is check out the New Wine website and talk to those of us at St Jo’s who have been.  There was a big show of hands on Sunday (15th March) as to who had been over the years!  Hilary Bannister co-ordinates our bookings so ask her for more details as to how to book.  The prices go up a little at the end of March – so its best to book before then for the best deal.

Tracey and I  are big fans of the Summer Conferences and would be happy to chat more – get in touch with us!

Tonight we had a very interesting session with Archdeacon Bob Jackson. (Bishop Clive was due to be with us too but circumstances prevented this.) Bob had spent the afternoon with people from across the parish, talking to them about what was happening and in particular how the “Going for Growth” strategy was panning out. This isn’t a numbers game – although bringing people to Jesus is clearly important! – but rather about quality and how the Church family is growing together.

So as well as Bob’s reflections on what he had heard – rapidly and effectively assembled into a presentation which you can pick up here – we heard about different initiatives from the churches of the parish and Bob’s (positive!) reaction to the work that the Lord is inspiring in Wolverhampton. Geoff Jellis gave us an excellent presentation on the St Jo’s social audit we’re planning to do to better understand what the community really wants and needs from us, and we also heard from St Phil’s on Personal Development and from St Aidan’s on their work giving Communion in care homes.

In the meantime St Jo’s is clearly doing something right – we feel more a family than ever, we felt, with momentum behind the growth that we’ve had and the work that we do for each other and the community as we serve Jesus. But – and you can see Bob speak about this below – there are some clear challenges because we’re getting a bit near to the point where the church is a bit too full at 10.30am on Sunday which can deter people so some prayer and thought and action are needed around the service structure. But it’s not immediately critical  – so do come!

There are four video clips of Bob here (scroll down the playlist under the video player to get to them all) and one each with quick remarks from Andy Evans and Liz Pemberton. Enjoy. And feel free to contribute your comments too…whether you were at the Going for Growth session or not!

(The screen Bob’s waving his hands at is displaying the presentation!)

At the last Pints of View session with Phill Ball and Andrew Ritchie there seemed to me to be a strong feeling that engagement by us as individual Christians, and also by the church as body, in developing and helping drive policy for restorative justice and also improvements in rehabilitation.

How to do so with real effect on our community?