Saturday or Sunday Church?

Yesterday I took a Sunday Service in the Grahamstown township. Previously I have preached at combined services where several societies had been brought together. This was the first time I preached to only one society. (I wish I could have done it a whole lot more, we had a strange action plan this year!) There were about 100 people there - most of them not very young.
On Saturday I preached at a funeral in the same church and the church was nearly full - I guess about 500 people.
There is no question in my mind - funerals need to be taken seriously as an avenue of ministry. I would use funerals as outreach events (explain Jesus, do evangelism - the ultimate words of comfort) and Sunday services for teaching and encouraging. If the people had solid teaching every Sunday I believe that they would start coming to church.
I have a vision for Shaw section in Grahamstown, but I just don't have the language skills.

Bongani Mkhize

This story from Independent Online is really frightening. I wonder what the other side of the story is?

"One by one they die - thugs pay the price for cop's murder," read the headlines in a Daily Sun article dated October 18 last year and included in Mhkize's High Court application. "When a top cop (Chonco) was shot dead in an ambush, his angry colleagues vowed to avenge his death. And this is what's happening. Today the seventh suspect in the murder lies dead, riddled with bullets."

They apparently shut the Chonco shooting case because all the suspects had been killed by police.

I did it!

I did it. I ran 5km this evening. I reckon I can keep running through the pain of anything that comes my way. My God is SO big.

Theme Song

Tired. That's my theme song for the past few weeks. I was exhausted yesterday, had a good night's sleep and I'm still exhausted. I think that has been the most difficult thing this year.
The thing with church work is the energy has to come from somewhere. I guess the other thing with church work is that God always takes you through that last bit when you just think that you can't anymore.
I don't want to spend my last week half asleep. I will be stronger tomorrow!

Leadership

One of my circuit stewards was sounding off to me in the car yesterday. She knows we think alike, so it's ok. One of the things she said was about leaders - people must know that if you are a leader some people will like you and some people won't like you. That will never change. The important thing is that you do what is right.
Something like that makes me feel good. But also I know that it is not a popular idea in many arenas. After all, who am I to say that I am right? Are there not many truths and many rights? And then I just want to go into a mush of 'I am a victim, help me,' screams into the distance. I sometimes feel that if I am leading a meeting and there are two opposing ideas and I have a third, then somehow both of the other ideas are right (even if they are opposites) and mine is wrong, by definition.
Fortunately, this is all just happens inside my head, and, without too much trauma, I do what I think is right - which of course might be adopting someone else's idea!

Persian Bones

This is a very cool story. Apparently there are historical accounts of a Persian army lost in Northern Africa about 500BC. Archaeologists think that they may have found their bones. 2500 years later! That blows my mind.
This would have been right around the time of the exile of the Jews in Babylon. The Persian king concerned (Cambyses) had both father and son called Cyrus and my history isn't good enough to know which Cyrus ordered the return of the Jews to Jerusalem.
I have some Googling to do! (Story originally found at Boingboing.)

Competitiveness, Jealousy and Invincibility

So, yesterday wasn't such a good day. I drove in to PE to visit some people. The Methodist Church where we had our phase 1 college was robbed of the Sunday collection on Monday morning while the admin lady was counting it. The bishop's secretary hauls out a newspaper and says 'did you see this?' An Anglican priest has been murdered at the college in Grahamstown (the town where I stay). I go to the Christian bookshop - 'we had all our takings stolen this morning'. The bishop's secretary says there is just a feeling of oppression around.
So, I got five hours sleep last night and woke up feeling grumpy and bad tempered. At least I knew it would be a busy day, so I would cope. Spent three and half hours in 30 degree heat driving around the township taking communion to the elderly. I don't mind doing this, but by the time I was saying the communion liturgy for about the fifteenth time my mind was wandering all over and I felt I was letting the people down. My husband smses to say that we lost the option to rent a house in Pietermaritzburg that the family was hoping to stay in.
I guess I was feeling pretty flat by this time. Get home, check in to the internet. Load Facebook and there are the chirpy doings of my less busy, higher achieving friends. I just wanted to give up and go home. I hated them for a moment. There is some competitiveness in me that I see when I am at my weakest. You can't beat me. You may not do better than me. You can't have more friends than me or more blog readers than me or a better ministry than me. So there! I know that competetiveness is always there, but usually it is controlled (not always in the best way, but that's another story . . .) It frightened me to see it so near the surface at that moment when I felt so insecure.
I've got a Learning Partnership meeting tonight. I didn't want to go feeling like this. The heat is oppressive. It physically drains me. But it's 5 o'clock and I'm going to run. I'm going to do my longer route. I've gone 200m and I feel the life pour back in. I am invincible. I can run forever. And I do. There's a male runner pounding it out ahead of me. Wow, he's going. I'm not that good. But check out that stomach - I guess running doesn't help you lose weight. There it is again. Can't let anyone beat me. I catch up with him a little way on. He's walking now. Everyone's walking now, except me. The route that took me twenty minutes last time took me fifteen today.
What am I doing with my life? What is God doing?

Mysteries of God's Revelation

How do we know about God?

Through natural revelation? Through what we can see in nature?
But then is God seen in the warm sunshine and gentle breeze or in the desert heat and the hurricane? Is he seen in sweet puppies and kittens and new-born children or in AIDS and cancer and polio?

In the Bible?
But then is God the God of the Old Testament, of Jesus, of Paul? How do we read the Bible? Literally, allegorically, contextually, reductively (by which I mean in a way that produces a systematic theology) or deconstructively (by which I mean that the meaning is determined by the reader's understanding and not the writer's intention)?

Surely God is also revealed in the church - in his people?
Is he the God of the Crusades? Of the first choir to sing Handel's Messiah? Of the early martyrs? Of the Benedictine monks? Is he God of the Roman Catholics, the proponents of the prosperity gospel, the Muslims, the Methodists?

And in individual believers?
Is he God of the self-righteous Christian who mocks and sneers at Christians who do not want to bless homosexual marriages? Of the Christian who believes that the Bible encourages racism? Of those Christians whose beliefs waver according to the person they are speaking to? Of the one who kills a doctor who does abortions? Of the quiet Christian who spends his life alleviating the poverty found in one small family? Of the arrogant and the afraid and the contented and the dissatisfied, of the greedy and those who seek poverty?

'Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.' 1 Corinthians 13:12.

Amatomu

I see that Amatomu have put a message up. They are trying to sell the site. If they can't sell it they want to give it to the community to run. I wonder how that would work?
Apart from the fact that Afrigator is a bit 'buggy' I'm finding it interesting to visit a different set of blogs.

Humanism

I am beginning to think that the struggles I have with many theological thinkers is that their philosophies are humanist rather than Christian. I'm probably getting the words wrong in a technical sense, but I want to get my thoughts out before I get confused! By humanist I mean that, loosely speaking, they believe that we should all live for the greater good of humanity. Now, apart from those who clearly only live for themselves, is this not the only sane philosophy for any human being? As Christians we are gung-ho, talking about transformation of the world. Is that humanist or Christian or both? Where does the difference come in?
I think that maybe the difference is in where we see that the repository of wisdom lives. Does it live in human experience and human rationalising? Or does it live in the revelation that God gives us about himself? Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms - does God's revelation exist outside the realm of human experience? But the difficulties in answering the second question shouldn't stop us honestly answering the first.
On another tack, I am now realising that there are people who say that animal rights are just as important as human rights - and for this reason we do not live for the greater good of humanity, but rather the greater good of all 'creation'. In other words, medical advance (such as the discovery of insulin) which leads to the saving of human lives does not justify experiments on animals. How does this fit into Christian thinking? Humanist thinking?