A watery reunion!

On a sunny Sunday afternoon I took the aged parent along the river at my new work location to look for the elusive kingfisher that I spotted when I was checking out the caches in my new area. The caches are all located along the river that runs through our town and you have to access them by boat. As Mum and I wandered along, me having seen two streaks of blue but her having seen nothing because they were moving too fast, 4 canoes came into view.

As the last one went by and got grounded in the shallow weeds, I ventured to call out 'You're not geoaching are you?', to which I received a positive reply. It turns out that they were from the geocaching group I met with during my project. They had ventured out from windy Norfolk to sunny Lincolnshire and were tracking the river caches. They had all been on the halloween night caching trip that I went on.

As we were separated by the river bank and water, the coversation concluded, but I was surprised to meet so briefly and unexpectedly with them. I'll have to put a message on their forum to get them to contact me if any of them come over here again! Maybe the adventure will continue? It certainly made me more determined to catch up with my latest contact here to try again with the whole idea.

Live and learn …

Well, Half Term (HT) came and went in a flurry of absolutely freezing coldness, so even though I’d been out and set a few local caches to try if anyone signed up, no-one did, and I don’t blame them!

After HT we heard that we are moving away from this area, so I’ve been rather pre-occupied with buying and selling houses for my mother who needs to come with us and visiting the new church, as well as worrying about how to write up a flopped emerging church assignment, contemplating an assignment on holiness, and also try to make a decision on what my dissertation might be about (considering I’m supposed to be writing some sort of detailed plan on it in 4 weeks deciding what it will be about would be really helpful). I am feeling very stressed!

All of which has meant that I did not chase up the local newspaper that promised to do an article on geocaching and the formation of a geocaching club for the ‘live healthily’ day that occurred today at our local high school. The reporter had thought it would be a good ‘nail’ to hang the advertising for the health day on, but obviously not that good, as I heard nothing from him, despite his interest in geocaching being used on both ‘Numbers’ and ‘CSI’.

Anyway, I took along an advert for geocaching to encourage people to get outdoors and get fit, with the intention of offering the opportunity to do a few geocaches together as a taster, but of course the wind blew and it rained, so that didn’t happen. So much for an outdoor emerging church! However, I did speak to several families about geocaching, and they seemed interested, but I lacked heart in pressing them to join a group which I knew would not run as soon as I leave in 2 months time.

I feel dis-heartened because it’s such a great communal activity for groups of people, but it does rely on good weather to at least get started, hence my urge to get started on the ‘church/assignment’ as soon as possible last year. I suppose if I’d had a separate stall inside the building and actually attempted to get contact details to form a group when the weather improved, it might have been a better approach. As it was, it was just an aside from the drugs and alcohol demos and experiments we were doing on the Red Bus youth project that I was on.

Reading people’s activities that are working, I see that they are generally having to provide structure for each of their sessions. I was hoping to have a more ad hoc approach if I’d ever got anyone other than converted friends to go out with me.

Ah well, live and learn …

My first cache

This week I finally managed to ‘set a cache’ of my own – what a saga. The rules of geocaching include no solicitation for trade and no religious enticement (or something along those lines). So I based my cache on our church building, picking up on the fact that it had been bombed in WWII and had then become resurrected. Unfortunately, another rule is about how far apart caches have to be from one another, and our building is too close to another cache, so I had to use our building as a spot for further clues to a final destination – as I write I think how similar this is to our Christian life! Setting all that up in ‘virtual web-land’ took over a week!

I was well chuffed to find someone outside the building looking for clues this Sunday morning, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to stop and chat as I was busy sorting out a Love Feast that was occurring inside at the same time (now if I’d been a real people person, instead of the leader organising, then I’d have made time and invited them in …). I told the geocacher I’d set the cache and pointed her in the right direction, but being in ‘uniform’ seemed to put her off wanting to chat – can’t imagine why.

I’ve also sorted out a few possible hides for the Half Term venture, but have yet to hear if anyone will sign up and brave the cold – it’s been biting cold up here, with the inevitable forecasts of snow.

I see one of my colleagues has written about ‘Attractional v. Incarnational’ (perhaps in response to mine), citing Stuart Murray, and I agree that both are helpful/desirable; equipping people to incarnate the gospel in all areas of society is very important. I don’t think we’ll get away from a mixed economy of church very quickly; in fact, I’m not sure that we will ever want to get away from both. What concerns me, though, is how infrequently I hear members of my congregation seeing God in their everyday lives and talking about it, or seeing the possibility of spiritualising everyday things and being able to talk about them in a spiritual way. I don’t think they don’t know God, it just doesn’t seem to be something they talk about a lot. And if we can’t talk about it, how are we ever going to expose others to Him? Maybe they’re just naturally people who ‘incarnate’ rather than storytellers?

Most likely I’m just deaf or don’t listen …

Attractional v. Incarnational

Half term is bearing down on us all, and I’ve decided to give it another go like I did last summer and advertise some guided geocaching around our town on two afternoons in half term, in the hope of connecting with some new people. So I’ve modified my original adverts and will be putting those around town to try to attract people.

There is also another event which will happen at the end of March, which is about getting fit, so I’m going to offer to take some people on a geocache to try it out, as walking is good for you. So I have two things to prepare for. I need to set some caches that we can look for, but just to protect the ones already in the vicinity, I’ll do some dummy ones of my own close to the venues. I’ve also asked a local newspaper if they can do a spiel for me about the two things. The newspaper guy had never heard of geocaching and was really intrigued when I explained, pointed out an article from the Telegraph weekend section in the last few weeks and then told him that it had started off this week’s episode of CSI. He said it must be cool if it’s on CSI! So I must set to work and come up with some details for him to polish up and put in the paper.

Of course, one of the problems with an outdoor activity, whether as the basis of a possible church or not, is that the weather dictates if you go geocaching or not. I’m a fair weather geocacher! So pray for sunshine on all three days (17th & 18th February and 20th March).

However, what is interesting me, or in reality is concerning me, is that my project has now become an ‘attractional’ thing with advertising, rather than an ‘infiltration/get to know the people and watch God at work through what’s going on’ thing. One of the main reasons for this is that the geocaching group I found always goes caching on Sunday. As a minister it’s pretty difficult to take Sunday off and go and enjoy myself!!! So much for Frost & Hirsch’s idea of infiltrating your own social networks and being incarnational within that environment (p51)!!!

I guess if I wasn’t a minister it would be easier, so does that mean that all new churches have to be started by non-ministers? It’s just like when I was at University – I could never go windsurfing or rambling because they were always on Sunday, when I was at church. In those instances, the Christians went on Saturday and were known as the God-squad windsurfers or Bible-basher ramblers. I don’t think it’s the first time someone has said go out and be church, rather than come in and do church.

What is church?

Coming up on a couple of my fellow bloggers’ pages is the question ‘Is this church?’ I watched Rob Bell’s ‘Everything is Spiritual’ DVD this morning. Here’s his definition of what church is (after 59 minutes of brilliance):

‘a group of people bonded together in their pursuit of God – obviously they are learning to see God in each other and God is powerfully present in their midst – but they are being given eyes to see the divine everywhere they go’

If he’s right, then all of the activities our blogging group is involved in would/could fall under this definition of church, as we meet and discuss 'Questions of Heaven' (loved the song, Sylvie) – even meeting in the Scooterworks bar for the ReSource weekend!