random thoughts from an article!

Reading through the blogs I regularly go through I came across this interesting article from Johnand it took me right back to a time when I was a student at St Martins in Lancaster, now called University of Cumbria! Ironic given the article! However when I was a student I went to Edinburgh to go to the Gorgie Dalry community association as it was founded on Frierian principles and I wanted to look into it more. When I arrived having chatted for a bit the person I was talking to asked me if I was proud of being English - to which I hesitated and then said 'actually not really'. He then said they were trying to make people proud of their heritage and of being from Scotland.

that conversation - as you can tell - has stayed with me and every now and then it comes back to me and I think a bit more about why I wasn't particularly proud of being English or even a 'lancashire lass'! Not many people associate me with being from Lancashire - partly because my accent is not a strong lancastrian one- in fact I have worked quite hard to get rid of the flat vowels associated with lancashire - simply because I don't particularly like the sound. But going back to the article that started my thoughts - I suddenly realised I was proud in some respects of coming from Lancashire as I suddenly had quite strong feeling about Lancashire being slowly eroded as a county.

In some ways it also ties in with some of my reading and thoughts on being a Christian and training for the ministry and with some conversations I was having in Holland with Phil. He is reading Eckhart Tolle at the moment who is the person who is teaching a new way of living, but it is based on an amalgam of different religious teaching - almost like hedging his bets. It is often the way with disillusioned Christians who have left the church who still want to believe in 'God' but because of things going wrong in their lives, in their Church, can't believe in the God they were taught about. Eddie Gibbs in his book Leadership Next talks about people who come to faith, but that is it - there is no moving on into discipleship for them, and then when things go wrong or they dislike something they move away. If leaders stop thinking about numbers and go for discipleship this might stop happening - people need to own their faith for themselves - it is not something that can be 'assumed' or 'passed down' through families or going to Church. This is where growth has to happen, not in bums on pews, but through real change, real discipleship, so the church becomes people again and not buildings.