Curate Conundrums

Have you ever had that niggling feeling in the back of your mind? The sort of feeling that just won’t go away, the compulsion to do something, or to say something. Something dragging you towards something else, like the way in a cartoon, a finger beckons out of the mist from a pie, and the character has no choice but to follow it? Sometimes the Holy Spirit leads us to unexpected places. In our curate’s training group we did an exercise in which we had to discern what our learning style was, which also feeds into personality too. There were four quadrants in this particular model. Activist, how much of a doer are you? Do you like to get stuck in? A Reflector, people who like to gather data by reading and listening, they have a thoroughly methodical approach.   A Theorist, people who are rational and analytical, they point out flaws in thinking and ask probing questions. A Pragmatist, people who like to solve problems and experiment with new ideas. They are mostly interested ...

As somebody who has a natural distrust of government, and people in positions of power, today’s reading from 1 Peter is one, when taken at face value I substantially struggle with. On the face of it disagree with. With the local elections coming up, it’s good for us as Christians to reflect on things such as power and authority, who has it? Who do we give it to? Where do we get it from? Now I’m not suggesting that we should take up arms against the government and form barricades around City Hall, like a Norwich version of Les Mis. ‘Do you hear the people sing, ‘cause they haven’t emptied the bin.’ But I think when we look at this letter within its context then it makes much more sense and is much more agreeable to those of us with a slightly less obedient mentality, when it comes to earthly government. What I don't think this letter is saying, is that we have to blindly obey those in authority. We’re not sure exactly who wrote this letter. Lots of scholars are unsure abou...

‘Acts of the Apostles’ is a bit of an unfair name for the book our sermon series is on at the moment. Most of the apostles only get a passing mention, and most of the book focuses on the story of Paul, but I suppose ‘Acts of some of the apostles and quite a lot of what Paul did after he was converted’ is not a very catchy title. Poor old Philip barely gets a mention. But still It’s a great book, that weaves together a narrative about what happened after Jesus, and how the early church started. It’s a funny sort of book, not funny in a ha ha sort of way, but funny in terms of what it is, what is it? Well a mixture of things, It’s often referred to as a History, but it’s not written like a dry Greek history book of the time would’ve been, so kind of, it is. Some scholars think that it’s a biblical history book, because Luke, the writer, who you might remember from such hits as ‘the gospel of Luke’, must have had excellent knowledge of the Greek Septuagint (that’s the Greek Old Testa...