Intro: Been thinking about worship quite a lot since Deep Impact 2012. Partly because i realised it reminds me of spring harvest 20 odd years ago. Partly because it challenged me in an unexpected way. These thoughts are rawish & unexplored. probably containing badly made points so feel free to ignore them. They come with a little experience of standing in pews, worship services and events, and some of organising and leading worship in a few contexts.

what is worship?
worship is time spent noticing God.
It can be done privately or corporately
Private worship it can include personal bible study and prayer times.
Corporately it can include liturgical action such as praising, thanking, invoking, confessing, proclaiming, interceding, and blessing

Worship within an congregational setting is not a private event.
Obvious right? If you gather with a group of other people, the relationship is public.

I do wonder about the individualism of worship. Particularly within songs, songs which refer to ‘I’ or ‘me’ and my relationship to a God. This can be helpful in songs of intimacy and praise, hymns and prayers of lament and confession.
Does this creates a false understanding of the privacy and intimacy of that moment. If I consider that during a public time it is actually a safe environment to have one on one time with God, how does that regard and speak of the others within the church?
The oft quoted ‘where two and three and gathered’ provokes the question about how God deals with each person within that. this questions has some momentum when each member of that group could be worshiping privately and individually while part of the whole.

Privacy
When we gather for worship, we gather.

We.

We bring our experiences, reflections, happiness and sadness and join together. That joining to notice God can mean different thing to different people but we do things together. Inherent in this is a public notice and reaction. If i do something in a congregation there is an expectation that people will notice and and expectation of a reaction. a smile, a nod, a frown, perhaps a stolen moment of commentary. That is part of a group coming to notice God. The reality that we can notice God in each other.

When David danced in front of God. He did it publicly, literally in front of everyone, (leading the soldiers back from battle). And others started joining in. The story goes that one of his wives looked out the window and saw him and was shocked, catching him later and asking about his actions.

When we join together, we are public. We are deliberately not private. Our gatherings are hopefully advertised, inviting people into churches to be with us. We look for critical engagement with those who have not joined with us.

Privacy is a hot topic with the CCTV, interweb, human rights and personal safety issues involved in the discussion. But privacy in a large gathered group is much harder to contend with. What does this mean for those whose job it is to lead a group in worship. it means our outlook and focus should be on the appropriateness of action within our gatherings for our culture, for how each action helps us notice god, & how we can notice God in a way which causes us to think & play.

Social Media
It would be easy to point to Social Media as something which disrupts our ability to notice God. It is endless and constant in the demands it makes our our time and our skills. With blogs to read (yes, Irony), RSS feeds to check, twitter to update, Facebook to update, thinks to re-tweet, like and comment on. Taking time to notice God seems entirely counter cultural.

For years Christianity especially has dealt in social media. First Communion Cards, Footprints book markers, entire shops of books and things to communicate publicly. With the advent of mass recording, Conferences & Festivals have recorded talks and concerts and sold them to those present and those absent, right up to and including dedicated radio and TV stations across the UK.

The problem comes with the speed of current social media. Twitter expects updates within seconds of each other. Facebook, within minutes. With this speed comes a lack of control. Anyone can say anything, picture anything, and have shared it with millions of people within seconds. This is no possibility of editing the message.

This immediacy gives rise to fear. The real risk of a negative getting out is realistic. Yet social media has the ability to bring those absent physically, into worship. Enabling for joining in and enriching our noticing God. It allows for those opting out of the worship to engage with those within in. It allows for dialogue.

Public worship invites comment and social media provides one of the main ways currently to comment. As a force with the ability to instantly allow for the engagement of a large group of people, it is unbeatable. As a aid to our efforts to notice God in a corporate spaces it is a tool which feels under used, with this great possibilities

The previous idea of pulling in the blog posts as notes wasn’t working as Facebook seems to have sidelined notes as a vital part of the service, much as they have with pages.

Hopefully with this in place things will communicate well but please be aware we are in a transition space with all this and it could fall apart at any point.
but it appears to be doing well so far

the only major problem came at the end of the process.
I had opened a Facebook app account, and set up the app as per the instructions.
I clicked back to WordPress installed and set up the plugin.
then it asked me to generate an access token. (By clicking the link provided)
every time I successfully got this error message.

API Error Code: 191 API Error Description: The specified URL is not owned by the application Error Message: Invalid redirect_uri: Given URL is not allowed by the Application configuration.

Rubbish.
I couldn’t work out what i had done wrong.
as per the instructions I was bang on.

The Solution.
when I had specified this Blogs Address in Facebook APPs, I have put it in as “http://www.schelp.co.uk/blog’
After some internet searching I found the solution was remove the “www.” within the Facebook App settings leaving “http://schelp.co.uk/blog/”
worked first time after that.

honestly, the simple things.

Laconic Hegemony, vol 6 is available for download from Soundcloud or for listening to live here using the embed below.
Vol.6 is a collection of my favourite songs from 2011,

(The critera, to remind you, is any music I have heard for the first time in 2011. So the album may not have been released in 2011 but thats when I heard it, then it is in. I am not sure it is as random as previous efforts and perhaps not as ramshackle as previous mixtapes, but it is there for you.

For the best listening experience, try listening blind and a tracklisting will go up tomorrow or wednesday at some point.

(as a point of interest ‘REMembering’ Laconic Hegemony, vol.5 was never released publicly. but is available if you want it?)

can virtual meetings replace physical meetings?

The World Questions Centre made this their questions of 2011

James Flynn has defined “shorthand abstractions” (or “SHA’s”) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates (“market”, “placebo”, “random sample,” “naturalistic fallacy,” are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate.

The Edge Question 2011

WHAT SCIENTIFIC CONCEPT WOULD IMPROVE EVERYBODY’S COGNITIVE TOOLKIT?

The term ‘scientific”is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous conceptual tool that may be summed up succinctly (or “in a phrase”) but has broad application to understanding the world.

The list of people who answer the questions are quite staggering.
The list of concepts runs to 17 pages and also are quite staggering.

the ones which i particularly liked were
Terrance Sejnowski – Powers of 10 also see Carl Page – Powers of 10
Gerd Gigerenzer – Risk literacy
Carlo Rovelli – The Uselessness of Certainty
Evgeny Morozov – Einstellung Effect

an entertaining and thought provoking way to spend an evening!
you should visit

original site ::[[click here]]::

interesting wee article in the financial times about the Pop Music by Peter Aspden. (inspired by the video above.)

watch the video and have a read of the article. I think it asks some interesting questions.

So we need a solution.

We live in a valley surrounded by quite big hills so getting a TV signal is quite an issue, currently we cannot get BBC1 or 2 on digital, was can get a poor analogue signal but,
Virgin doesn’t cover our area,
BT Vision relies on a minimum broad band connection speed, (which we cannot vouch for),

there appears to be three main solutions
1 – we buy/rent the field next to us off the rich man and site a satellite dish there.
2 – we replace the entire existing Ariel system for the house
3 – we do away with broadcast media and rely solely on technology such as 4OD, BBC iplayer, STVplayer & OnDemand five.
ideally though any new system/solution would allow for accessibility cross a wireless network to varied different devices.

but we are open to hearing people’s experiences/thoughts?

any ideas? seriously answers on the back of an envelope!

I do have to say though, it is lighter, faster, somehow it looks more compact than the previous one.

A big thank you to my wife for such a wonderful surprise. it really was quite amazing.
It is quite wonderful.

all i have to do is save up for a new laptop bag for it to fit in,
one of these would be nice…

No matter where I search, it seems the internet can never answer the question.