Congratulations to Stewart Cinq on winning The Open golf championship.

Interesting speech and responses that he made...
'I want to thank the R&A for such a great competition' <Great applause>
'I want to thank Tom Watson' <Great applause>
'I want to thank my wife and kids' <Great applause>
'I want to thank my wife for bringing me to faith and I want to thank God for all that he has done for me' < Stony silence.>

Blameless.

In many places in the bible Christians are urged to be 'blameless'. For example - 1 Thessalonians 5:23 "May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

I have worked in some places where there is a blame-culture. If anything goes wrong, the finger pointing begins...no-one takes responsibility, someone else is to blame. Being blameless is making sure you don't get blamed when it all goes wrong. The result is an atmosphere of fear, mistrust and dishonesty.

Contrast that with a story I heard to do with the NASA Mission Control Centre for the Apollo 11 moon landings. Unfortunately I can't remember the names or exact words but the gist of it makes a good point.

The Mission Control room was full of highly intelligent, young individuals who had a tremendous responsibility to the men on the mission. There was no experience in the room - they were all pioneers. Each had thousands of tasks to do : - monitoring systems, watching over the health of the astronauts, measuring oxygen levels, etc etc. The mission was high risk, high profile, high cost. Just before the mission blasted off, the Flight Controller (who I believe was Gene Krantz) turned off their communication links to the outside and addressed these comments solely to those in that Mission Room:

"You all know what to do. I have every faith in all of that you that you will do your best and get it right. But know this – if there is a mistake and a tragedy occurs I will take full responsibility. It will be down to me!"

In these few words he created a team who were motivated, trusting, honest and secure in the job at hand.

"May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."

An answer to prayer - I am now famous!

For those who care, and I know precious few of you do, I moaned in a recent blog how few people follow anything I do on the good old interweb - this blog, Twitter or Facebook (OK so I don't have a Facebook account but if there were true friends out there they would set me up an account - right?) However, on Friday, July 10th all of that changed when I went international.

Being on Twitter (follow me here) and a follower of the Five Live Simon Mayo/Mark Kermode film review podcasts, I heard that Willem Dafoe was being interviewed on the show about his new film 'Anti-Christ'. I sent a tweet that they should put to him that, having been Christ in 'The Last Temptation...' and now being in 'Anti-Christ' that he should make his mind up! What followed next is sure to make history...just click on the video below.



Ok - so I may not have been mentioned personally but then God doesn't always answer prayers the way would would like Him to.

PS - I can't recommend the new film. Sounds very gruesome.

PPS - You can now catch my video broadcast here. Occurs around 1minute in!

What makes a good church?

Over the past few weeks I have been thinking about what makes a church 'good'!

Clearly church-goers define what they consider to be a 'good' church as to what they enjoy and what they believe takes them closer to God. Such things will include:

• Preach the Word of God...
• Free and easy worship...
• Formal liturgy
• Styles of songs
• Sense of togetherness
• Etc

I wonder of there is 'correct' way to do church, ie. is there a universal definition of what church should be? I think there is also a great danger that we see evangelism as being the marketing of the kind of church that we like, rather than anything else. Perhaps the problem is deeper and to do with our definition of what it means to be a Christian. I have a feeling that we have created a definition of Christianity which is marked more by how we follow Jesus rather than how closely we follow him.

The picture is the Church of Hallgrimur, Reykjavik, Iceland.

Well done Bob!

Spent today at York Minster for Robbie's Commemoration Day and Prizegiving Ceremony. He was awarded a prize for 5th form Music composition and the school English writing competition.

It was great to see him wearing the suit which he needs to wear in the 6th form instead of his school uniform. Another rite of passage passes and you realise that for your child adulthood isn't just looming but has well and truly arrived. And with it comes the pride of seeing a young man emerge and a sadness that you are needed less and less. But the success of parenthood is in realising that you are not needed, which has its rewards in itself.

I'm not sure where stories of painful teenagers comes from because I didn't start it! Robbie is no problem at all and we share a lot together.

Proud as punch.