What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Ditching the sermon – a dialogue for Holy Innocents

    dialogue with bishop
    This morning I decided to ditch the sermon in favour of a dialogue with Bishop Gregor.

    It has been a difficult Christmas in Glasgow with a major tragedy in the centre of the city as people were doing their last minute Christmas shopping. Bishop Gregor was himself there in the square just after the incident involving the bin lorry. In this conversation he describes what he saw, what he was asked to do and how he responded.

    Together we reflected on how Christians find God.

    This happened in the context of the Sunday morning Sung Eucharist instead of a sermon. It seemed the right thing to move the Feast of the Holy Innocents back to this day, it having originally been scheduled to be celebrated here tomorrow morning.

    As I said at the beginning of the service, Jesus wasn’t born into a fairy story, nor into a Christmas card – he was born into  the real world and sometimes we need to think about what that really means.

    Here’s the video:

    Dialogue between Kelvin Holdsworth and Gregor Duncan in Glasgow on 28 December 2014 from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo.

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4 responses to “tae see oorsels as ithers see us”

  1. Rev Ruth Avatar
    Rev Ruth

    My children just don’t understand it. Nor do they understand why I stay.

    Reply
  2. kelvin Avatar
    kelvin

    I suspect that the children of very many Christians in the UK these days don’t understand and don’t stay. We can see that laid out for us in page after page of diocesan and provincial statistics.

    And still we are expected to cheer on Archbishops who propose amendements which would institutionalise treating women as having less authority than men and also Bishops who tell us that banning gay people from leadership roles is good.

    In both these cases we are supposed to believe that these actions keep the church together. Meanwhile the children leave bewildered.

    Hear what the Spirit says to the children.

    Reply
  3. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    What surprises me is that it’s the same term “evangelical” that went from connoting “student-ish” in the 90s to “happy” (reserving outright clappy for those of charismatic designation) to “evangelicals come in Open form too!” now to “traditionalist” in matters of Backwards Beyond Belief(TM).

    Now I’m used to the arguments being “our tradition, restated more-so and louder” versus “put the Bible in context” – at least one party talking theologically.
    For a fresh thought, is the CoE (in particular, but also the AC in general) a bit preoccupied with not losing any *one* bum-on-its-3-legged-seat? There is a tension in the dynamic that could be resolved well by a large-scale rotation in membership – redefine the denominational lines by issues not history – that leads to a slimy weasely position of “I sort of want to go but don’t have the honesty to get on with it so I’ll sit around being a thorn in the canonical flesh and blame the church for trying to push me out”.

    Social evolution is too slow; that is where injustice lies.

    Reply
  4. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    I often ask me why I stay, and I’m in my late fifties. In the end, it is because I feel cheated without other people to worship with, and, well, to be a kind of thorn in the canonical flesh for the conservatives!!

    Reply

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