What is in Kelvin's Head?

Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome!

19/12/2013

There have been quite a lot of new hits on the blog over the last few days, not least because of the Rudolphus post, which is currently receiving comments about the quality of the Latin. The comments are in Latin too.

Seeing all these new hits come in, I decided it was time to update the About page on this blog. It now says a little more about what I do than the two line one that was there before which just had my job title and links to twitter and facebook.

If you are reading this as a new blog subscriber a particular shout out to you. Willkommen! Bienvenue! Welcome! Thank you for signing up to receive updates by email. I hope you enjoy reading all this. Do join in the comments. This is a lively community which I learn from and which often makes me laugh.

This is what I’ve said on the new About page. (Many thanks, as usual to Gordon Smith who took most of the photographs).

Hi, I’m Kelvin Holdsworth. Welcome to my blog. I’ve been writing here since August 2003. I’m the Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow – a busy church with a progressive ethos in the inner West End of the city. Glasgow is a place that I love and have a strong connections with both through my family and my childhood – I went to school just a few miles outside of the city.
After school, which I finished back in Yorkshire where I was born, I studied Mathematics and Computing at Manchester Polytechnic before going on to study theology at the University of St Andrews and the University of Edinburgh.

I enjoy my work – celebrating the Eucharist as I’m doing here, preaching and leading a busy, interestsing congregation which is gathered from all over the world. This blog is an extension of my preaching ministry sometimes – I tend to post my sermons here for all to see and I enjoy the debates that sometimes arise in the comments.

Some of the themes of my ministry have been cathedral ministry (I worked in St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth for my curacy), working with students (I’ve twice been involved in University Chaplaincy) and finding ways to make the liturgy of the church exciting and fun. I’m unashamed of having learned more about liturgy from the theatre than from the church. Human rights are important to me – I believe that everyone was made in the image and likeness of God and the consequence of that is an imperative to work for justice.

The Independent of Sunday was kind enough to include me in their Pink List – their annual celebration of movers and shakers in the UK who come from the LGBT communities. I’m one of the more outspoken members of clergy who happen to be gay and I write quite a lot about that on the blog. For me, equality is indivisible – I think that people should be treated alike whether or not they happen to be gay or happen to be straight and that has led me to be one of the campaigners to Equal Marriage in Scotland. I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to marry such couples in church.

As well as finding me in church, you will find me in other places too. Social media seems to have been invented for me and I’m active on both facebook and twitter.

When I’m not in church or online, I’m happiest in the theatre. Holidays quite often include a trip to London to catch up with what’s on there. A fascination with opera has led me into opera reviewing and my reviews of what’s happening on the opera stage in Scotland are regularly published by Opera Britannia.

If you are wondering what a thurible is, well it is the thing that you use to swing incense around with in a church.

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its all about me, Kelvin Holdsworth, welcome

6 responses to “Repeat post – wiki video”

Tim

20/02/2009

Ah goodie. I’m sure you’ll let us know how it goes 🙂

(What an *awful*ly annoying voice-over on the video…)

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Erp

20/02/2009

Do you have the critical mass of people times effort/person to get the wiki going?

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Stewart

20/02/2009

Sounds a wonderful idea – now what topic can we use and discuss to improve our worship.

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kelvin

20/02/2009

That is a good question ERP. At the moment, the wiki is really working as an intranet. (Or perhaps an extranet). It means that several of us can work together on a page without being physically located together.

One of the things that are very prevalent in churches is the presence of dispersed teams. Keeping everyone one track by e-mail can be quite hard.

A good example of what we are doing at the moment, is using a private, protected part of the wiki so that I can work on wedding bookings with our weddings organiser.

In time, and with help from others, I will be developing various bits of cathedral documentation. We are good at doing things in St Mary’s but less good at writing them down.

Thus, a liturgical manual is one of the goals of the wiki project.

Also things like “How to organise a ceildih in St Mary’s” and “How we organise champagne for Easter Day”.

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Lay clerk

20/02/2009

“How to choose the post-Evensong pub”

And the answer to both the ones you posed is obviously “get the choir to do it”!

😉

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Robin

21/02/2009

I remember signing up for “St Mary’s Hub” a while back, but I didn’t record its URL, and I can’t now find it. Is that the wiki you’re talking about, or are you now starting from scratch with something different?

I’m just curious to see how you’re using the technology, in case there’s anything we can learn and apply up here.

Robin

Reply