GadgetVicar

Happy Christmas

A little GadgetVicar tradition.....A Happy and Blessed Christmas to all readers of this blog.

What's It All About?

Home communions, maybe a bit of hospital visiting, watchnight service, cleaning the rectory and preparations for Christmas dinner all to do today. Keep focussed......it's all about Jesus, of course.

Reading the Bible

One of the highlights of this year and something of a spiritual lifeline has been the weekly Bible study at Starbucks every Thursday morning. Six pastors have read our way throught the New Testament together and it has been most edifying and a good discipline. We start on Genesis in the New Year.

Beat Attitude is the brains behind another Bible-reading scheme, which we are encouraging St Silasites and friends to engage with. The details can be found here. It's another good way of reading the Bible regularly. The resources needed are available on the internet, which should make it accessible to most people in the congregation.

Bible reading is one of the things that has sustained me most in the darker days of 2009. Why not give it a go too?

Acting It

Reminder to self: never offer to act in anything again. I've trod the boards several times this month, shocking my fellow cast members last week  with my hammy sergeant-major. This morning I played "Mike", the grumpy hubbie in our marvellous Christmas play (Whaddya mean, " You didn't need to act, then?").

In my youth, I was in a little theatre troupe called "Ripples": we toured the land presenting our little Gospel tales. We performed on the stage of the Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow and the BBC recorded  and broadcast our work (I even have a video of the latter, which will remain sealed in a vault until I go to to heaven). It's been lovely to do a bit of acting again, but far more stressful than I remember it being.

Tonight at 8pm is our Carols by Candlelight Service. Another superb team has been working on this. I always find this a tough one to prepare for and every year I struggle to put some thoughts together for the talk. This year has been no exception, but I hope I've been given something worth saying.

I suppose that, in some ways, my acting has been replaced by preaching. Preachers should always have a good sense of the dramatic and an ability to project, so those experiences in the past have all been useful. The main difference being that preachers should always be true to themselves and express what God has impressed upon them, not just what they think. I hope I do that tonight.