Colourful Dreamer

I met with Spanky Moore the other day to talk about my research on worship with young people in an Anglican setting. There is other stuff about that on this blog. I was trialling the interview schedule. One of the things we came to was the need to be a whole lot more specific about the functions of liturgy, and not just about the form. So I had questions about the structure and about the use of liturgy, but nothing about the function, partly because I had not so clearly thought or read about that. So I am learning about the need to do all this together: read, shape the question, interview and research, read more, work on the questions more etc... So what did we see the function of liturgy to be? 1. To provide a framework to gather people, tell the biblical story, and send people out to join with God in mission. 2. To provide a way to form the character of the whole community and the individuals involved to have an incarnational approach to God and mission. The heart of Anglican liturgi...

I was watching an australian kids dvd of chirstian songs. Many if not most of the songs were little memory verses all set to music to make it easier to remember. All good??? Maybe. but as I watched I thought of all those talks I have listened to which has used the line "there is a verse in the bible that says" I hate that line so much. It reduces teh bible to a ransom collection of proverbs. And the Bible is not a random collection of proverbs, and should never ever be treated as such. And as I watched this dvd I realised where some of that attitude comes from. Our education programmes which teach the memory verse, and nothing about the book that verse comes from, the author who wrote it, what the author was trying to say in teh book and how the verse fits in with that. And we never teach the whole bible, or the story of the whole bible, well hardly ever. and as a result, we end up with a view of the Bible as whakatauki, proverbs. Blah!!!