Autumnmania

I get all excited when autumn starts and I'm not really sure why. I can be spotted (indeed was, this week) collecting conkers on the side of the road, running my thumb over their highly polished brown skins, massaging off the soft white vernix, wondering how long till they'll decay, taking photos of them in sunshine, still harbouring anger at the banning of conker fights in schools, circa 2002.

Some people think that seasons correspond to personalities; you can be a summer person, or an autumn person, etc., and there's a whole colour/fashion/make up course (Colour Me Beautiful) that's linked to this conviction (explored in a previous post http://parttimepriest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/lent-for-extroverts-16-colour-me.html).

Maybe it's true that I'm an autumn person, but apart from having light brown-ish hair (with imagined copper highlights) and brown eyes, are there also character traits that accompany being 'an autumn person'?

I have applied some pop psychology to myself and reflected upon three reasons I might feel drawn to autumn above other seasons. If you feel the same, maybe you're an autumn person too, with your own fascinating reasons for being autumn-y. In which case, don't wear navy or scarlet. They're NOT autumn colours, unsurprisingly.

Why do I feel drawn to autumn?

1. School days.

Maybe the mention of school days makes you think of summer, those lazy hazy days in the playground, sitting under a tree if you were lucky, doing 'he loves me, he loves me not' with a daisy head (yes, this is what girls do). Or if they were bleak, your school days may remind you of winter. Spring brings to mind revision, so we instantly forget that season, and are left, therefore, with autumn.

In addition, if, like me, you became a primary school teacher, or had kids who were good at singing, you could well be drawn to autumn simply because of this one fact: that all time best kids assembly song, 'Autumn Days', with the smash lyrics:

'Autumn days when the grass is jewelled
and the silk inside a chestnut shell,
Jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled (is that even possible, I'm now wondering)
All these things I love so well
Oh, I mustn't forget, no I mustn't forget
To say a great big thank you, I mustn't forget.'

2. Conkers.

A memorable three years of my school life consisted of walking up an extraordinarily steep hill on both sides of which grew horse chestnut trees. My school memories are all bound up with those trees and their autumn fruit, stooping down to collect them, planning fights with my brother, feeling like they were so much treasure, a veritable free windfall of burnt umber. 

About aged ten, I went conker hunting with my grandfather in suburban north London. We took a bag, walked round the municipal golf course and loaded ourselves up with a modest but well earned brown shiny cache. One street from home, a woman came out of a house with a huge bag, on the way to the dustbin. The bag was full of conkers. Seeing our own, much smaller haul, she offered the bag to us and we took it, hesitatingly. It seemed to me, who had been brought up with a Protestant work ethic, something of a cheat, a benevolent bounty we had not deserved, which spoke of the mysterious, even risque. But we took it anyway.

3. Something ending, something beginning.

Here we get more metaphysical, but feeling drawn to autumn has to do with its being the season than most resonates with our humanity. Summer is over, stuff is going to die, and yet I find I'm often more relaxed about it than sad. One may as well be realistic. Summer is heralded by protracted ends of term, outdoor social events - in wealthy Thames valley, anyway - ever more splendid, and/or exhausting, depending on how you look at them; holidays away - more planning, travelling, angst about how to get sun, and for me, dreaded airplanes; ill fitting skimpy clothes and women's figures. I greet all this with less enthusiasm than the autumn back to school routine, children growing up into new classes, trees relaxing into brown and gold, a nip in the air. 

Because after something is ending, something new can begin. Out of all the seasons, autumn is the most like actual life: not always summery and happy, but it's not all bleak either. Such a life is viewed with what Richard Rohr calls 'a bright sadness' (Falling Upward, p. 117).

And so on this National Poetry Day, I concur with Wordsworth's admission to being:  

'a melancholy (...) that lov'd
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than dawn, Autumn than Spring' (The Prelude, p. 90).

School days, conkers, and endings/beginnings. Three reasons to wish you a happy autumn.

Passing the baton

Sermon for Trinity 19C

In the Race of Faith, we’re all involved in active baton passing.

Luke 17: 5 The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.

^{2 Timothy 1:5}I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you. For this reason I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands...

One of the biggest disappointments of the Rio Olympics track and field events was the disqualification of the GB men’s 4x400 sprint relay team.

They had run a storming race, beating their own record in training, and thought they would be straight into the final with it. But there was a problem.

Baton passing is a fine art, and you’re supposed to do it within a 20-yard stretch of track. If your foot is deemed to be over the line, even by a fraction, whilst you pass it to the next runner, you are disqualified. And if they progress beyond the line before receiving the baton, the team is disqualified.

Obviously you’re running really fast in a sprint relay, but as you approach the next runner, you must position yourself completely accurately, and so must they; you must slow a bit, they have to start running so as not to lose the momentum, and you must pass it within that very narrow margin of track.

The GB men’s team had run a blistering sub 3 minute heat, which would have put them in the frame for a medal in the final; all the passes appeared to have gone well, but after jubilant scenes at the finish line, news filtered through that they had been disqualified.

They appealed, but were unsuccessful despite video footage being inconclusive. The judges ruled that Matthew Hudson Smith had marginally had his foot over the line while waiting for Delano Williams to pass the baton.

India were deemed to have committed the same offense and Trinidad and Tobago received a lane violation, thus shifting the host team, Brazil, three places up the scoreboard and into the final.

In a similar disappointment, the US men’s 4x100m relay team were also disqualified after finishing in Bronze Medal position, due to an early hand off between Mike Rodgers and Justin Gatlin.

In the nail biting sport of sprint relay, the successful passing of the baton is the crucial lynch pin of the whole race. But passing the baton has its glitches, and those glitches would seem to be rather common.

In the race of faith, the successful passing of the baton is the crucial lynch pin of the whole race. But it too has its glitches.

The fact that we’re here this morning gathered and worshipping is testament to the baton passing of each generation before us, but we also know that there’s been a dramatic falling away of attendance within the C of E lately, particularly in younger generations, and perhaps we might be able to put that down to glitches in the baton passing.

Despite population growth, numbers attending church services has dropped 12% over the last decade and generally speaking many C of E congregations are aging whilst fewer young people (under 50s) are engaging. Less than 2% of the population go to an Anglican church on a Sunday.

It’s a good job that our gospel reminds us of mustard seed faith. With mustard seed faith, we can join in with God in the seemingly impossible task of baton passing.

Let’s look at how we all need to need be actively involved in passing on the baton of faith.

Timothy, had received the baton of faith and it would appear he was a third generation Christian: in the Epistle, Paul refers to the faith that first lived in his grandmother, Lois, and in his mother, Eunice.

Scholars generally agree that Paul is near the end of his life here and that he wrote this letter to Timothy in the mid 60s, so just enough time for there to be a first generation Jewish believer in Jesus, (Lois) who then passed the faith onto her daughter, Eunice, who passed it to Timothy.

Never underestimate the power of a praying parent, grandparent (or partner or godparent for that matter).

In the 98^th year of her life, my Grandmother was known to attend the monthly prayer group which took place up in her local church, as people sat round in a circle of chairs and prayed for the young. Although she could have rested on her laurels, having almost run the race to completion herself, she went to that prayer group because she believed in young people and recognised the need to pass the baton. She was ignited from within by the need to pass the baton. She was in some ways, difficult, uncompromising and a bit of a social snob, but she was unceasing in her prayers for the generations below her to know Christ.

As you get older, it seems you have nothing to lose. If people think you’re barmy for talking about Christ, that doesn’t really matter, because God will honour your mustard seed faith, and uproot mulberry trees into the sea for you. Someone, somewhere, will get the baton from your prayerful witness. If we don’t share the gospel, the baton falls.

So Timothy learnt the faith through his family. But Paul had also been instrumental in his faith journey. We read that he had laid hands on Timothy for him to receive the Holy Spirit, and in the Epistle he encourages Timothy to continually fan into flame the gift of the Spirit that was given him at that time.

It’s the same for us – the best way to pass the baton is to be alive in your faith. The best signpost to Christ is a fully functioning Christian. That’s why we continually need to be renewed in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Timothy’s faith pedigree tells us two important things about handing on the faith (passing the baton).

Firstly, the family is the primary conduit for faith, but each person needs to individually appropriate that faith for himself or herself. Timothy’s faith was caught, but also affirmed individually.

There’s a tension here for churchgoing families.

Children are not easily fooled. They imbibe actions and not just words. What feeds them primarily is real spiritual life flowing out from a lived experience of Jesus Christ. This is more than simply church attendance.

Yes, we long for them to develop church-going habits too, but primarily they need to see a lived daily faith that speaks to life issues at each stage of growing up.

So that’s baton passing within the family. And research suggests that the majority of people who come to a living faith in Jesus, will do so before their 18^th birthday. So that’s even more reason to pray for your children, grandchildren and godchildren, nephews and nieces.

But, secondly, not everyone is lucky enough to see living faith modelled within their family.

So we also need to be involved in baton passing more generally. This is clearly what happened with the very first believers in Jesus.

Someone, somewhere, modelled Christ to them in such a way that they turned to him and became believers. So someone shared their faith with Lois, Timothy’s Grandmother, and she became the first family member to know Christ. Perhaps it was a neighbour or a friend, someone who pointed to Christ in persuasive words and loving actions.

Paul himself came to faith by what seemed to be a direct intervention of the risen Christ, as he fell to the ground on his way to persecute the young church. He then devoted his whole life to spreading the message, passing the baton. Not many of us will come to faith like that, but you do hear of the occasional experience when God appears to someone in a dream, say, or in extremis.

Paul assumes that baton passing will be one of the chief characteristics of the Christian church. That’s why he has identified Timothy as a successor – a very different person to him I’m sure – but carrying on the race with the baton firmly in his hand.

Investing in successors is a risky business because our successors do things differently from their predecessors.

That’s the nature of baton passing. We need to have humility, and to be encouragers here. As I look back on 50 years of church going the most significant catalyst in baton passing that I can identify in the family of Christ, is the individuals who are encouragers.

The baton, of course, is the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ, which is for all people everywhere. ‘For this gospel I was appointed a herald, an apostle and a teacher’, writes Paul from prison, and he urges Timothy to ‘guard the good treasure entrusted to you.’

Passing the batons happens in those fortunate families where faith is truly alive, but they may be in the minority. So baton passing is up to all of us.

In looking at this enormous task, we come back to the mustard seed faith.

It’s just as well Jesus talked of faith as having very small beginnings, because otherwise I think we’d be tempted to give up. If we have faith as small as a mustard seed, we can say to a tree, be uprooted, and thrown into the sea, and it will be done, Jesus says.

Christianity started with one person. It spread to 12, then to 72, then to 3000 on the Day of Pentecost. We don’t need to lose heart about passing the baton. But we do need to be actively involved in doing it.

And when we’ve done what we can, when we’ve had faith, and prayed, and cared enough to pass the baton on, in words and deeds, in fact all we’ve done is been faithful servants, and not super human Christians.

And that’s quite a relief too.

Amen.

Warming to my theme

When it comes to preaching, is it sermons from The Lectionary or discreet Themes that get your vote?

For many years a typical Sunday at church for me would involve listening to someone preach through either a theme or else a large chunk of a whole book of the bible. In the kinds of churches I attended, you'd be likely to receive a list of themes in advance, in the form of an attractive coloured leaflet, so keen people (yes, I confess I was one) could look up the preacher's theme that week. When it came to whole books (six week on Ephesians - hooray!) I don't know how the vicar decided which to choose, but, being a gently charismatic sort of Christian, I simply assumed they listened to the Holy Spirit on that one. Such innocent days...

Knowing in advance what was being covered gave you a sense of something systematic and was very stimulating. Need five weeks on being a Christian at work? No problem. Not read Habakkuk for while? Never fear, the preacher had it covered. Exodus would take longer, granted, but you get my drift.

I thought this was what happened in all churches till I started going to village church. At village church, I experienced a sense of fogginess and losing the thread, as week by week it wasn't immediately obvious why we were having, say, something from Matthew one month followed by something from somewhere else the next, with no discernible pattern. I was no doubt unobservant, unlucky or just very dense, but it didn't occur to me till I was training for going into the church myself, that there was a thing called a Lectionary and people simply followed the set reading each week and after three years, they would theoretically have heard the preacher steam through the whole bible. What a great plan! 

And there was more. I remember the first time someone turned to me in the theological college chapel to ask, nonchalantly, 'Which year are we on?' I looked completely baffled, thinking what planet is she on, clearly we're still in 2007. She eventually explained that the Lectionary readings rotate every three years: Years A, B and C. I was grateful for the enlightenment. There was clearly more to the C of E than first met the eye.

For the record, I will also always be extremely grateful to the person who patiently explained to me what a Canticle was for, and why it was that in The Daily Office, different bits of the bible were called, confusingly, different names, viz. Psalms, Readings, Canticles and The Gospel, though to me, they were all just 'a bible reading'. 

The first time I had to prepare worship for other ordinands, just following the Lectionary, and not around a theme, I confess I was completely at sea. It seemed so prosaic, so unimaginative, so non-creative. 

I got used to it.

So is it Themes or the Lectionary? Which is best? There's a possible tension between different churchmanship here. Are you more evangelical (themes) than Anglican (set readings)? Or are you the other way round? Honestly, I cannot rightly say any more. 

Since I've now preached twice through the entirety of Years A, B and C, I'm quite at ease with the Lectionary. In fact I have umpteen sets of sermons filed on my laptop under A, B and C. And they can even, in some circumstances (say it in hushed tones) be re-used. The Lectionary also has the wonderful advantage of relieving the pressure to invent the wheel every Sunday, which thinking up themes threatens. Even the most creative amongst us get tired. And preaching from set readings is a good discipline.

Another upside of the 'Common Lectionary' is the sense of solidarity with other preachers all over the country, even world, being formed around the same reading week by week, especially if you're in the Early Morning Sermon Club on Twitter, which is an attractive, yet for me, very scary prospect. Not being a morning person, this isn't really an option, but I like the idea of those clerics that are on Twitter at 6.30am on a Sunday, hurriedly writing their last minute sermons 'together'. It must be nice and communal. 

I suppose the downside of the Lectionary is that unless your parishioners go out and buy one themselves, or go online and work it out, people may well be sitting there on a Sunday morning quite oblivious to where we're at each week, preaching-wise. And as a feature of multi-parish rural ministry is multiple services in different buildings, your continuity can get upset anyway, which makes remembering where we are in the preaching pattern tricky. In point of fact, sometimes we can't even remember which building we're in, let alone which book of the bible we're in.

Tension between the Lectionary and discreet themes was highlighted in this week's Church Times column. The writer complained about the profusion of themed Sundays the church seems to be bombarded with - Sea Sunday, Education Sunday, Racial Justice Sunday, Homeless Sunday - to name a few. Glossy leaflets come through clerics' doors, or we get emails urging us to engage with whatever Sunday is coming up, and I have some sympathy with her frustration, up to a point. 

She lamented the 'agendas of a themed Sunday': 'they are a chance to put ourselves on the side of the nice and the good, to think well of ourselves by what has become known as virtue signalling'. A bit harsh? For although it might take more effort to depart from your usual reading, what themed Sundays say to me is, the Church has something to say on important topics that people on the fringe of the church also value. Themes like race, education and homelessness are bridges across which the less churched and the unchurched might walk. In all the writer's critique, there was no mention of the missiological possibilities of a themed Sunday. Instead the implication was that they were gimmicks. 

Mothering Sunday and Remembrance are themed Sundays and, though amongst the hardest in the Church Year to pull off well, are often those which are the most 'permeable', attendance-wise. You can invite someone to Mothering Sunday and it might just connect with them. You see people at Remembrance who might not otherwise come, because it's a theme we all understand. So from the point of view of mission, aren't themes advantageous?

The writer reserved special ire for 'new seasons'. Apparently there's such a thing as Creation Season now, something to do with the present Pope. Seeing as the threat of ecological armageddon is real these days, it would seem a good idea...

But there was a small concession in the aforementioned 'liturgical rant' (her words): Kingdom Season was at least welcomed as an 'opportunity to wear the under-used red vestments'. 

I admit, I felt mildly depressed. I had to ask myself, generally speaking, is my priestly heart beating that little bit faster at the thought of connecting, through a shared theme, with people outside the church? 

Yes. 

I had to ask myself, generally speaking, is my heart beating that little bit faster at the thought of wearing liturgical red? 

No. 

It's probably just me, but that's the truth. Maybe I'm not so Anglican after all...

Dreaming of evangelism

Despite having been embedded in the rural church for 6 years I still dream about "successful evangelistic programmes".

I realise this sentence needs a lot of what is trendily called unpacking.

First of all what is 'the rural church'? Rural is a bit of a 'catch all' phrase and much of what passes for rural is not very. Rural might not necessarily mean one working farm and a church in a tiny hamlet (that really would be the rural church) but 'rural' does imply a lot of pretty countryside. And when you have a lot of pretty countryside, you have expensive housing, for which a healthy salary may well be required. So the rural church might just as soon be a 'mixed commuter village' and it might therefore be near a station and a hub of shops and services, like the one I live in. So the answer to the question 'what kind of evangelism do rural churches do?' must have something to do with the context, as it always does. 

Because wisdom has it that the church 'does evangelism' differently in the rural set up. So I probably need to give up my dream of big evangelistic programmes, which may be a false one anyway. And yet...

There seem to be a number of reasons for thinking differently about evangelism in the (small) rural church. Firstly the style in rural/central ministry is to remain fairly close to the seasonal/liturgical year - it's the effect of all that countryside and our big gardens I think. 

So when we're looking for opportunities for sharing the Good News do we really need a 'programme', or are we more likely to look to Harvest, Remembrance, Christmas, and other seasonal times in which to share the message? Because we're supposed to be more tied to the seasons in the countryside. Though if you're upwardly mobile and can travel, you might be a village dweller who's nonetheless oblivious to harvest and who's no more likely to feel the need for church at harvest festival time, than someone living in the large town down the road. Mixed villages contain those who may not have grown up in the countryside as well as those who have, but even those who've lived in the countryside many years may have drifted away from the need to include God in the marking of time. So where does that leave rural evangelism?

Secondly, another factor in middle of the road/rural churchmanship is that the need for outreach/evangelism/sharing faith needs to be gently negotiated, and not assumed. The very fact that people are more likely to know each other in a smaller dwelling place means that calling out distinctions between those in the church and those outside is not seen as strictly necessary. After all, we're all in the same community together; some go to church a lot, some a bit and some not all. What's the problem? Is there any need to think about who might or might not be a believer? And yet, if we're all in the same boat, where does that leave evangelism, the fundamental challenge of Christ, to make disciples of all people groups?

Things are complex in the happily mixed middle. One meets plenty of people who are in fact quite 'connected' to their local church in their own minds ("the church is important in the community", "it's our church", "you're our vicar") whereas many who are actually physically there most Sundays may talk about a much closer link between belonging, belief and collective worship. What in fact is the connection? That you can be 'Christian' without ever connecting the word knowingly to the word 'Christ', is a strongly held position for a number of non church-goers, and so there's a need to clarify terms. But who owns the term 'Christian'?

Finally, evangelistic approaches may have something to do with numbers. There are fewer volunteers in very small congregations, so the 'manpower' needed to host, say, a 10 week course, with meal, IT projection, training beforehand, follow up afterwards, can seem overwhelming. In a previous large-ish church I attended, in a town, the expectation for evangelistic programmes was such that the Curate not only led every session of The Alpha Course, but also wrote all his own talks, even though he could have used the filmed material on offer. The meal was cooked by an army of older ladies, the hall set up every single week with chairs and tables, there were multiple group leaders, and even paid-for babysitting, so young parents could attend. The vicar didn't even need to turn up. This is the content of my dream in fact...

I hope my dream of evangelism doesn't entirely fade, though it may have to be re-imagined. Because if you aim for nothing, you generally hit it. I think what it boils down to is equipping the people of God for the mission of God. However, as the saying goes - not a particularly well chosen one, for my profession, perhaps - the devil is in the detail.

Rio 2016 and the law of exponential blessing

Christ the Redeemer statue overlooking Rio, where a particularly blessed Olympics as far as Team GB went, has just taken place.

The 2016 Olympics will soon be drawing to a close and I'm thinking of ditching the telly now. After such an uplifting two weeks of sport, not my normal hobby by any stretch of the imagination, with nearly everything I watched turning out pretty amazingly for Great Britain I can't imagine going back to a diet of depressing global news, wall to wall men's football and repeats of Midsomer Murders.

It was London 2012 that first alerted me to an entirely different discourse around British sport and our potential for national success at 'the greatest show on earth'. Up till then we were plucky losers with a modest number of famous medal winners - in Atlanta we were 36th in the medal table, in Sydney and Athens, 10th.

During the 1970s a minuscule number of Olympic names filtered down into consciousness due to their outstanding performances rising above the level of the physical, to something almost mythical - chiefly the diminutive gymnasts Olga Korbut, the 'darling of Munich' (1972) and Nadia Comaneci, who scored a perfect 10 in Montreal (1976). These two, rather than any others, stood out for me no doubt because in the 70s I did gymnastics at school. It was a bit like dance, and the only sport at which I gave even a vaguely passable performance.

But as for the rest of the Olympics of, say, the last quarter of a century, I'd be hard pressed to recall much. Here goes a random attempt, just using my very poor, very non-sporting memory, without the help of Google:

Seoul (1988) - Absolutely zero, though I did know one of the Chaplains. 
Barcelona (1992) - I remember the song - Freddie Mercury and Montserrat Caballe.
Atlanta (1996) coincided with the early rising of our then 6 month old baby daughter, so a lot of swimming on at 5.30 a.m, and one very tired husband who got up every morning with the baby so I could lie in.
Sydney (2000) Splendid fireworks and Cathy Freeman's 400m gold.
Athens (2004) They couldn't really afford it. Paula Radcliffe's tragically incomplete Marathon.
Beijing (2008) I Started noticing that Track and Field have really exciting events, especially when Usain Bolt is winning stuff.
London (2012) Got very caught up in it this year, it being home territory; even went to two events, one with now 16 year old daughter; completely amazed that GB could actually win stuff, but assumed that was because it was on British soil and everyone was completely buzzed.
Rio (2016) Realised something amazing is going on, in this our most successful Olympics ever. Like London, people I've never heard of are getting so many medals for Great Britain that sometimes you miss one because you can only watch one chanel at a time. Come down every morning for breakfast and discover we've won more golds. Our medal total is 66 to date*, more than in London, across more disciplines, some for the first time ever, with actually fewer GB athletes than in London. Golds in swimming, diving, rowing, sailing, cycling, kayaking, canoeing, tennis, golf, taekwondo, dressage, gymnastics, show jumping, boxing, 5000m, 10000m, hockey, triathlon (may have missed a couple...)
Begin to scratch my head in wonder...

It's got me pondering about how success builds more success and what this means in terms of the spiritual, and that intriguing little verse in Matthew 13:12 - 'For those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.'

Seems a bit unfair of Jesus really. It's in the context of the parables and the one about the sower in particular. He seems to be saying that for those who 'get' him (who follow his teaching?) more understanding will follow upon what is already understood. Enlightenment will lead to more enlightenment. But for those who don't get it (don't get him?) the law of exponential growth will work backwards, and even the small something they did have will reduce exponentially to nothing. 

I might have got this wrong, but blessing appears to work like compound interest. Or Olympic success (even if that success is directly linked to funding. Of course it is - that's obvious). The more you have, the more you get, but exponentially. Blessing doesn't run along in a straight line, but goes up an increasingly steep graph. Maybe that's also what Jesus had in mind when he said 'I have come that they might have life, and have it in abundance' (John 10:10). I guess in sport it stands to reason that if you start from a successful beginning, with success to look up to, you can build even more success. If you come into a sport on the back foot, it'll take longer to build up to even modest success.

It reminds me of CS Lewis's concept of heaven and hell (purgatory?) in The Great Divorce (1945). Heaven and hell are not equal and opposite, though they appear like this to people at first. In the end of the book, those who have chosen the harder reality of 'heaven' over the grey laziness of 'hell', look down from their vantage point in a green grassy heaven, through a little hole in the heavenly ground, and see the whole of hell beneath them. What appeared, when they were there previously, to be a vast and sprawling grey town, is nothing more than a small reduced spot easy enough to fit into a puddle under their feet. Hell has exponentially reduced, while heaven is a place of endless and growing reality as people continue to travel onwards and upwards.

The 'law' of exponential blessing and growth may well apply to church life too. Churches where evangelistic courses have run, often report that the impact of running the course repeatedly is exponential. You can see this in the growth of the Alpha course across the UK and worldwide. Whether our Olympic success will continue to follow an upwards curve will be interesting to observe. There's nothing particularly 'fair' about exponential blessing - it just appears to be a fact. Whether after a certain point is reached, success begins to breed complacency might be an interesting tangent to explore, along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell's thesis in David and Goliath (2013), where disadvantage actually leads to a special motivation and hidden advantages. 

But for now, I'm basking in the feel good factor, watching repeats of Mo Farrar's races and the women's hockey team's winning goal, and sadly gearing up for next week's Midsomer Murders repeats.

* we ended with 67.