Visit to the Oadby Gurdwara

Oadby now has its own Gurdwara, a place of worship for the Sikh Community. Albert Mosely, of Trinity Methodist Church writes,

On behalf of Trinity Methodist Church a visit has been arranged to the new Oadby Sikh Gurdwara, but this can become a Churches Together in Oadby visit if people from other churches would like to join us. This visit will start from outside Trinity at 7.15 pm on Wednesday March 14. It will provide an opportunity to see round the Gurdwara, learn about Sikhism, offer friendship and good wishes to the Sikhs, and enjoy light refreshments with them. People going will be expected to take off their shoes in the Gurdwara, and cover their heads when in the main rooms (head scarves are quite acceptable for women and handkerchiefs will be provided for the men). There will be no charge for the visit but a small contribution (say £1 - £2 per person) towards their refurbishment fund would be very acceptable. For further information please contact Albert Mosley 0116 271 7609.

How to stay awake in church

These gems from The Lutheran Handbook are aimed at helping worshippers stay awake and alert during church.

Get adequate sleep. Late Saturday nights are Sunday morning's worst enemy.

Drink plenty of water, though not too much. One quick bathroom break is considered permissible. Two or more are bad form.

Good posture will promote an alert bearing and assist in paying attention, so you'll get more out of worship.

Occupy your mind, not your hands. Look around the worship space for visual stimuli. Keep your mind active in this way while continuing to listen.

Stay alert by flexing muscle groups in a pattern. Avoid shaking, rocking or other movements that attract undue attention.

If all else fails, consider pinching yourself. Dig your nails into the fleshy part of your arm or leg, pinch yourself, bite down on your tongue with moderate pressure. Try not to cry out.

I would have thought if it really gets that boring, you may like to talk with the preacher!

General Synod 2007

General Synod is one of the key decision-making bodies of the Church of England. It usually meets twice a year to consider pressing issues and to make and amend the legislation that governs the Church.

The Synod is currently meeting in Westminster, and you can keep up with its debates and news at http://www.cofe.anglican.org/news/gspm2602.html

The Archbishop of Canterbury gave his presidential address to Synod, available here, in which he responded to developments at last week's meeting of national church leaders in Tanzania. These are uncertain times, and our prayers for Synod are needed, especially as contentious issues are to be debated in the coming days.

Prayer for our City

Prayer4ourcity is a venture of Christians who meet to pray for the city of Leicester. They have put together an extensive resource and list of events for Lent at the website: prayer4ourcity.org

Holy Space - Labyrinth - 4 March 2007

Brookside School Visit

The children of Year 1 at Brookside School are visiting St Paul's on 28 March 2007, from 10:00 to 11:00.

The children really enjoy these visits. Although St Paul's doesn't have ancient architecture to admire, there's still the strong sense that the building is home to a worshipping community, as well as lots of activity through the week. I especially enjoy the questions that the children ask; they're full of curiosity and are so keen to get an understanding of what we do through hands-on exploration.

Email Epistle

Our weekly news-sheet, the Epistle, is available by email. Church members can keep in touch with goings-on, even if they miss the service. If you'd like to receive a copy, please email me.

Superhero at Transfusion - 3 March 2007

We've posted before (and here) about the Transfusion event at the Y Theatre on 3 March 2007, which features Scottish band Superhero, whose video "Goodbye" is below.

Love Life, Live Lent

Lent is a season to reflect and act. A time to reassess our lifestyles, and think about the impact of our actions on others. This Lent, the Church of England is launching Love Life Live Lent nationally – a two-pronged multi-media campaign that blends this tradition with modern technology. For 50 days from Monday 19th February, in a venture backed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, mobile phone owners can text the word ‘Lent’ to 64343 to begin receiving the daily texts, at a price of 10 pence a day (based on a ten-day subscription costing £1). Each morning through to Easter Monday, users will receive flashes of inspiration for the day ahead, including:

• Give up your place to someone who is in a rush e.g. in traffic or a shop queue
• Have a TV-free day and do something you have meant to do for ages
• Take part in an environmental clean up
• Watch the news and pray about what you see
• Leave a £1 coin in the shopping trolley or where someone will find it

The actions may seem small, but can add up to something bigger.

“It’s all too easy to feel we are powerless to make a difference. But the truth is, with God’s help we can change the world a little bit each day. Each of us can be the change we want to see in the world… Together we can build better and more generous communities. Together we can lighten the load on our planet. We show God’s love when we do these things,” say the Archbishops of Canterbury and York in their joint introduction.

See Love Life Live Lent’s website, http://www.livelent.net/, featuring each day’s actions, games, resources, and a chance to share experiences with other people who have tried out the suggestions.

How to use this blog - the basics

1. What's a blog?

Since we began the blog, several people have told me that they've never viewed a blog before and would appreciate some tips. It's all quite straightforward really, so relax and have a good look around. You can't break anything here (or on your own computer) by clicking anything.

A blog is rather different from a conventional website. Good websites provide information in a logical way, usually beginning with a 'home page'. From the homepage of a well-designed site, you can click on links (text that's usually underlined and in blue) to find your way to sections of the site that interest you.

Blogs work slightly differently. They still use links, so you can click around in a similar way. But blogs are better than websites at providing up to date and fast-changing information. And writing information for a blog and getting it to appear in a presentable way is much easier than revising a conventional website.

Like all blogs, the information on the St Paul's blog appears in 'posts' or 'articles'. The posts are displayed on the main page in the order that they are posted, with the latest first. This means that when you come back to the main page, you'll always see the most up-to-date information. Come back often and you'll find the new posts appear all the time.

So there's a clue to one way that blogs can work. A bit like flicking through a magazine, you can visit the blog and work your way through all the posts, in the order they were written. This is one way of keeping up with what's happening at St Paul's.

But perhaps there's some specific information you want to find out, like what's on for children, or the details of a particular event. For more about how to find what your looking for, click on this link: How to use this blog - How to find information

Read on to find out more about the basics of the St Paul's blog.

2. The blog in all its glory

So now you know roughly how the blog works, let's go a little deeper. Look at the screen and you'll see that it's basically in two columns. On the left are the posts themselves. This is the area that changes most frequently, as new and up to date information is constantly appearing.

The right column contains information that you might always want to have to hand, so it appears on every page on the site. Here's what's going on:

• Go to our Main Blog Page - Click this link, and you'll be sent to the main blog page at http://stpaulsoadby.blogspot.com which always includes the very latest posts.
• Subscribe to this blog - The easiest way to read this blog is to keep coming back to this site. But keeping up with lots of blogs can be time-consuming. So many people us a feed reader (I use Google Reader) to make the whole process easier. Click the subscribe link to be taken to the feed for this site. For more about feeds, see this explanation.
  
• Contact us - Information about how to find us in the real world, and which number to call to speak with a real human being. My email address is also shown - don't be afraid to click and send me an email; I'll try and help if I can.
• Welcome - A brief introduction to the blog and to St Paul's.
• A picture - A shot of the church building, taken from Hamble Road.
• Calendar - This blog started as a way of sharing the calendar of events and bookings of the church buildings. The calendar is automatically updated with event information, from Google Calendar. For more information about the calendar, click here: How to use the calendar.
• Parish Map - The map is provided by embedding code from A Church Near You, which itself uses data from Google Maps. You can click the control buttons at the top left of the map to move around or to zoom. Even better, click and drag on the map itself and you'll be able to move around. For more information about the calendar, click here: How to use the parish map.
• Links - We won't go mad by flooding the blog with links but there are several websites that you might want to visit from any page.
• Labels and categories - One of the neat things about the blog is that each post can be labelled according to the kind of information it contains. If you're interested in events, for example, clicking the "events" label will return a list of posts that are all labelled accordingly.
• Blog archive - perhaps you're interested in what we were writing about in January 2007. Use the blog archive to go back in time. The blog archive always shows every post in the current month but compresses previous months and years to save space. To view a full list of posts from a past month, click on the little sideways-pointing triangle.

3. Blogging style

The written style of a blog is usually informal. Perhaps that's because content can be generated so easily, published so quickly, and edited even after publishing - there's less pressure to 'get it right'. Blogs tend to be written as a commentary on events, so their tone is often provisional or tentative. Blogs are interactive too - the fact that comments can be made by anyone who reads the blog tends to make them a conversational medium.

Now there are pitfalls with this informal approach. It's rather easy to get carried away and allow oneself to blather on about irrelevant things, or to lose focus, or (even worse) to be indiscrete. I shall try to stick to the following self-imposed discipline:

• Privacy - I want to respect the rights of people to remain anonymous, so won't use full names in any post unless I've asked permission first. I'll never publish anyone's email or phone number without ensuring that they're happy for me to do so.
• Church, not me - Inevitably, the style of the blog makes it quite personal. You'll probably get a good idea of who I am and the way I think by reading the St Paul's blog. But it's easy for the ego to take over, so I shall try to keep focus on the church and it's community-life, rather than bore you with personal stuff.
• Seasoned with grace - Colossians 4.6 urges the believers as follows: "Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone." I shall endeavour to ensure that posts are gracious and honour God without causing offence or embarrassment. But a little "saltiness" seems appropriate to avoid things getting too bland.

If you've got any suggestions, criticisms or ideas, please feel free to use the comments facility.