solas2010 was class
you should have been there.

great music, speakers, weather, activities, and fun for all the family.
it was great to be a part of something like this.
where sourcing affordable, local produce, sold at affordable prices, (£2 for an organic venison burger. nice!) was as important as getting the right band. Where giving the festival the right feel & vibe was more important than having a pub.

It was a delight and joy. I still can’t quite believe how well everything went. Someone gave me feedback based on turning Solas from a 4star festival into a 5star. Trust me, a 4star rating is deserved and accurate. It really was good. You should have been there.

thanks to lots of people I worked directly with including,
Dominic,
Hoggy & Gordon @GBR,
Ben & E&MS crew,
Bill,
Sam,
Martin & Dave,
Jonny @Wiston
and the solas directors.

Here’s to many more.

PS Becoming a Solas Saint would be very helpful. please consider helping Solas to grow and develop the conversation between Arts, Justice & Faith, http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/give.php

I wrote a letter…
It was accepted.

Changes.
They come in some unexpected places.

You came to take us
All things go, all things go
To recreate us
All things grow, all things grow
We had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
You had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
All things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)

Tropical Storm Agatha blows a hole in Guatemala City
Hundreds dead as torrential rain sweeps Central America. Sinkhole in Guatemala swallows three-storey building

(picture and quote from the guardian website.)

Am I the only one who appears to have missed this on the news?
the pictures are stunningly, terribly, unreal.

Solas Festival is happening 25th-27th June. and I, somehow, have managed to be a part of the process of making this entire thing happen. (I knew i should have stopped my addiction to turning up at meetings!)
I am quite pleased to be involved withe the Solas festival bods in trying to do something creative and new and quality within Scotland. It is quite weird and affirming to sit as a equal in a room with people you respect and work with, to work together on a project with internationally exhibiting artists, people who’s songs I sing and have taken on, with people who’s books i have read and been influenced by. I was e-mailing a friend yesterday and writing down what my involvement was an i didn’t realise quite how much i was doing . but by the time June comesI won’t remember all the time I volunteered to it.

So what is Solas? Solas is an arts festival wrestling with the issues around the intersection of faith/arts/justice. It is an attempt to look at what is Scottish, and how these themes play out within a Scottish context. Mr Gay writing for the website says it so much better than i can;

“Solas Festival is an independently funded and managed organisation which works in Scotland to promote the celebration and exploration of relationships between faith, art and justice. Its roots lie in the Christian tradition, ecumenically understood, and it seeks to be actively hospitable to a range of faith traditions.
Our dream is that this all-age weekend will light up the Scottish festival landscape with a vivid mix of music, debate, theatre, comedy, film and visual art and will quickly establish itself as a unique location to celebrate and question our commitments to art, faith and justice within Scotland’s cultural life. Come with us on the journey.”

so get involved please help us make this happen.

come along to the weekend, that’s right, buy a ticket there is a heavy discount until the end of February
http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/tickets.php
volunteer, come and help us actually make the weekend happen.
http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/volunteer.php
become a saint and help fund this vision either regularly or in a one off basis
http://www.solasfestival.co.uk/give.php

As for me I will be the one running about hoping everything will run well.

on the 20th of december third sunday is looking at the 4th commandment, Keep the Sabbath holy. I have once again stayed up late with a beverage of my choice and did some advertising which is displayed below for you delectation and delight! (I do kinda enjoy doing this stuff although if i was better at it i may not enjoy it so much perversely)

reecently I have been busy with thePROJECT, a series of interim events which are somehow heading towards a expression of festival focused on Arts, Culture and Faith within a uniquely scottish context.

I am quite excited about the whole thing and think it will be grand.
as well as names John Bell, Doug Gay, Mr Cutler, Iain Archer, We See Lights etc. it has been good just engaging with the people who have put all this together. It has been an excellent exercise in just being creative and thinking beyond a very narrow perspective. The perspective at work is kind or narrow and concentrated. that is good it delivers specifics and relevance. But this wider remit has been good fun.

I don’t know if it has been as challenging as it should have been. I focused on the Web side of things and this has been fun.
click for the project website

anyway if you are free and able to travel to edinburgh this weekend please consider coming over and enjoying “A day for the deliberate exploration of the arts, culture and faith. A comfortable place for insiders, outsiders and maybe especially those at the margins of the church.”

should be fun!

Exciting news from Howies! (one of the best small clothing companies about.)

Scotland here we come

Finally, after some broken promises and premature wishes, we are on our way to Edinburgh and Glasgow to hold back-to-back sample sales.

The Edinburgh sale will be held at:

Assembly rooms
54 George Street
Edinburgh, EH2 2LR

The opening times in Edinburgh will be:

Monday 8th June – 12:30 til 6pm
Tuesday 9th June – 9:30am til 6pm
Wednesday 10th June – 9:30am til 6pm
Thursday 11th June – 9:30am til 6pm

And then we’ll pack up and head straight over to start the Glasgow sale

Unit 23, Princes Square Shopping centre
Buchanan Street
Glasgow G1 3JX

The opening times in Glasgow will be:

Friday 12th June – 12:30 til 6pm
Saturday 13th June – 9am til 6pm
Sunday 14th June – 11am til 5pm

Phew!

As always, there will be tonnes on offer, including some amazing one off test-print tees from the print shop. We’ll also have the usual end of line stuff, one off samples, last in the box, shrunk, faded, and pre loved.

So make sure you get there before the lot is gone. Oh and bring a bag to carry your new stuff home safely (we don’t give out bags).

Hope to see you there.

Rt Rev. Graham Cray is the current Bishop of Maidstone and Bishop for Mission in the Diocese of Canterbury. He was invited to address Emerging Church Fringe Event at the Church of Scotland’s general assembly 2009

thanks to the assembly being a bit technical savvy the whole thing was webcast live, thanks to my twitter campaigning (Yeah its all me folks!), it was also recorded and put on the church of Scotland website for future watching. Well done and thank you to the web boffins, it is a good thing that has been done!

I watched it today and took some notes. So i don’t forget them here are my my notes.

(You may wish to watch/listen as you read!)

honesty
– the same won’t work
– faithfulness won’t just work

church has become – peripheral, obscure, irrelevant and confusing

the job of emerging fresh expressions of church is to lead them to become church for their own culture. Not to a slightly modernised church culture?
To be agents of god’s kingdom where they are?

CofE Study conclusion parish system unable to do the parish system Job
New way forward, new and old interdependent partnership. not new only, not old only, but both. Church essentially mission because we serve a missional God. Therefore church is essentially mission. Mission is not an activity some of us engage in as part of a bigger church thing.

Rev. Torrance quotes.
“The church is included, in participation through the holy spirit, in the sons mission in the world.”
“church is , through the holy spirit, participating in the incarnate sons communion with the father ”
looking at church starts with Christology.

not niche church
not self indulgence cause currents not what it is like
give up church as we like it, giving it up for someone else.
dying to live.

Acid test
Is the Holy Spirit there?
If the holy spirit is there then incarnation is possible.

Relinquish out missionary presubositions.
Planting not cloning

See what God is doing and respond.

Have you heard about best film ever…The Expendables.

To be honest I have problem with any film written and directed by Sylvester Stallone, especially when he makes himself the top actor. The redeeming feature of the film is the rest of the cast.
Jason Statham
Mickey Rourke
Sylvester Stallone
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Brittany Murphy
Charisma Carpenter
Jet Li
Dolph Lundgren
Eric Roberts
Steve Austin
Randy Couture

So lets be honest. the story will be rubbish, the dialogue, will be rubbish but full of quoteable one liners. The only way this could be better is if Milla Jovovich turned up as “Alice” from Resident evil or maybe as “Lelu” from the 5th element. turned up.

honestly bring it on, in all its rubbishness.

How do you review comedy?
I have been to a few comedy shows over the years John Shuttlesworth, Bill Bailey, Harry Hill, Milton Jones & Joe Fisher, some famous, some medium some not so famous. all quite funny.

if i had to rate them then

1 Milton Jones – Absolutely Hilarious
2 Harry Hill – Just Beautiful
3 John Shuttleworth – every song a winner
4 Bill Bailey – good set
5 Joe fisher – Had a hard audience of youthworkers to work with. His “cuddling for the kingdom” was very funny though

anyway
on saturday we, ( and a mean a reasonably large group of us went to see mark steel at the Glasgow comedy festival.
it was quite funny. marks set was based around being radical and being over 40. Is observations about how he has changed and how how his perspective on what and how he believes politically, has changed and developed as he has grown older. it was very funny.

I did wonder how the rest of the guys I was with felt about it.
I had an idea about his Marxist background and how his politics had been very definitely left. I am not sure that many of the guys I was with were that aware of just how political the show would be. (it was a relatively gentle politics, but it did ground the majority of the set.)

Anyway the night was fun.
Most of us laughed consistently and had a good time.
where would he have come on my list above? Joint forth with Bill Bailey probably. (PS the top 4 are quite close together so forth isn’t bad at all.

you could read rich’s thoughts here