What came first, the chicken or the egg?

Well... I have photographic evidence from this year's Christian Resources Exhibition that the Chicken beat the egg - at least to the top of the climbing wall!

The boys from World Emergency Relief seemed to be having a great deal of fun promoting their "Be a good egg!" campaign. It's all about raising money to buy chickens to help people in the developing world. Six pounds buys a (live) chicken - or so I'm told...

Beyond chickens, we looked at chairs for All Saints', stained glass artists for Christ the Sower and shirts for me. I was severely tempted by a clerical hoodie from Cross Designs but decided to be sensible and buy a couple of black shirts - for when I need to dress up...

I also picked up a copy of a new course produced by CMS which aims to help local christians to explore the five marks of mission in the 21st century. It's called 21M and looks quite good.

All in all a very good day. Bumped into a number of old friends and several MK clergy including Chris Collinge, Mindy Bell, Mandy Marriott and the new minister from Newport Pagnell. Always worth a trip.

Sandown again

This was the second and final day of my sojourn with Scripture Union at Christian Resources - another two and a half hour drive to Sandown Park to talk about SU resources in the Royal Box. 

I met Dave Walker from the Church Times (who does those funny cartoons) and tried to introduce him to Light for the Lectionary - in the hope that a few more anglicans might find out about it...

It was a good day, filled with interesting encounters. I'm already looking forward to next year...

Christian Resources

As part of my sabbatical I was invited to join the Scripture Union team at the Christian Resources Exhibition at Sandown Park. We spent the day in the air-conditioned Royal Box talking to people about their work with children and young people. We were also trying to promote the new online resource LightLive which makes all of their regular youth and children's work material available for free online. To help us with this we had a computer set up with a (very slow) mobile connection.

It was great to meet all sorts of interesting people who are trying to develop their work. I met one older couple who were hoping to put on an all-age service in their village church. I also spoke to a pentecostal pastors wife about their hope to move their congregation on from 1950s pentecostal worship - isn't it interesting that these themes are repeated across denominations? All in all a useful day - I hope...

CRE is an interesting event. I only had a short opportunity to roam but it's always astonishing to take in the massive variety of resources and projects that Christians are involved in. You can come away feeling overwhelmed by the range of things that you are not doing (or failing to do) or you can be inspired to try something you've never thought of before. I came away with a bit of both - and a pile of bargain  books...