Filofax 2000
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02.12.00 / 01 / small fire discussion board
On this day the Small Fire discussion board launched on Ship of Fools, with myself and Dave Walker as hosts.
So now let's declare this Board open [virtual ribbon cut by Lara Croft].
My hopes for it are that it's somewhere to:
- explore issues around broadening the culture and forms of worship
- find inspiration to have a go, try new things, get advice, encouragement
- find out about people in your locality who are experimenting with worship too
- get together. Hopefully we'll flush out people who've been doing creative things away from the known 'scene' - fresh contributions to the theory and practice of reimagining what church can be. Many people are experimenting without knowing what others are doing - groups can exist for years as neighbours without realising it!
From Dave's intro notes:
This open access board is a space dedicated to discussing alternative worship, including topics raised in Steve Collins' Small Fire (link to index of columns) columns. Besides commenting on the burning issues he's raised this month (link to this month's column) you might like to tell us what you see the future for the church as being and about creative forms of worship you're involved in. Please stay on topic, though – off topic posts will be deleted. If you want to start a new thread, post here. If you have any questions, visit our guidelines page, or contact our Small Fire hosts, Steve and Wibblethorpe.
This was quite a lot of work. Being a host requires active presence. The board had a global audience, and people might post at any hour of day and night. I had to sleep and do other things, but someone might need a reply or a flame war might be happening. The American members logged on in the small hours of the morning UK time, the Antipodeans were active late morning.
Our regulars were a lovely bunch who looked after one another so the hosts could actually eat and sleep. My experience as a participant in similar forums was essential, I was familiar with the dynamics. We had some interesting characters, notably a gay Christian BDSM guy into chastity and submission. He used the board as a confessional when things became difficult, we learned all sorts of subcultural things. He was all heart and much loved so no-one was going to be judgmental.
11.11.00 / 01 / bus scrapped
Three days later I sold the bus for scrap. It really wasn't worth the expense of further repairs, especially as the body was showing rust in many panels - a tea bag, as they say - carefully covered up by the vendor.
In my mind I felt like I had it for a couple of years, but my diary shows that it was barely one year. I lost £6000, it took a few years to make it back. If I had spent another £2000 for a better van I might still have it.
It had its moments of pleasure - driving over to Grace on a Sunday evening on the motorway, camping at a windy Greenbelt when everyone else was struggling with their tents, making tea and pasta of an evening at Croyde. This was balanced by the endless repairs and maintenance, and the scary moments when the clutch failed on the motorway, the handbrake wouldn't hold it on the hill, when it could barely get up the hills, when it refused to start miles from home, when it was hard to park, when a car appeared from the blind spot on the motorway. It did 23 miles to the gallon. It really wasn't suited to modern driving conditions. I wish I could have the same body on modern machinery.
08.11.00 / 01 / bus salvaged
My bus was parked at the end of the road by the river, awaiting repairs because it wouldn't start. Unfortunately the river flooded, as it sometimes did, and left the bus in a couple of feet of water. The police called me at work to come and rescue it, and I explained that it wouldn't start anyway and couldn't be moved.
I called a local garage who pulled it out of the water onto a trailer and took it away for repairs and an MOT.
01.10.00 / 01 / smallfire.org activation
An email from the domain host tells me that smallfire.org activation happened Sunday 1st October 2000 at 3:25pm. The actual launch date is not recorded, but it was between 1st and 5th November, after I had made the site. A week or so later, an email arrived from a pastor in Wisconsin asking how to do alt worship. My global advisory role had begun ;)
17.09.00 / 01 / smallritual.org activation
An email from the domain host tells me that this site's activation happened Sunday 17th September 2000 at 12:12am. The domain was first occupied by a temporary CV site, the first smallritual.org site didn't go up until October 2001.
25.08.00 / 01 / greenbelt
Grace ran the St Paul's labyrinth at Greenbelt. On the first day only a few people came. On the second day it went well. On the third day we had to lock the doors to control the numbers trying to get in.
This was the first time we had significant numbers of children using the labyrinth. We found that after an initial manic phase, they became deeply engaged, and often sat or lay down to pray or meditate for a long time. Parents finishing the labyrinth in the usual hour found that their children were still in the middle praying and reluctant to leave! We hadn't expected this. As on other occasions, it seemed that God was using the labyrinth to touch people in ways that we hadn't anticipated or designed.
06.08.00 / 01 / surfing
6th-20th August surfing at Croyde, living in the bus for two weeks in a campsite behind the dunes. I spent three or four hours every day in the water, in all conditions. I didn't get any better.
I was sitting on my board out back when it started to rain heavily. My strong instinct was to go to the shore and seek shelter, but of course I was already as wet as I could be. I had to override a lifetime of conditioning. The rain pattering on the sea was pretty.
I encountered the infamous low-tide suction. The waves were opaque with sand. I lost my board and swam for the shore, but was being sucked back. I was more amused than alarmed, just yards from the beach but not getting there. Eventually a wave pushed me into shallow water and I could stand up and walk out.
I met friends from Epicentre in the village. They were staying at the Unison holiday camp, where I had stayed several times in childhood. I went back to their chalet, we watched Big Brother which was in the middle of its first series.
In spite of servicing, the bus struggled with the hills in Devon. I feared it would go backwards. When the time came to leave, it took a long time to start. It felt like everything that could go wrong was wrong. Still it was pleasant, in the evening, to sit on the doorstep drinking tea, with the gas lamp on the grass.
11.07.00 / 01 / ship of fools
Lunch with Simon Jenkins of Ship of Fools. He commissioned me to write a monthly column about alt worship. This also entailed visiting groups across the country to report on what was happening, and add to my photo collection. The first column was published in September 2000, the last in August 2002 when I had to give it up to commit to my 'day job'. All the columns are now on this site.
A couple of the columns made the front page of the site, particularly February 2000 which caused an agreeable controversy.
08.07.00 / 01 / surfing
8th-10th July surfing in the diary, but no details. Probably Croyde. Was I doing more lessons?
07.07.00 / 01 / last day at sheppard robson
Last day of my job. Next day - go surfing. Way to go.
01.07.00 / 01 / guildford labyrinth
The first outing for the labyrinth after St Pauls, at a diocesan youth weekend in Guildford. It was in a 1960s building with period carpet tiles in clashing colours. About 160 people, mainly aged 11-18 attended. It was very well received - but one guy suddenly burst into tears mid-labyrinth and sobbed uncontrollably. We were quite alarmed. It turned out that his conscience had been touched by God over the need to reconcile with someone.
19.06.00 / 01 / movement magazine
Somehow, I'm not sure how now, I connected with the editor of Movement, the magazine of the Student Christian Movement (SCM). Initial discussions were for me to become the editor, or co-editor, which didn't happen, redesign the magazine, which did happen, and do a Small Fire column on alt worship which also happened. The magazine was termly ie three issues a year.
SCM was liberal in the 1950s theological sense, Christianity as some nice stories to help human evolution, God as a vague impersonal force. I didn't realise how evangelical I still was until I began to write for it, and read the other contributors. I found that I actually believe in the saving work of Christ, the Holy Spirit, the authority of the Bible and other archaic notions.
My last column was July 2006, I resigned because I felt that it had run its course and I didn't have anything useful to say in that form any more. Most of the columns are on this site, but in various sections.
12.06.00 / 01 / 'fire' service
This is an email I wrote to Cathy Kirkpatrick the day after the Grace Fire service 11th June 2000. I blogged it when I refound it in 2010 but it belongs here.
at grace last night, being stuck for ideas for a pentecost service, we used your 'fire' service as featured in the prodigal project. the tvs were set up in a horseshoe around a flaming barbecue in the centre of the church. around the tvs, an outer necklace of candles. our new vision mixer, on 'permanent loan' from the bbc, makes whole new realms of video effects possible, which look pretty good on five screens. we think we'll use the arrangement again for events - i'll send you pictures when i get them out the camera [a couple of months]. for the service itself we stuck to the original script.
we had our share of technical hitches. as i read 'the fire of god's presence' ["there is nothing but the fire and the darkness"] the tvs switched to benign blue sea creatures while the video guys scrabbled at the controls. the flaming coal for the tongs wouldn't glow, and as it was passed round each person blew on it to try to get some orange; it became a sort of ritual action, but meaning what? one child was only just dissuaded from taking the coal in his hand. we tried to burn adverts symbolically, but the pieces of paper were too large and went up in sheets of flame, threatening to fly off the barbecue and stressing the vicar. but it was a good service, and the beautiful setting was a sacrament.
afterwards, my hour's drive home on the motorway became a kind of harmonious extension of the service. the road was uncrowded; the orange floodlights curved overhead in the deep blue summer night sky, the red taillights and white headlights in motion, the blue glowing rectangles of signs; people would travel to see such displays. the engine of my vw bus makes its coffee-percolator burbling somewhere in the back.
when i got home i ate strawberries, for the first time this summer. it felt like a moment to make food up, to eat three of something that comes in twos, to eat things that are not like the meals your mother taught you. unless you had a strange hippy mother who had thrown out order in cooking as a product of the system and was teaching her children that you could eat anything, anytime, however you liked.
03.04.00 / 01 / bus service
I took the VW bus to Kentish Town for a major service, collect 14th March. Garage guy was very Turkish, the little coffee, the philosophical gesture with the cigarette. I liked this.
06.03.00 / 01 / st pauls cathedral labyrinth
The St Paul's Cathedral Labyrinth ran 6th-10th March. A full story is here.
06.01.00 / 01 / labyrinth graphics
Working on the graphics for the Labyrinth in January and February. Needed to get flyers and posters out there. The design was deliberately opposite to St Pauls' publicity design - white instead of black, modernist instead of traditional - the posters were intended to form an exact contrast when placed next to the cathedral posters in the external display cases.
I also needed to produce little booklets of the liturgy in different languages. Other people did the translations for me to format. The last one to arrive was Japanese - it was hand-written and there was no time to get it typeset so I had to use it as it was. It was finished the day before we opened! Translation into Japanese was challenging because many of the terms and concepts have no direct equivalent in Japanese language or culture.
