www.gatheringgrace.org

For the record...

...my Farmer's son joke has had a pretty decent airing this week at Collective Worship. The final results are in, and all votes have been carefully checked.

The number of people who laughed at this joke each day are as follows...

Monday - no laughs

Tuesday - 3

Wednesday - no Collective Worship as a Teacher Training Day

Thursday - 8

Friday - 0 (although one of the teachers smiled).

So I just made double figures adding all four days together (bearing in mind each house has, I think, 240 pupils).

Are we downhearted? No! Did we nod 47 times during the course of the assembly? No!

Great judgments from the past...

To rank alongside all those famous Beatles rejection letters we now have...

It's a collection of clichés and stock characters which I can't see as being anything other than a disaster

...written to John Cleese initially rejecting Fawlty Towers.

Young people today - tut!

A football manager has just been on the telly talking about trying to encourage young people to come to football matches.

"In 3 to 5 years time these 16 years olds will be 21".

No flies on that man...

Slightly cheesy Churchy moment...

Looking for something or Sunday I found a site offering ringtones of Taize chants - Wait for the Lord anyone?

If its Taize does that mean you are supposed to let it ring...and ring...and ring...

If you recall Reggie Perrin's mental image of a hippo every time his wife's mother is mentioned then that might explain why I get these recurring images of a...sorry, but in order not to offend any ladies reading who may be a) Methodist, b) violin players and c) don't shave their legs - the rest of this post is censored.

Living with disappointment...

...is one of the defining characteristics of ministry. Take this little exchange today over coffee...

"You know you mentioned about being made clean on the inside", I was asked.

"Yes," I replied (try to remain calm on the outside - this is just casual conversation - but this could be a break through moment on this person's spiritual journey!!).

"I wanted to shout colonic irrigation," I was told (try to keep smiling- it was nothing really)

"Thanks for not shouting," I said, struggling to hide my disappointment, "have another Party Ring."

You don't always get to laugh in a meeting (sadly)

But I was still chuckling this morning with the following...

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Lynne Truss)

...style paragraph.

In 2008 it was noted that the urn delivers water very slowly and is very stiff to turn on and off causing water to be spilt on Phillip’s foot. It is very old and Jane and Jane think it should be replaced either from Jenny’s hall funds or from Ladies evening funds, although these are currently saving up to replace the hall curtains.

With sincere apologies to the age-ist connotations of the reference to Phillip's body parts.

A question

What does Emperor Ming have on his poppadums?

Mongo chutney

Dr Who at prayers?

Was it just me or did one of my colleagues really say in a prayer...

...and we pray that we will see a Time Lord...

Harvest in the barn

Nobody wants to go home. We might have to have a lock in.

Church: an alternative definition

My old boss, Bill, used to define a Church as a skip with a roof on - a place where stuff just got dumped...

...so this story from my virtual friend Randall in Canada made me laugh.

Ah that might look good hanging over the pulpit

You know how sometimes churches can become a sort of dumping ground for the junk we have in our homes that doesn’t really fit our lifestyles any longer but its too good to throw out, so we give it to the church to use?

You know how that happens?

Well yeah, it happens here too, so we’ve decided to put everything like that in a big room and the people can come and take whatever they like and what’s left will be donated to other organizations.

So I was just down there, walking amongst the stuff, and I came across a four rifle gun rack with lockable drawer apparently for the shells. A GUN RACK for pete’s sake. In what line of thought would somebody think that that might be a good thing for a church to have??

A GUN RACK?

I’ve been with these people over ten years and they still surprise me sometimes.

(Anybody wanna buy a dark wood, three rifle gun rack?)

Read it several times now and still sniggering...