So I am Talking Tomorrow Part 2

I just realised that I went off on one in the post below and didn't actually talk about what I was going too, hense the title not matching up.

Basically, I am talking tomorrow to what we call our house group. Basically, house group is a small group from church that meets at my house. The reason being that it is hard to build up friendships with people in the larger format of church so in the smaller groups, we can come together, learn about our faith and support one another to the best of our abilities.

Tomorrow, I have been asked to talk on 'The Character of God'. It an interesting subject and there are many different aspects I could pick on, in fact just 30 mins of research into the bible tells me that God is:

1. Compassion , Mercy, Grace
2. Love
3. Impartiality
4. Patience
5. Goodness
6. Justice
7. Holiness and Truth
8. Perfection
9. Wisdom
10. Faithfulness
11. Sovereignty
12. Glory
13. Jealousy
14. Immutability

I could tell you more about each one and give you verses that back it up (and if you want me to do that please comment) but the thing I have been thinking about is this:

Tere is only so much you can get from a talk about what God is like but if you don't experience it, what does it mean? The answer I have come up with is simple, it means nothing. I cooked a spinach and ricotta lasagne tonight (with added meat, vegetarian? whats that?) but it was the first time I had used the recipe. I could read it and be told about it as much as I liked, I might start to believe it was good and even tell a few people about it based on reccomendations and the picture that Deia gave me but unless had tasted it tonight, I probably would have forgotten about it quite soon. We need to have the experience of God that people that wrote about Him in the bible had.

You may think thats a wierd thing to say but I have experienced God, I would not have such a strong idea about what I believe if not. So how do I make sure that I am not just talking about things but actually helping people to experience what I have, especially if they are in difficult situations which when you say God is Faithful makes them real in anger because that is not what they are experiencing at that time.

Well, I'm going to come back to that, hopefully on Wednesday.

So, I am talking tomorrow......

Some of you that don't know me really well, might not know that I believe in God. In fact, when I moved to Norwich, I joined my cousin in planting a new church into the city center. You may wonder why I say that I believe in God rather than saying I am a Christian, well, the word Christian sometimes conjurs up some interesting pictures in peoples heads and that is something I don't want to do.

I have never started a conversation telling someone that I am a Christian, indeed its not until someone really gets to know me that they find out exactly what I believe. Why is that you may ask, is it because you are ashamed? Is it because you are worried?

There is one reason and one reason only why I don't come out with it straight away, I like people to get to know me, to become friends with me for who I am. Lets face it, when someone says they a Christian it often brings up negative images straight away, even to me and I am one.

I love talking to someone and getting into conversations that are deep, the kind that you only get into once you are real friends and then speaking about my faith, after all, at that point I am being invited to talk about what I believe.

If you want to know why I am a Christian, feel free to ask a question in a comment on this post, in the meantime, let me tell you how it changes the way that I run te record label.

As you probably know, the record label is called Broeknrule, why? Because we want to break the rules of the record industry, we want to act fairly, we want to treat the artists and the fans with the up most respect and not just be after their money. People have said to me that you can't do business in a moral and fair way, I hope to prove that wrong.

I would love to converse with people that have a belief, please leave a comment below if you do. It doesn't need to be in the Christian God, it could be Budda, yourself or even Captain Kirk, let me know!

Some quite good quotes.........

These are some quite good quotes I discovered the other day. All about Christianity, I think they sum things up really well.

I have more and will probably add some soon.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such a violent reaction against it?... Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if i did that, then my argument against God collapsed too--for the argument depended on saying the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus, in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never have known it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.

C.S. Lewis

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For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.

G. K. Chesterton

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A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

C. S. Lewis

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If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshiped.

Evelyn Underhill

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Out of 100 men, one will read the Bible, the other 99 will read the Christian.

D.L. Moody

The Ultimate Showcase

Well, here I am working on The Ultimate Showcase, a competition that as a record lable we run in conjunction with Ultimate Events. If you don't know what The Ultimate Event is then you are missing out on a good one! The Ultimate Event is now in its 13th year and is an annual Christian music event at Alton Towers, the biggest theme park in the UK.

The Ultimate showcase is a competition that invites unsigned Christian artists to battle it our to become the the opening act at the gig. In the case of next years gig they will be supporting the likes of Toby Mac, Delirious and Ayiesha Woods.

So why am I writing about it? Well, because its really doing my head in at the moment. The website that we are running it off is over a month overdue and because of that we can't get the live semi finals sorted. By the end of the day, I want to have venues sorted for both the semis and also the final and know what other acts to get in headlining.

The best thing about this competition is the varitry of acts we have entering, its great to see the talent thats out there and see them come into their own as they play at their best to try and get their place in the finals. Our main vision as a record lable came through running youth events in Worcester with the local churches. Its where we met most of the bands we started working with and also saw te sruggles bands had at getting a big break.

On top of that, we noticed that some of the bands that were absolutely superb couldn't make it because they were Christians. The lable of 'Christian' had such a stigma to it that as soon as they mentioned it, people turned off and didn't want to listen. Where did this stigma come from? Well, personally I think many areas, as a Christian myself I avoid the people shouting on the street about going to hell, I hate it if someone knocks on my door and tries to tell me why I should accept Jesus into my heart, I HATE it when I am given tracks in the street! It really is no wonder that Christians get pigeon holed. The only ones that seem to be out there sharing their faith seem to be doing it in a way that is so irrelivant to our culture that they earn the rest of us a bad name.

So how are we supposed to act? Well, this is open to discussion and I would love to hear other people's thoughts on it so leave some comments! I will put my toughts down on the matter in a few days.

In the meantime, back the the Showcase. This is a great opportunity for bands to get a good gig, get noticed by thousands and build their fan base. Not because they are Christians or because of any message in their music but because they have great music. I would love to see more bands in the charts and on things like MTV. Did you know that Delirious are one of the only bands to have had 5 top 20 hits but not been shown on Top of the Pops (RIP)? Why? Because their lyrics might have offended people? Well, that doesn't seem to apply for a lot of other bands who really do have offensive lyrics. It will be interesting to see how we do, getting Christian bands just as far as we want to get bands that are not Christians on our lable as well. I wonder if we will have more problems?

Check out our website at www.broeknrule.com