Holiday Monday & "Are Christians being persecuted?"

Such is the once Christian nature of our country that we have a Public Holiday after Easter Sunday, in recognition of the resurrection.  Yesterday was Easter Sunday.  We had the usual greeting at church:
Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed Alleluia
Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed Alleluia
Christ is Risen!
He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

So the service got going.
I have not been 100% healthy over this holiday.  I've had some sort of virus.  So Easter has passed be by a bit.  I missed the Agape meal at church on Thursday, the walk of witness on Friday, and would have missed the sunrise service on Sunday, had I identified one to attend.  It has been different. Even the Easter Day service seemed different from my less than 100% perspective.  Yes, I've recovered, but I'm still tired.  I have though had some really good appreciative feed back from the Good Friday service. The services I lead often seem to go better when I'm not 100% - God works through me better when I'm less able to get in the way?
Warner spoke on the resurrection, and showed the clip from The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe where the stone table breaks and Aslan appears with the Sun behind him.  He spoke about our faith and even our dead faith being resurrected by God.  One of the high lights of the service was the music.  The younger, but no longer young (sorry, guys and girls!)  people did a marvellous job and provided some very uplifting music.  I must especially mention Mandy, whose singing and worship was tremendous. 

Today was also the day we started to use the new laptop (with Windows 7) and Easislides.  I had spent a long time evaluating various pieces of Freeware.  Jo and I had spent a long time the previous week getting the songs into the Easislides system.  It offers a range of imports, but our old system (SongPro3) doesn't export and the Songs of Fellowship CD words for books 1-3 are very poorly formatted.  We arrived at 9am to set up the new system and to transfer the notices in to Impress.  By 9:55 we were ready to go.  Just in time.  Easislides has a good user interface, but when I was asked to take over briefly - I got it wrong!  Overall though it was a success.  Now I just have to train the other operators, and make sure that the song counts work for the end of year copyright reporting.

Then home to wait for Karen, and watch the Malaysian GP.

One piece of Easter Entertainment - Jonathan Creek - The Judas Tree - didn't disappoint.  I wasn't expecting anything else and was just about to go to bed when I saw "Are Christians being persecuted?".  It was presented by Nicky Campbell - so I wasn't expecting good things.  The last couple of things I've seen him in have missed the real issues and spent too long on people experiences.  So I was pleasantly surprised.  Various religious leaders were interviewed and allowed to say what they needed to say.  We (the program stated as fact) live in a Liberal Democracy.  The danger for the Liberal democracy is that when it has no belief it will find something - almost anything - to believe in.  It was also recognised that secular humanism is as much a religion as Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and the rest.  There was a reasonable discussion on the difficulties involved in granting 'rights' to people that will inevitably conflict.  Liberty, perhaps had a greater share of airtime than you might expect given the conclusion of the program.  Some of the 'famous' recent cases of discrimination were also covered.  Most notably the case of a Check In desk woman sacked for wearing a cross. There was also coverage of the Human Rights bill, which consolidates the various anti-discrimination legislation (equal pay, gender discrimination, sexual orientation discrimination).  The danger with this is that in reality it behaves like a piece of Orwelian 'thought' legislation.
The program's conclusion:
No - Christians are not being tortured and murdered like they are in many countries,
and
Yes - In a Liberal democracy (so by our standards) the deliberate shunning of one religion feels like persecution.

Easter Day @ 9:30 @ Christ Church & Eastingle

Easter Day starts around 5am, as we drag ourselves out of bed for the sunrise service. This year, as I have often done in the past, we joined the youth group 'sleep over' and headed for a high place, to worship our newly risen Lord in the early hours. By the time we arrived on the top of the hill the sun was coming over the trees. We were asked to face outwards (symbolic of what we should always do). A rabbit came out of a copse to take a look at us and ran away. We had a very short worship service, and went back to a local church member for breakfast, then home. A cold crisp morning, and slightly cloudy.

This is a picture of our back garden, after we returned from Church. You could not have expected this from the start of the morning.

As our vicar is still recovering the vicar from Emanuel Church came from to take holy communion. For many weeks now we have been planning the change of time (9:30am instead of 10:00am), to allow holy communion to be 'live' rather than by extension. As it happened, it worked very well, and I hope that it was enjoyed by all. I have to say though that it felt very strange taking over leading the service half way through. That started with a review of Good Friday and the Eastingle service. The English language is marvelous, there's always a word you can make for any occasion. Eastingle is an Easter version of Christingle, and orange with a red band around it and sweets and dried fruit attached with sticks. It reminds us that Christ died for the world. The Eastingle is a hot cross bun, with a straw and streamers, in three colours (red-for the crucifixion, purple-for royalty, white-for new life and purity) there's a bit more about it on our web site, or at least I hope there will be. So for those that weren't there on Good Friday, we revised the Eastingle idea, and used up the hot cross buns.
Then there was a sermon and prayers as usual, and the congregation worshiped the risen Jesus.

"Alleluia! Christ is Risen", I said loudly at the end, before the blessing.
"He is risen indeed. Alleluia!" they all responded, more loudly than I had expected.

A couple of pictures of Christ church at Easter


So far Easter Day is as it should be. Praise God.