Tall Skinny Kiwi

HPV Jab Death?

Terrible news: Today was the first known HPV jab death in UK. Our prayers are with the parents of 14 year old Natalie Morton. God's peace to you all in your loss!

BBC states that "Vaccination is not compulsory and consent is required before it is administered to the under-16s" but we found this to be not true for Scotland. We did not give consent, neither did our daughter, and she got jabbed anyway. Our hopes are that the government will stop insisting on this dangerous treatment but make it optional instead, and offer it through family physicians rather than through the school. The story of our daughter's forced jab last year in Scotland, and the horrible side effects, were well chronicled in the papers but nothing was done about it. My opinion? It is not well tested except for the fact that Brits are currently testing it for larger markets overseas and our kids are the guinea pigs. Anyone else here NOT WANT THE JAB?

On a plane to New York right now so i will not be able to respond to comments until the other side.

cervical cancer, hpv, jab

EC talk postponed

UPDATE: Not this time. Nobody in Altanta is really interested so I will shelve this talk and bring it out at another date - perhaps Dallas early next year as part of our ten year celebration of the Boaz Project under BGCT.

Original Post:

Saturday evening Oct 3, 2009

I will be in Atlanta on Saturday evening (maybe Friday evening also) and would like to tell the story of the emerging church in USA from the Southern Baptist point of view. Its an amazing story and so much of it happened in and around the SBC. All very exciting - creativity, heresy, drinks and stinks, experiments, mistakes, successes, problems, victories, Great story and a part of our church/mission history. It should take about one hour.

I have the story. What I dont have is a place to tell it. This is where you come in and say "Ooohhhh Andrew, we can gather some friends who would like to hear about that and we can do it at _________" And I reply "Ahh yes . .the perfect place. Lets bring some food."

baptist, baptist emerging church

USA this week

I am in New York this week for "Feast on Good" social enterprise conference, and to work on a social accounting project called the Transformation Index, and then off to Atlanta on Friday for meetings there on Saturday. Sat evening in Atlanta is free. Any ideas.

feast, social media, social web

Secrets and Lies

No lies, just secrets. Deep secrets. Secret secrets. Hope I dont have to kill you afterwards

Secret 1: Our secret email sent out today is here for you to read. What? You dont get our regular email? You should subscribe!

Secret 2: Our secret website that contains our family's adventures and some horrible photos of me. Its here at Jonesberries.com. Its a fun blog that my kids run. Abigail (14) is the webmaster and its a great way to follow our family's adventures without me trying to turn every experience into a lesson.

Secret 3: The secret map that contains our travel plans for the next year. We hope to be in about 25 countries by August 2010. Shoot me an email if we are coming to a city near you.

Secret 4: I have a bit of athletes foot under my right toenail that I have been struggling with for many years. I have taken medication from doctors and once stayed on that medication for 18 bloody months and still it came back. Very persistant, this athletes foot of mine! Many years ago, Lisa Seay in Houston told me I should pee on it to get rid of it. Maybe I will try that.

You probably didn't want to hear Secret number 4. Sorry.

Campaign Going Well: Thanks to Twitterers

Thanks to all the Twitterers who helped us today with our campaign to fund our travels into the next 25 countries. Jonah was first . . .

Then the Twitter avalanche happened.

Amazing!!! We have only just begun and already the result right now is . . .

social media, social web

Urgent Appeal: 5 Ways To Help the Jones Family

Thanks everyone for your suggestions on getting supported and on our way to the next 25 countries. So much opportunity. . . so little funds. You know how it is, especially in this financial crunch when things have dried up. We have just lost a huge amount of support and need to make it up really quickly. In fact, we really need a chunk this week for visas, ferry tickets and diesel so that we can continue.
Special thanks to Shannon Hopkins of Matryoshka Haus, who has generously allowed us to use her 501c3 account at Givezooks. We have launched a campaign called "Friends of the Jones Family" which we think will be a good short term solution.

5 WAYS YOU CAN HELP

1. Put a widget on your blog. Clicking on the widget will take people to our special campaign. Widget codes here.

2. Tell your church. They might have a mission fund that is looking for more opportunities. They can contact me directly about having me speak at their church to share what God is doing around Europe and beyond.

3. Join our email list and receive the top secret updates on our journey, adventures, prayer requests, and updates. Request it and I will put you on the list. This is the best way to see exactly what we are up to and where your funds are going.

4. Give. Yeah! You can use Givezooks or send me an email if you would like to support us directly or in a different way. tallskinnykiwi [at] gmail [dot] com

Thanks to all who are supporting us now, and over the past 25 years. You ROCK!!! Watch the results here

Brother Sun Sister Moon

Mark Berry found this pilgrim t-shirt. Nice.

I had an idea for a pilgrim t-shirt also, based on the 1972 movie of Francis of Assisi called "Brother Sun Sister Moon". What do you think?

brother sun sister moon, francis assisi

UpStream Collective: A mission experience

Ed Stetzer and Larry McCrary are taking a team of people into Asia for a mission experience - visiting temples, talking to religious leaders, eating strange foods, etc. You can follow it at the Upstream Collective blog. Think of it as a virtual jet set tour for those who could not attend but can still be involved by reading the stories and interacting with the people.

My first experience in Asia was quite shocking. I was 21 years old and not really prepared for it. The food places looked dirty and MacDonalds was far too appealing. But after a few days our team weaned ourselves away from Western food places and digged into the best food I ever tasted.

Not only that, but it also prepared me for a lifetime in ministry and cross-cultural exchange. Hope it will do the same for the lucky people on the Upstream Collective wagon.

upstream collective

Remembering Brian Ollman

Memorial service today for Brian Ollman who passed away unexpectedly last week in California at the age of 40. He was a good friend and I will miss him. I have some photos back home of when he and Heidi came out to stay with us in Scotland.

Brian and his friends in Pomona, California started a spiritual community called Icthus. Alongside it, they launched the Millennia Co-op, a co-operatively structured group of businesses which included a vintage clothing store, web design lab, a jiu-jitsu studio, a club for DJ's and more. We visited them in the late 90's and had a great time.

When Alan Hirsh was doing research for his book The Shaping of Things to Come, he asked me who he should visit in southern California and I strongly suggested Brian's ministry in Pomona. Which might be where some of you have read about it.

One of my craziest memories of Brian was when he came over to Austin, Texas in 2001 as creative director for our multi-media worship installation called Epicenter. Mark Scandrette and Brian found a room full of choir robes at First Baptist Church of Austin and insisted on wearing them. A few weeks later, the photos of white robed worshippers appeared and some people thought it was a pagan event. We had to explain about Brian's crazy idea of robe wearing. He also created the "Senses Lab" with a light room complete with statements that "God is light" and a wind machine so worshippers could think about the Holy Spirit and Acts 2.

That's Brian standing in the center of the play space. Towards the end of the event, everyone came into the main sanctuary where Brian had gathered dirt and trash from around the city. We were invited to take off our shoes, enter the pile and have communion, consisting of bread in a dirty wrapping and a bottle of cheap red wine in a brown bag. When asked about the service and the dirt, Brian was quoted in an article as saying the filth represented God's "coming into our messiness to lift us up and animate us."

The last time I saw Brian and Heidi was 4 years ago in Santa Monica where Brian was lending his talents to the movie industry. Brian was an amazingly creative, spiritual, emotional, crazy guy and he will be missed sorely. He impacted all of us. Prayers for his family.

Read on for an excerpt from 'Shaping' about Brian's ministry in Pomona. We are seeing many sustainable church models these days that include business and social enterprise but Brian was doing this a decade ago.

brian ollman

A Farmer's Search for a Theology of the Land

We are driving today to the farm of John Riddell in Petworth, England. John says we can stay there for the next week and use his barn for some meetings tomorrow. Cool!! John Riddell is a Christian farmer who has done a lot of thinking about a theology of the land.

"Did the Bible offer a sound theology for agriculture? My search for answers reminded me that God created the heavens and the earth, that his creation is good and that we human beings are part of it and have some responsibility for it. But then, as a farmer in North West Sussex, I looked at what we and our forbears had done to it. I saw the damage caused by neglect, bad stewardship and agronomic practices, injustice and the displacement of people. This surely was never what God intended but it did help to explain what Paul meant when he talked about healing and bringing wholeness not only to persons but to the entire created order (Col 1: 19-20). I discovered a gospel which went far beyond personal forgiveness to the transformation of whole communities (2 Cor 5:17). I understood how God’s kingdom cried out not only for a renewed relationship with the Creator, but also for renewed harmony and justice between all peoples and the entire created world order (Isaiah 55:12). "

John and his friends have started the Petworth Stewarship Forum which has managed to put some thoughts down in writing.

"We have a Mission Statement (‘Working together for the land and its people, towards a just and ethical practice’) and for the last three years have been working to develop relationships between landlord, tenants and the local community, ‘joined-up thinking’ in stewarding the land and local resources, diversification projects which serve the local community, opportunities for people to access land to grow their own food linked to local markets."

You can read more of John's thoughts at Together, Together, Together, Together (PDF). Sounds great. I am looking forward to seeing how it all works. Anyone else done some thinking about agriculture and theology?

agriculture