Not for Sale Sunday 2009 May 17th

http://tinyurl.com/nfss09resources

here are some great new
~ ideas
~ prayers
~ display and creative ideas
~ liturgies and litanies
~ poems
~ and some other resources.

CHASTE & Not For Sale UK's archive of resources produced before 2009 are held here:
http://www.tinyurl.com/nfss-resource-archive

Wow

Pretty much two full houses from where I sat. Maybe a handful free on Wednesday.
Tremendous sense of our young people growing up through this, growing into maturity and discovering gifts, talents, abilities, confidence and sometimes the 'nowse' to bodge through...

Great!

My email to praying friends

Stop the Traffik “Esther’s Story”

Thanks to those of you who heard my ten-minute presentation on Tuesday and later prayed for an audience to come to experience “Esther’s Story”.

We had a full house on Tuesday evening and only a handful of spare seats on Wednesday.

One of our church members prayed for a wave of response to the Spirit so that the anti-trafficking message would not end tonight.

CHASTE, CMS, Stop the Traffik, and TEAR Fund were promoted to those who attended with literature.

Stop the Traffik and Unesco had videos included as part of the performance.

Phil’s Story

Tonight I told two women the story Phil Evans told us, so movingly on Tuesday, of the difference that “Breaking the Chains” and the G8 lobby had made to people in Madagascar.

They said they had not signed cards for Stop the Traffik as they felt disconnected from any real result after Jubilee 2000 etc. They both signed petition cards then and there.

Our J Team of young people were ecstatic after the first night and euphoric after the second night.

Since Free for All and Big intent came several of them have advanced rapidly towards maturity and in discovering talents while taking on roles in the production.

Wonderful!

Just when I thought Jonny wasn't going to add us into his blog

I finally surfed the right search and here is his entry.

slavery 200 years on...

this coming sunday (25 march) is 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade bill was passed in uk law through the house of lords. i confess my knowledge of the history is pretty thin. but one of the groups heavily involved in the campaign were the clapham sect who also founded cms. william wilberforce is the best known member of that group. amazing grace the film that tells the story of the abolition through his life is out this coming weekend and the preview is tonight.

the current issue of yes magazine focuses on the issue of slavery (15mb pdf).

the irony is that there are more slaves today than 200 years ago with child soldiers, sex trafficking, and forced labour. this is tragic. lots of groups are making the most of the anniversary to focus attention on the issue of slavery today. these are a few things i am aware of. feel free to add any others in the comments and i'll paste them in...

african snow - a play that cms has sponsored
free for all - the cms youth team are undertaking a huge tour round the uk
ending slavery resource pack - education pack for cizitenship, RE, and history
the truth isn't sexy - i love this simple campaign to raise awareness of trafficking through some fairly full on beer mats in bars and pubs. there's a parliamentary launch tomorrow - well done guys!
stop the traffic - coalition of organisations, with a particular campaign focused on chocolate.
chaste - churches alert to sex trafficking across europe
set all free - churches together site
anti-slavery
rowntree uk slavery report

all this can be a bit overwhelming. find something that touches you, or grabs you and get involved. an example of a group getting involved that inspired me is a youth group from st pauls and st barnabas in oldbury who are working on a production esther's story. as part of the promotion for it they put a video together and it got aired on channel 5 news - amazing! the play blurb is...

Shocked by the imprisonment of young women in a nearby brothel a group of teenagers from an Oldbury Church are actively and creatively highlighting the modern day evils of human trafficking and sex traffiking through a youth theatre production at Leasowes Community College Theatre, Kent Road, Halesowen, B62 8PJ.
The performance will be on 27th and 28th March at 7.30 p.m. with doors open at 7.00 p.m. Tickets are reasonably priced at £2.00 for adults and £1.00 for under 16’s.
Tickets from Paul and Barnys 0121 4226700

Meetings at P&B 1st March

Meetings continue with the young people and older helpers planning the publicity.

A synopsis has now been completed and now the script, too.
Colourful banners as part of the stage set have been made also.

The first advertising poster went up in to Quinton Library today 3rd March.

vimeo

VIMEO

Kill your darlings

Kill your darlings

Is a post with a download of an exercise on how to judge the quality of photos.
Could be a useful thing to do for later int he project.

Meetings yesterday all afternoon

Karen, Dave, Wendy, and Lynn met for hours at Paul and Barny's place and sorted out items like the budget, the planning team structure for March, and made a lot of agreements on buying kit some of which mey be available and here for Saturday.

The Lynn left and Colin arrived followed by Megan.

Colin had spent a long time on the phone with Anita from CMS.
Anita - supposed to be on holiday - was trying to finalise agreements with the Big Intent actors. Looks like they had a clear idea of what would work, Anita had a clear idea and we had a clear idea of what we thought they were going to do and these three pieces of data had never been fully knitted together. For a while things looked dodgy. A day later and it seems that this may open up the way for something better than we had imagined as another actor and trainer may be able to come and join us.

More later.

roller coaster

Yesterday we prayed Lord be the Way and today it seems like
i> more people are sick
but
ii> the programme is coming together
and
iii> there is an exciting new possibility

we ll the nearer we get to Jan 6th the more this feels like a roller coaster
with problems and people ill, planning difficulties, agreements that are unclear and people who did not realise the exact implications of saying what they were saying yes to. in this all there is an exciting sense of things coming together and I will try to put up an account of the last few days tonight.

One very exciting thing has come from the BigIntent team coming later than expected and this may be the involvement of "Sarah I" .... it looks like she might be able to come and fit into either the afternoon gap or the morning session or maybe both. She has some exciting material on trafficking and Bangladesh. :-)

This means that we could have some very exciting input while the cameraman is here recording stuff for the proposed feature on Channel five community news.

Meanwhile 80% or more of the organising team are sick one way or another . . . .
Help Lord!

SandBox

my friend and colleague has featured us on her blog
sandbox
here is a link
http://words-in-sand.blogspot.com/2006/12/action-at-paul-and-barnys.html

this blog registers quite high up the google tree for visibility
and it means that if anyone puts paul and barny's into google this link to our work will likely be quite high up the list if not at the top.

it also means we are doing the work we got grants for - rasing awareness of the problem of human trafficking and the need for a solution.

Top tips for blogging from a top blogger

Tall Skinny Kiwi is a top blogger whose blog nests high in the google tree

here are his tips for blogging pastors or perhaps that ought to be more daintily
pastors who blog

heretis:
http://www.churchcommunicationspro.com/2006/10/5-questions-with-tallskinnykiwis.html

one of his posts is here tsk
and another here
http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2006/12/eurochurch_conf.html#trackback

Paul and Barny's website trial

Hi
I have created a website at freewebs

http://www.freewebs.com/paulandbarny/index.htm

as a way of simplifying the promotion of this programme
after all this blog is a record and a diary but not really a marketing tool.

Let me know what you think...
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Colin