“Death in the morning, incest at night”

I returned to Sandyford Henderson today, and this blog's title was how a guy I got talking to this evening summed up the sermons. Cheery stuff, but then it was deep Old Testament texts, and those guys really went in for their murder, warfare and sexual deviancy. Which I suppose was why God was always so busy with his "smite" button back then.

The minister, Peter White, who was apparently away bungie-jumping in New Zealand when I visited in round one, preached two excellent sermons today, with good use of powerpoint, gentle drops of humour, and a lot of social relevance, which I suppose is often hard to derive from obscure bits of 2 Chronicles or Genesis, today's texts.

It was nice to be back, and the welcome was good, particularly from the studenty-types in the church. I was very warmly welcomed as I came in both times - the guy on the doorstep was cheerful and chatty in the morning and remembered me in the evening; the intimation sheet hander-outers were friendly too. And the old woman sitting next to me in the evening engaged me in a bit of a discussion about the sermon afterwards, which was nice, although she perhaps didn't recognise me as new, and not many of the older members of the congregation seemed to be interested in speaking to me.

Despite the very warm welcome and great feel about the place, I'm in two minds about it. Although there's a busy midweek calendar, the only deeper thing that might be relevant to someone like me is their Wednesday night prayer meeting, although that is everyone altogether. There are no cell groups or home groups, which is something I'd really look for in a church because of the depth of understanding and friendship you gain in a way that you can't in bigger gatherings.

But that said, it was a wonderful place with great teaching and a friendly atmosphere, and I really enjoyed being there.

And incest too. What more can you want?

Ironic

I'm gently entertained by the fact that Rangers fans will have to cheer on Celtic tomorrow.

Celtic are visiting Tynecastle to play Hearts, who are just one point ahead of Rangers in the chase for the second Champion's League spot.  If Rangers are to have any hope of catching Hearts they need Celtic to do them a favour, so it could be amusing to see the Huns cheering on the Tims for perhaps the first time ever.

I think this is irony… rather than just bad luck, like in that Alanis Morrisette song.

Destiny: midweek

I went to Destiny's Wednesday night meeting for students and young professionals, along with John, my new friend that I'd bumped into on Sunday.

It was an interesting experience - it was a bible study, prayer meeting, mutual support time, discussion group, communion, and lots else all rolled into one and stuffed up in the upstairs of Starbucks on Byres Road. John and I were new among the twenty or thirty people who attended, but such is the seeming growth and vibrancy of Destiny that seems to be enjoying lately that we met a few folk who were relatively new there themselves and had only been to the Wednesday night bash once or twice.

Although serious and thoughtful in direction, it was an informal event, and well led by one of the pastors from the church, Liam, who had preached on Sunday night and who I had a really interesting discussion with about what Destiny stood for, where it had come from, and where it was going.

There wasn't a huge "let's introduce ourselves to the obviously new people" culture among the established folk there, which was a shame, but John and I both got talking to enough people between us to get the impression that it was friendly enough, and there were interesting things happening in the group.

Liam explained to me that they've had an interesting range of speakers coming to join them in the past, including everyone's favourite Big Brother Christian, Cameron Stout from Orkney. In a couple of weeks' time, he told me, they have a very intriguing-sounding bloke - a pentecostal church leader from somewhere in the south of Glasgow, who is a former homosexual, used to be Freddie Starr's warm-up act, and was Ireland's 1982 Eurovision entrant.

With a billing like that, how can I not go back?

“It is your Destiny, Luke…”

Round 2 kicked off yesterday with a return to Destiny. I'd enjoyed it the first time, although many aspects had been a little alien to me as a non-charismatic, and my flatmate and I had not received too much of a welcome. This time around, though, I made it to both Sunday services and loved it.

The morning service was attended by around 200 people - more or less filling the church, and in fact we were told by one of the speakers in the service that Destiny was working towards buying a new 2,000 seater venue. Which would make God more popular than many first division football teams. The evening service was perhaps around half that, and interestingly was being filmed - Destiny has a slot on a UCB channel on Sky on Monday nights, apparently. The services both began with praise, and I really enjoyed it because I knew most of the songs, and the ones I didn't were very easy to pick up and had lovely lyrics. The band, the same in both services, were absolutely excellent - they were a six piece rock band and were very loud, but very talented and co-ordinated, and they sounded brilliant.

The sermons were both good. The forty minute address in the morning was by Andrew Owen, Destiny's lead pastor, and a very useful, practical part of a series he was doing on the seven habits of highly effective Christians. In the evening it was another guy, who preached a animated and passionate sermon of a similar length on not underestimating God, not relying only on others' testimonies as our basis of faith, and how we should ask for and expect remarkable things to happen in our own lives too. Both sermons were lively, humorous, scriptural, entertaining and brilliantly delivered. They both provided good notes on the screen, although I missed not having the Bible readings printed up there too.

The welcome was significantly better in both services today than it was a few weeks ago. We were welcomed at the door and directed to seats, and after the morning service we went and had a cup of coffee and got talking to a lot more people. Partly this was due to another guy we'd come in with who we'd bumped into getting off the train - our new friend John was just visiting Destiny although he knew a number of folk in church who we ended up talking to. But also it was due to the fact that one or two people did approach us and ask us if we were new, which was nice.

I ended up getting on well with John, a student at the Scottish Baptist College. He too was looking for a church to settle in, and we spent the afternoon together talking over lunch and then a coffee about Destiny, churches we knew about, and loads more. We're probably going to go along to one of Destiny's midweek homegroups (or "community groups" as they call them) on Wednesday, one which is specifically geared to students and young professionals. That should be an interesting way of finding out a little bit more about the life of Destiny. Or "Destroy", as I reckon it looks at first glance on their logo.

So… I remain to be convinced it's the church for me, but after two excellent experiences of the place yesterday, I'm more likely to want to be a part of it now than I am after the first visit.

She cannae handle it, Captain!

If you visited my website earlier today and found it missing with some complicated message in its place, then my apologies.  My webhost Matt reports from the engine room that I exceeded my monthly bandwidth, which he says was largely due to the picture files, and my friend Angus's mullet radio programme which has been downloaded 640 times this month!

Basically, any website's server can only handle a certain amount of pressure from visitors - every time you visit a website you make its server work hard to deliver you the text, images, sound files or videos you ask it to show you.

Matt hosts several websites, and has a certain amount of his server's power allocated to each - but all you lovely but over-enthusiastic visitors exceeded my site's share of it this month.  Must be all those people looking for "shetland horse" and "ismael kadare".  Matt, being the thoroughly top egg that he is, has expanded my allowance, so my site is now currently rocking and rolling again.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

One of the great things about WordPress, which hosts my blog, is that there is a whole page of statistics about how many people have visited. For example, I had 43 visitors yesterday, and the highest number so far was 88 (on 18 April). The most popular pages that people were browsing before visiting my blog, though, were just other pages on my website - which doesn't tell me much.

However, Matt, who very kindly hosts my website, has shown me a cool page I can view that tells me all about the visits to www.simonvarwell.co.uk - everything from their country of origin, to length of browses, and how they've come to my site, and I wouldnt't be surprised if I've missed a graph somewhere that lists the visitors by blood group.

So for example, I have discovered that…

• I've had 473 different individual visitors to my website this month;
• 13 April was the quietest day (17 visits), and 6 April the busiest (67 visits);
• Americans visited most, with Brits, Aussies and Germans next down the line
• the vast majority of visitors use Windows, but 7 visitors are on Linux (no, I don't understand either);
• only 49.5% of "hits" were through the Internet Explorer web browser, with Firefox not far behind on 36.4%;
• Of those who arrived after typing a phrase into a search engine, most were searching for my name, but two visitors each found my website after typing in "shetland horse" and "ismael kadare". Make of that what you will.

Most interesting, though, is what page people were looking at before visiting my website. Often it was pages I already know about who link to me, such as friends' blogs or websites. But there are a lot of Christian blogs, church websites, and emails, which make me think that a lot more people than I know about have been discussing and visiting this site, no doubt mostly due to the church search. Moreover, the website and blog have received surges in hits in the few days after I published some of the church reviews from round 1.

I am quite humbled that many people - both Christians and non-Christians - are reading what I write about in my search for a church. I guess I have a responsibility to God, myself and those churches I write about, to write honestly and to write in such a way that simply make people reflect more on God and his church.

And at the risk of sounding like a bit of a geek (though I confess I may be already beyond redemption in that department), I wonder whether the statistics will be influenced by how the church search resolves itself in the coming weeks.

Good luck Gareth and Jane!

I'm thinking of Gareth and Jane Saunders today, who are moving from Edinburgh to Cellardyke in Fife.  Gareth is leaving his job as a priest with the Scottish Episcopal Church and beginning life as an Information Architect (web boffin to you and me) at St Andrew's University.  Not the most common of job changes, but there seem to be an awful lot of web-savvy clergy around these days, so you never know how many more there could be.

Just as long as there aren't too many changes in the other direction - can you imagine letting a bunch of web programmers start running our churches?  The hymn numbers would be in binary only, outreach would consist purely of sitting in internet cafes sending Bluetooth messages to people's mobiles, and services would be replaced with sychronous chat over the internet from the comfort of our living rooms.

Anyway, I digress.   Good luck to Gareth and Jane as they settle into their new life in Fife.  Gareth's been a great friend to me since we first met through Join Me and discovered that my folks know Jane's folks.  He has been a big source of advice to me on everything from HTML coding and web accessibility for my website, to the nature of the Holy Spirit and the power of prayer.

Last year I was invited by my old church to get involved in the youth work.  This meant going through a "disclosure check", whereby the the national authorities make sure you are a sound, sane character and not a raving nutter or paedophile.  I asked Gareth to be one of my referees, and put him down as "spiritual and technological adviser, and fellow cult member".  Which was, if nothing else, the truth.

I never did hear back about the application.

Does my website look gay?

Right, time to settle a debate. I've been told on more than one occasion that my website looks gay, largely because of the supposedly "pink" colour.

Which it isn't, it's lilac.

Anyway, I changed the front page a bit, to include a excellent picture of me (a rare phenomenon), which was taken by Claire, a fellow joinee, just after the football this weekend. However now my friend Donald says it just makes the front page look even more gay.

Should I change the colour of my website? I have to say I quite like the lilac, but I don't want visitors to get the wrong idea or anything.

I'd be interested to hear your views. On my website colour, I mean. Not on homosexuality; this blog is getting controversial enough among fellow Christians…

Good Good Friday

The victorious North team, with me on the far left. And yes, that trophy is just a pint glass with a football sellotaped on top!

This weekend I was in Nottingham, for Good Good Friday, the annual Join Me gathering in Nottingham, where joinees from across the country (and, increasingly, the world) gather to perform random acts of kindness on the unsuspecting citizens of Nottingham, and also to have a fun weekend of meeting, greeting and the occasional pint.

Part of GGF includes the traditional North v South football match on the Saturday, which the North thankfully won 5-4 this year - a relief after our 5-1 gubbing last year.

Although I was a reasonably solid right-back, I didn't play particularly well, barely managing to run more than a few paces at once without collapsing in an exhausted heap (the last vigorous exercise I did was last year's match). The fact that I valiantly neither died nor threw up on the field unexpectedly won me the Man of the Match award.

I suspect that the last time anyone won a Man of the Match award simply for not dying was in the Colloseum two thousand years ago, so I feel quite privileged.

Oh yes, and talking of people dying two thousand years ago, happy Easter everyone.

Round 2: the battle plan

Gareth Saunders suggested yesterday that I should visit all the churches again dressed as a clergyman. Almost as tempting as another of his suggestions, which was to visit them all again, loudly proclaim myself Messiah, and gauge their reactions. I'm not quite sure who I should then join - those who reject me or those who accept me as the returning Son of God…

Seriously though, I've been a little unsure as to how to take the search forward. I can't really pick a favourite just now (though the early front-runners are QPBC, Re:Hope and Sandyford Henderson), and I don't really want to spend a few weeks in each because that will take ages. I'd thought about just keeping going round them all one at a time, eliminating one after each rotation, but that's all a bit too Pop Idol or Big Brother, and you'd never catch me being frivilous about something like this.

I think what I need to do is get beyond first impressions and find out more about the churches - what they do beyond Sundays, what they do in their communities and the wider world.

So I'll go back to each of them one Sunday (both services, where possible), and even see if I can gatecrash something else, such as a midweek meeting. Different events and services have different people, atmospheres, purposes and formats, and so seeing more than just one service should help me get a much fuller picture of whether I'd be comfortable being a part of each church in the longer term.  And more importantly, whether they'd put up with me.

Thereafter, I'm not sure. Maybe I'll commit to somewhere for a few weeks or months, or think up some sort of round 3… an inter-church poker competition, perhaps.

Any other ideas?