It’s already 2007 here and has been for several hours. So for those of you who have yet to catch up and start your festivities – Happy New Year.

We didn’t see the ball drop in Times Square, but we did enjoy some good Scottish food and traditional music – didn’t get home until 3.15am which is later than I expected but much earlier than it used to be in years gone by!

Hogmanay (pronounced [ˌhɔgməˈneː] — with the main stress on the last syllable – hog-muh-NAY) is the Scots word for the last day of the year and is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year (Gregorian calendar) in the Scottish manner. Its official date is the 31 December. However this is normally only the start of a celebration which lasts through the night until the morning of the 1 January or, in some cases, 2 January which is a Scottish Bank Holiday.

For the uninitiated, it would be good to explain that New Year in Scotland is what Thanksgiving is to Americans. It’s the biggest holiday of the year, a huge event that carries over two full days.

Our plans tonight start with a service with friends in a local church. That will run from 10.30 to midnight and then the fun starts with a ceilidh, scheduled to run until 3.00am.

A céilidh (pronounced /ˈkʲʰeːlʲiː/) is the traditional Gaelic social dance in Ireland and Scotland. Other spellings encountered are ceilidh, céilí (Irish reformed spelling) and cèilidh (Scottish Gaelic reformed spelling). Before discos and nightclubs, there were Céilidhs in most town and village halls on Friday or Saturday nights and are still common today. Originally céilidhs facilitated courting and prospects of marriage for young people and, although discos and nightclubs have displaced céilidhs to a considerable extent, they are still an important and popular social outlet in rural parts of Ireland and Scotland, especially in the Gaelic-speaking west coast regions. Céilidhs are sometimes held on a smaller scale in private or public houses, for example in remote rural hinterlands and during busy festivals. It is common for some clubs and institutions such as sports clubs, schools and universities and even employers to arrange céilidhs on a regular or at least annual basis. The formality of these can vary. Some mix modern pop music with a Scottish country dancing band and dress codes range from compulsory highland dress to informal. Knowledge and use of the basic dance steps is not always strictly necessary, and dances often alternate with songs, poetry recitals, story telling and other types of “party pieces”.

Céilidh music is provided by any assortment of fiddle, flute, tin whistle, accordion, bodhrán (pronounced /ˈboːrɑːn/ or /ˈbaurɑːn/) (a drumlike instrument, traditionally with a wooden frame covered with stretched goat hide), and in more recent times also drums and electric bass guitar. The music is cheerful and lively, and the basic steps can be learned easily; a short instructional session is often provided for new dancers before the start of the dance itself.

After the ceilidh, the festivities will continue in private homes and while we have several invitations to keep going well into the morning hours, I have a sneaking suspicion that we’ll be making an exit before the ceilidh itself is even over.

It will probably be quieter where you are. but Happy Hogmanay anyway and may 2007 be a very special year for you.

To tell the truth, I have not seen breakfast time for the past two days. The five hours time difference makes it tough to get to sleep at night here and even tougher to face daylight in the morning.

British breakfasts vary a little from what we may eat in a New York diner as you can see from this photo. Note the absence of fat on the bacon, the beans – yes beans! – on the plate and some black stuff on top of the bacon that you really don’t need to know about. But since you asked, it’s called Black Pudding and it is comprised mainly of blood!!!

Our church will be kicking off The Earliest New Years Party Ever at 8.30 tomorrow and more familiar items will be on the breakfast buffet – like scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, home fries, french toast, pancakes and of course bagels!

That will be followed by our last service of 2006, with a great guest speaker – Ivan Vorster – who is Lesaya Kelly’s father. Ivan pastored in South Africa for years, but more recently is the Chaplain to the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Department in California and is the pastor of a church there also. He’s a great guy.

So don’t miss breakfast tomorrow morning – it’s free of course – and I’ll do my very best to get up in time to eat over here too.

We had a huge Christmas Eve, with the attendance only twenty people and change under our biggest Sunday of the year, Easter. It was a great time.

Today I got word from our friend Basil D’Souza in Thane,Bombay about their special services last weekend -

I think we made the right decision to have two services in Thane for Christmas, although it was hard work. We had 480 at the Hindi Service (5.30pm) and 284 at the English (9.00pm).
In addition Agnel had 190 at Calangute and 80 at Vasco, bringing the total number of those who attended service at Covenant Blessings Churches to 1000+…. God is so very good.

Isn’t that amazing? – Over 1,000 people in services there celebrating Christmas in a Hindi culture. Basil is really doing a great job over in India, but I have shared with him that I believe the potential for development and growth surpasses anything he can even imagine.

And it’s the same for us too!

If you check the weather forecast for the north east of Scotland, it will tell you that the temperature was around 40 today. They’re lying! What they don’t take into account is what I had forgotten about this area in winter – there’s a lingering dampness in the air and the wind has been gusting up to 80mph.

80mph – I lie not. Back on Long Island that’s enough to have warnings flashing across the bottom of the TV screen, but here it’s just another windy day that feels like its in the teens.

When I went out for a run this morning I doscovered that walking was barely possible. It was a test to cover around two miles heading straight into the wind, but it was a heck of a lot easier jogging the return journey with the wind at my back.

And the moral of this story is – sometimes the going is tough and everything is against you, but it changes. Nothing stays the way it is. Stick at it and stay the course.

Better go be sociable. Loving being here with family and friends – but baby it’s cold ouitside!

Forty eight hours before we were due to leave for a vacation in Scotland last July, our son-in-law’s father had a horrific sky-diving accident. Needless to say, our plans were put on hold. Freddie is home now, still recovering, but a living miracle and we had the joy of spending Christmas with him.

With that crisis behind us, we decided to use our plane tickets to be in Scotland for New Year, so here we are in London’s Heathrow Airport waiting for our connecting flight to Aberdeen.

New Year is huge for the Scots, so it will be a good time to be with family and friends there. We will be staying with Gill’s brother and sister-in-law. Sue has been battling colon cancer for the past eighteen months, so we really want to see her and spend some time with her.

I intend to use the time to wind down, relax and contemplate the year ahead. I am convinced that 2007 will be a pivotal year for Church At The Movies. It will be a year that shapes our destiny as we look at fresh challenges and opportunities and take bold steps forward. I’ll be outlining some of this in my “State Of The Church Address” on Sundays January 21st and 28th – Dangerous Church 2007, but there’s a lot of good stuff happening before then.

The Earliest New Years Party Ever kicks of this coming Sunday morning with a full breakfast being served from 8.30 to 9.30 and then our end of year service with guest speaker, Ivan Vorster, gets under way in Worship Central.

Celebration Sunday is January 14th, with our fourth baptismal service in nine months and a time for communion too.

A great end to one year and an exciting start to a new one – a year in which we will be pushing the limits still further. Buckle up for the ride of your life!

Here’s a great post, stolen in its entirety from – John Laeger’s blog

Why “church in a movie theater”?

Because of who WON’T come.

My observation is that most Christians who are looking for a church, are looking for a church that has its own building. But let me get right to the point. Meadow does not exist to reach Christians. They are already reached. (That’s why they are called “Christians”.) Being a “church in a movie theater” will actually give Christians who are looking for a new church, a reason NOT to come to Meadow and I am perfectly okay with that.

If you were to look back at the brief history of Meadow, we have had very few Christians come to Meadow who considered themselves (noticed I said “considered themselves”) “solid” Christians. Because the perception of a church that meets in a movie theater – to most “solid” Christians (whatever that means) is that it is not a “solid” church.

However, I would put the teaching of Meadow up against any other church. I don’t say this to create some kind of competition. Other churches are not our competition. I say that because we do teach solid doctrine. We just don’t use big words. Being a “church in a movie theater” has nothing to do with the content and focus of our teaching.

We teach what the Bible says about the tough subjects most churches (in their own buildings) won’t touch like money, sex, and leadership. We are clear in our teaching that unless a person puts their faith in Christ, they are bound for eternal hell. We just don’t lay it on with a major guilt trip. Our teaching is laser focused on LIVING out a relationship with Christ, not KNOWING more stuff about theology, parsing verbs, knowing the Greek tense, etc. Truth is, “solid” Christians have left Meadow because they wanted to hear more Bible “stuff” rather than change their behavior to be more “Christ-like”.

Bottom line is that being a “church in a movie theater” gives Christians who believe a church and its teaching is defined by a building – a reason NOT to come. And it creates curiosity in those who are far from God to come check us out. To many who are far from God, a church in a church building makes that church like every other church and that’s why they don’t go. Being a “church in a movie theater” at least raises the intrigue factor and gets them in the door – “maybe they are different”. Once they get in the door, they hear teaching that is real, Biblical, makes sense, and they can understand it – AND it makes their life better. They also meet others (you and me) who are also walking this path of trying to live a life that honors Christ.

We are working on a strategy to make sure every person in Scott County knows about this church in Shakopee that is a “church in a movie theater”. We believe that over the next few months, we are going to see hundreds of people come to Meadow simply because we DO meet in a movie theater. But they won’t be Christians who believe a church is defined by its building.

Is it possible to be reaching 500 people every Sunday in 2007 because we are a “church in a movie theater”? Yes, it is!

It’s official!

I can confirm for all my concerned friends that I am not anorexic, bulemic, nor am I simply starving myself.

I can still eat and I have been doing so!

In fact I’m stuffed – guess it’s Christmas!!!

Now if you’re sitting reading my blog on Christmas Day, read fast and go back to the real world!

It’s all different this year in the Blackmore household. This is the first time ever that we have not all been together for Christmas and so it brings a different flavor to the holiday. We’re a tight bunch, as you might have gathered, but life is all about changes.

I won’t be making my brief Christmas dinner table speech that the best gift of all is having my family all around the table, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the best thing I have this Christmas is a wonderful wife, children and grandchildren who are the #1 joy of my life.

It’s all a little new this year, but new traditions are good too.

We’re heading over to Charlotte’s later for what will be an amazing celebration as her father-in-law, Freddy, who should have died in his sky-diving fall in July, was released from hospital on Friday and will be there with us. This is the Christmas none of the doctors expected him to see! I guess God had other plans!

So, wherever you are, Merry Christmas.

And if things are not the way they once were, appreciate what you have now – and enjoy!

Congratulations to those of our forefathers who hijacked the pagan rituals of mid-winter and decided to make it into a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

We all know Christ did not actually come into the world “in the deep mid-winter”, despite what the carols say. It was probably spring time in Palestine when the Babe of Bethlehem made his entrance, but in the absence of a registrar’s records, I applaud the decision made by whoever it was to name the day as December 25.

I love Christmas. It’s a brightspot in winter and I personally use it to remember the coming of the Savior and to appreciate family and friends.

No point in getting all hot under the collar about Christ getting lost in all the seasonal paraphernalea. This time of year started out pagan and for a lot of people it has stayed that way.

What a pity for them. Let’s not criticize, let’s be thankful we know what we know and share the good news.