Another big, big step forward in Dock-world today – my first visit inside the new TQ campus of the Belfast Metropolitan College.

I had a bit of a root around in my old folders and found a photo (on your left) of the building taken at the start of 2010 – back in the early days of The Dock. Compare and contrast with the pic on your right, taken a few days ago from exactly the same vantage point. It’s been a joy to watch the transformation and construction of this beautiful new building – so imagine my child-with-a-new-toy excitement when I got my first tour around the campus today…

The most striking thing about the campus is the shape – it’s actually a huge square with a massive space in the middle – which will be opened to the public as a nice bit of chillout space in the middle of the TQ, complete with pond and great views of the cranes.  You’ll also be able to avail yourself of some cooking from the catering college students, a haircut from the hairdressing students, and who knows what else…

The facilities are truly impressive – have a look at (respectively) the gym, the hairdressing/beautician stations, and even the spray-tan booth…

The architecture is gorgeous too – check out the view from the library, the impressive entrance lobby seen from above, and the clever lecture theatre/kitchen, in which catering students get to watch professional chefs in action…

Massive thanks to Susie for a brilliant and enthusiastic tour.  It’s that wonderful TQ story again – people who are excited to be here, full of hope and confidence about the opportunities and potential of these fantastic new spaces – hugely inspiring to be around.

And speaking of the fab people of the TQ – despite the fact that it was pelting rain all afternoon while I was exploring BMC, the clouds cleared bang on time (yesss!!) for the Arc BBQ, and another wonderful, friendly bunch of people gathered in the evening sun to eat a selection of beautifully “chargrilled” burgers and hotdogs at The Dock’s pop-up cafe.

Great day!

Enough of this complaining about our damp summer! The BBC says that we’re going to have “sunny intervals”, and I believe them!

So Thursday 25th marks the return of the Dock BBQ – meeting at the base of the Arc Apartments from 5-7pm for the finest burgers, hotdogs, salads and snacks that money can buy!  See you there!

(And if anyone is free to help out with a leaflet-drop around the TQ, we’ll be meeting up at The Kit at 5pm on Wednesday.  Squatting down to push leaflets under doors is really good for toning your thighs – fact!  No need for a gym in this job…)

Credit: BBQ sign photograph “BBQ Thisaway!” by Kevin Trotman, www.flickr.com/kt/

Lots more juice for the mind-grapes this weekend!

I’ve been having a great time over the last few weeks providing clergy cover for St Mark’s parish in Newtownards, the gleamingly-shiny church you can see to your left. So from one day to the next I’m changing between the red T-shirt of my Walking Tour Guide uniform and the clerical shirt of my “I’m a minister, honest!” uniform – I’m multi-tasking! (although, as Susan would quickly point out, not simultaneously – I’m not a woman.)

I’m telling you this because I’ve been using the long drives (I’m in a Micra after all) between the TQ and Newtownards for a long-overdue catch-up with some of the podcasts that have been piling up week-by-week on my phone.  I’ve probably mentioned on this blog before – I think the church has been very slow to take advantage of the huge, huge resource offered by the intoxicating selection of top-drawer teaching and preaching which is available, for free, to download onto your phone/MP3 player and listen to at your leisure.  In the stone-age days BT (Before T’internet), the best preaching you heard was a luck-of-the-draw matter of who was speaking at your local church, and people would church-hop at a rate of knots with the complaint that they “weren’t getting anything from the teaching”.  Always a bit of a daft reason, I thought, and now utterly irrelevant, because if the sermon you might hear on a Sunday doesn’t hit home, there’s absolutely no excuse not to take responsibility for finding something richer during the week.

Just to mention a few names at random of the people I was listening to today, John Ortberg and Rob Bell podcast their sermons on an almost-weekly basis.  These guys live and breathe for preaching – they are tremendously gifted communicators, and are both resourced by their (massive) churches to plunge loads of time and energy into crafting their talks to perfection.  Ortberg is, in m’humble opinion, the absolute world-class expert at relating Bible passages to real-life stories and situations (and is also laugh-out-loud funny – which does mean that you look like a bit of a lunatic, driving along on your own in the car cackling like a maniac).  Rob Bell (who got the big thumbs-up from Dock Book Group a few months ago) is superb at applying his huge wealth of knowledge about Biblical context and language in an accessible way, making the passages really come alive.  After a day in their ‘company’ driving back-and-forth to Newtownards, I feel like my mind is overflowing with good stuff – stories, insights, new perspectives, truths.  And they are just two examples – I’m sure many of you out there have other suggestions of podcasters worth following (feel free to post them as comments on this blog).

And to round-off a thoroughly great day, another beautiful Dock Walk this afternoon.  (Because it’s important to connect with this stuff in community, not alone in your car in a little isolated bubble.)  (Although again, as Dock Walkers we use brilliant resources which are available for free on t’internet – the endlessly creative and inspiring Wordlive daily Bible-reading website). The sun shone, the rain fell (simultaneously – so at least the NI weather can multi-task), and a fabulous bunch of people walked and talked and came up with all sorts of new windows on the endlessly-fascinating story of the Good Samaritan.  Who is my neighbour?  Who is “the other” in our day?  Are we glad to receive help when it is given?  What did the ‘expert’ who first heard the story do with it when Jesus had finished speaking?  What do we do with it today?

We also, as you can see to your right, got to use the FIRST EVER pedestrian crossing in the TQ for the first time; there were no cars coming, but that did not deter us…)

So the end result of it all is that I’m here on a Sunday night tapping away, feeling like I’ve had a 7-course banquet of brain-food over the past day.  And it’s a great feeling – our minds receive and process so much junk food that it’s good to intentionally seek out some quality meat.  (or quality tofu or something if you’re a veggie – sorry Sally).  So, I’ll finish the day with a challenge to all of you: have you sought out some good stuff to load into your phone, or MP3 player, or laptop – or have you got books beside the bed or CDs in the stereo which will feed your soul?  The good stuff is out there.  Check it out.

(And just to mention one more name:  Bill Hybels and the Willow Creek material have been a huge influence on Dock World – check out this video of Bill announcing to this year’s Global Leadership Summit that Howard Schultz, the Starbucks CEO, has had to pull out of a planned appearance at the Summit.  Now I’m not posting this to get caught up in the why’s-and-wherefore’s of the moral issues that Bill addresses here – don’t get hung up on that.  Just watch this as an example of great communication and leadership.  Bill takes the announcement of a very disappointing piece of bad news and, in 7 minutes, manages to turn it into a powerful, clear expression of his values and a powerfully Christian response to a difficult situation.  That’s great leadership!)

One of the things I love about The Dock is that there’s no rest for the little grey cells.  Some absolutely fascinating chats over the past few weeks about faith, life, love, conversation, forgiveness, ‘the other’, inheritance…  I just love being part of this huge and invigorating dialogue about why faith matters, and what it might look like, in the new era we’re living through.  I’m sure some of the creaking movements of my brain-cogs will be making their way onto this blog over the next few weeks…

In the meantime, I’m here to tell you about one of the gatherings that has been hugely helpful in getting these conversations started:  Dock Book Group.  Over recent months as we’ve looked at Love Wins, Reasons For God and Mere Christianity we’ve been challenged and stretched (and drunk lots of coffee).  So we’re going to stick with the local boy:  C.S.Lewis is our choice again for next Book Group, and we’re going to look at Surprised By Joy when we meet again on Saturday 27th Aug, 9:30am at the Premier Inn.

The consensus on Mere Christianity was that we loved it, loved the idea, loved Lewis’s writing style, his clarity and intelligence – but that the whole enterprise did occasionally have the air of a pipe-smoking Oxford intellectual who had never strayed far outside his little bubble; oh and that his “back in the kitchen woman!” treatment of gender politics was a bit…. “of its time”!  So, did the love of a good woman change him?  (Surprised By Joy was written after his late-in-life marriage to Joy Gresham and her heartbreaking battle with cancer.)  How does Lewis’s deep theology connect with his joyful and painful experiences of real life?  Lots to chat about next Saturday!

A fab article on the BBC today (link here) following the construction process of the massive wind turbines under the Samson and Goliath cranes at the Harland and Wolff yard.  I’m starting to really love the sight of those cranes on the skyline in the TQ, and it’s been great to see them in daily use.

If you’re ever in the TQ area and hear what sounds like an air-raid siren, watch the cranes closely: the siren is the signal that one of them is moving (at the exciting speed of one-and-a-half miles per hour).  The walking tour groups can never resist stopping until we’ve figured out which crane is slowly changing position!

And the best fact from the article on the BBC?  The wind turbines we’re making in Belfast are the largest in the world.  Biggest ships… biggest wind turbines…  little old Belfast, leading the way again.