Sponsored sleep out!

On Sunday evening I slept out on our church tower. As you do. It's not for the faint hearted - 29 m and 108 steps up to the top, a seriously steep and narrow climb. And at the top, a flagpole which turns out to be very noisy all night long, and a series of ridged bits of stone to try to sleep on. What fun. The enthusiastic new curate (who'd been here all of 2 weeks) cheerfully did it with me. She showed her worth by the snacks she brought (cheese and onion crisps and Haribo; she'll go far), but she blotted her copybook somewhat by falling soundly asleep between midnight and 7am, while I was mostly wide awake. My friend kindly suggested it gets harder to sleep as you get older...

We gamely slept on groundsheets and in sleeping bags, but without tents or any covering. It was stunningly beautiful. We saw the sun set over the beautiful city of Liverpool, and then we (or at least I!) saw it rise again the next morning, just before 5am. I took some incredible photos.

Why did we do all this, you ask? Surely not just for the views. Well, no, although they made it all the more amazing. We did it to raise money, and many kind people have sponsored us. To be honest I feel a bit of a fraud. Most people run marathons or climb mountains for sponsorship - all we did was go to sleep for a night (or not), admittedly in a slightly less comfortable place than normal.

The eccentricity of it seems to have captured people's imaginations, though, as I'd hoped that it would - "Vicars sleep on roof to raise money to repair roof" etc. We were featured in the Liverpool Echo and on Radio Merseyside in the days leading up to it. We tweeted all evening and much of the night with the hashtag #RooftopRevs, and gained many new followers.

Overall it was a really fun experience, albeit not one I want to necessarily recreate next week! I was VERY relieved by how kind the weather was to us - the night before the night before there had been significant thunderstorms, and the day before our annual church open day had to be held indoors because of torrential rain. But on the night we slept out it was calm and clear, a bit breezy of course (this is the highest point in Liverpool after all) but pleasant and mild all night, and with the most amazing views of the city that you could possibly hope for.

But I still haven't explained why we actually did it. Well, I'm vicar of St. George's Church in Everton, which has the distinction of being the first church in the world to be built entirely of cast iron. It's absolutely stunning. I spend so long in there that I sometimes forget just how beautiful it is, and the 'wow' factor which is inevitable the first time you walk inside. It's a Grade 1 listed building, and rightly so. This year we're delighted to be celebrating our 200th anniversary.

And yet unfortunately the roof is absolutely stuffed. I believe that to be the technical term... We own A LOT of buckets. On very wet days there's almost as much rain inside the building as outside... (I did at one point suggest to the PCC that instead of embarking upon lengthy and expensive roof repairs we should simply buy everyone in the congregation an umbrella...).

We've finally bitten the bullet and accepted that the roof simply must be fixed. This required a huge intake of breath and a massive amount of faith. In many ways I'd rather not be the vicar who embarked upon this. I don't want it to distract me from the mission of God in Everton. And yet I recognise that in very many ways our building is key to the mission of God in Everton. So this simply must be done, and done now.

We're fortunate that English Heritage have awarded us an 80% grant, for which we're very grateful. We've also been successful in a couple of funding bids. And, as a Listed Place of Worship, we'll be able to reclaim some of the VAT we pay. And yet, even so, as a small congregation in one of the most deprived areas of the country, this is a huge undertaking. We do it in faith, certain that it's right, but we do it with trepidation nonetheless.

And so it came to pass that Ashley and I slept on the roof. We had far more fun than I feel like you're meant to have when trying to raise serious sponsor money. We are incredibly,. profoundly grateful to everyone who has sponsored us so far, and we hope and pray that even more will do so. With website and cash donations, and including Gift Aid, we've just tipped over the £3000 mark. That's awesome! You can sponsor us at www.justgiving.com/stgeorgeseverton. We would appreciate it so very much.

Below is a photo from the night. You can see more if you look up our hashtag. May the beautiful St. George's Everton be a beacon of faith and hope for Everton and beyond for many more years to come...

Book Review - Acts and Omissions by Catherine Fox

I guess I need to say right at the start of this blog that I absolutely LOVE this book! This isn't going to be one of those cryptic book reviews where you don't know until the last sentence whether the reviewer loved or hated the book. I think this is a fantastic book - not to everyone's tastes, I imagine, but then what book is?

I also probably need to say, in the interests of transparency, that Catherine Fox is a friend. Given how funny and witty and naughty she is in real life, it's no surprise that her books are all of those things too. However, wonderful, loyal friend as I of course am, I'm not so nice that I would write a glowing review of a book I didn't like. (And anyway, I've been a fan of her writing for longer than I've been her friend!).

I think as a reader that one of the things you most want from a novel is characters who you really care about. Acts and Omissions delivers many such characters. They're a joy, every one of them, with their eccentricities and egos, their humour and humanity, their foibles and frailties. Matt, Freddie, Wendy, Jane, Paul, Bob, Susanna, Martin, Dominic... these people have become totally real to me! I'm not sure I can think of many other novels I've read where I have genuinely cared this much about what happens to the characters!

The way in which the book was first written probably helped to create this level of character-empathy. Catherine blogged a chapter a week for a whole year, meaning the reader was often left with a dramatic cliffhanger, and there was nothing to be done except wait a week to see what would happen next.

For me the genius of this book (and all of Catherine's writing) is the way she brings up big, important issues in an easy, light-hearted way, that means you suddenly move from chuckling about something daft that one of the characters has said or done, to finding yourself thwacked between the eyes by something incredibly moving and profound.

I have spent the whole of my life worshipping within the Church of England, and the past 9 years working within it. I have a massive amount of affection for it, but am also very well aware of its peculiarities! I love that this book pokes gentle fun at the CofE, challenges it where it deserves to be challenged, but does so at all times with genuine warmth and fondness, and never with negativity and criticism.

This book is also far from afraid to tackle the Big Issues. It does so cleverly, because first of all it has made you genuinely love and care about the people involved. This means that you can't just dismiss the things you don't like - which is what, in real life, it's all too easy to do.

There are lots of moments in this book where I've wished that one of the characters hadn't done the thing they've just done. There were times on a Sunday night as I read the blog when I yelled "noooooooo" at the computer. I disagree, morally and theologically, with some of the things which happen in the book. It would be pretty surprising if I didn't, really - that's novels, and indeed human life, for you. There were lots of moments when I wished that a different choice had been made, or a different outcome reached. That doesn't mean, however, that I can't enjoy and appreciate the book for what it is.

The brilliant thing that it does is that it forces you to consider these issues as they affect 'real people' (please don't tell me they aren't real!!) who you've grown to love and care for. In church life it's all too easy to retreat behind our theological labels, and to stay within groups of people who think the same way as we do, and to assume that we know what 'we' and what 'they' think and believe. This book doesn't allow us to do that - it challenges us in ways which can only be helpful. Not all angles and beliefs are equally represented, however, and there's a definite liberal bias in the theology of most of the main characters that is different from my own theology, and therefore presented me with a not-always-comfortable challenge. I might also have liked one or two more 'single, whole and content' characters (trust me to say that!), but then they probably don't make for such interesting stories...

In many ways the book is 'about' the homosexuality/equal marriage debate which is so topical in the CofE at the moment, but it's also about more than that. It's about how huge institutions care for (or don't!) the people who work for them. It's about love and relationships and how frail and fragile they are, but how worth fighting for. It's about the Christian journey, and the ups and downs of an ordinary bunch of people trying to walk it. It's about grace and forgiveness and joy and life and laughter. It is not, however, for the faint-hearted or the easily offended...!

Even though I'd read the book faithfully each week as it was blogged, I still couldn't wait to read it again when it was published. I read much of it in one go on the train home from London and I laughed and cried for most of the journey!

This is a fabulous book, incredibly well written and achingly funny. Read it quickly (it's just out, published by SPCK), and then go to www.unseenthingsabove.blogspot.co.uk to start reading the sequel, also being blogged a chapter a week.