Yet more snow – Blogstead residents emerged this morning blinking in the white light. A mere couple of inches – barely worth thinking about.

Meanwhile we plough on. Work continues on the Whole Church Mission and Ministry Policy – which is an elegant way of recognising that the SEC, in common with most other churches, protects itself from change by making sure that it takes several keys to open the locks and that many people hold them! But we’re doing better than I expected – and I think that the fact that we are trying to define our mission is another signal that we are moving into the mainstream.

This week sees our Clergy Conference in Kinross. We’re looking forward to having Canon Professor Martyn Percy of Ripon College, Cuddesdon, with us. Apart from his ability to develop what is obviously a remarkable training institution – very different from the year I spent there just as Ripon Hall and Cuddesdon College merged in 1975 – Martyn manages to be ‘ahead of the curve’ in his much of his writing. I’m looking forward to it and we’re honoured to have him with us.

But Monday starts with a critical meeting about the future of Scottish Churches House .. and the diary is inexorably moving towards the Primates’ Meeting in Dublin at the end of the month.

This seems to have gone on for ever and I won’t be allowed to slip back into my workaholic tendencies until Wednesday.

I’ve had one or two ‘projects’ to keep me going – including collating a first draft of our attempt to write a Mission and Ministry Policy for the SEC. I woke up on New Year’s Day with absolute clarity about it. I felt like Beethoven having been handed his 5th Symphony. I rushed to write it down before it slipped away. Some stayed with me but inexorably it moved out of reach. Finished today and sent to other members of the group who will wonder where it came from.

I’ve been kept in touch with reality by the Channel 4 Father Ted evening – which contained all my favourite lines. We also enjoyed the DVD of Barchester Towers – took a look at Plumstead Episcopi and my hero Archdeacon Grantley. I just thought that Slope. the Bishop and Mrs Proudie were wonderful. Such fantasy! So uncomfortable!

More like the St Lawrence than the Tay – but this was Perth this morning. We’ve sort of got used to living with this level of cold and with the icy roads. It’s fine so long as you don’t actually want to do anything very much. But of course you don’t have that choice.

A Happy Christmas to everyone.

At this time of year, I often make a point of going to churches where for one reason or another there isn’t a Rector. So I headed for Lochgelly this morning – a round trip of about 75 miles in the snow. It’s old mining country in Fife – a place that, like the Welsh valleys, is still trying to find a new future.

As I travelled, I listened to sage, sensible and prudent advice – to travel in such conditions was like going up a mountain in tee shirt and shorts. But this was not recreation and I had taken precautions – left the Passat at home because, to be honest, its heater doesn’t work well. I had my alb, hat and stick, the Sally Magnusson snow scoop [purchased to dig myself out of a snowdrift in Dunblane after being interviewed by Sally – well actually I was in the snowdrift and she was in a warm studio in Glasgow], my wellies, coffee, water, biscuits, blanket, laptop more for recharging the phone than for doing my e mail.

There were six of us. And I was glad I had gone. I think that the church at its absolute best is found with small groups of people to whom it would not occur to do other than sustain it against all the odds. Harry read and served; another Harry played the new organ; Edith prayed and I was glad to be with them.

Then they headed for the hot toast and I took my Captain Oates departure. It did indeed take me some time.

Well it’s gone cold again. But the energy levels are returning to something like normal. So what have I been doing?

Well, amazingly, for somebody in my position, I’ve been working on mission and letting the lead valleys look after themselves for a bit. And if they are in any state like the Blogstead roof, they will need a bit of looking after.

First of all, we’re doing a bit of between-tides maintenance on Casting the Net. You learn by doing – and we’ve been learning from our experience and from others like the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway who are shaping their own diocesan mission strategy. So, like Goldilocks, we realise that some of the mesh is too big and some is too small – and we’re searching for what is ‘just right’ That means some new defining of what we are trying to do and a look at the structures. More than ever, we recognise that ‘us trying to do things’ is not quite the same thing as spirit-shaped cultural change. So we’re taking a look at what that might mean.

Meanwhile I’ve also been part of a group working on what the Provincial Mission and Ministry Board has been calling a ‘Whole Church Mission and Ministry Policy.’ And this isn’t easy either. Sometimes it’s about asking what mission means in 2011 – sometimes it’s more functional – do we have a reason for what we do and is there a reason for doing something different? The ‘whole church’ tag interests me for this reason. I’ve learnt over the years that the church is expert at deflecting attempts to engender change. On a personal level, it exhausts you or it marginalises you or it makes you a bishop – the result is pretty much the same. But its best tactic is to make sure that everything is scattered about the church in such a way that there is no single place to which you can go and push. It’s like putting the treasures in a safe and handing the key to somebody who thinks it’s the key to something completely different.

Be that as it may, it seems to me that one of the real advantages about being a relatively small church like the SEC is that it is possible to shape a policy and hope that it might mean something. Others who are attempting to steer super tankers don’t have that excitement.

I think I just got tired of the snow in the end. It seemed extraordinarily enervating – just the struggle to do anything and get anywhere. Anyway, I got myself to St Andrews on Sunday to preach at St Salvators, which is the medieval church at the heart of the life of the University. I quite like preaching in places within the Presybterian tradition – it’s an invitation to step out of your own tradition. So this is some of what I said.

We marked the end of the snow – and the collapse of most of the gutters – with the Blogstead Christmas party and mistletoe-fest. The driver of the snowplough was of course still with us – tho’ about to return to his family. As we sang our Carols – special dispensation for Advent – his voice rang out as he sang, ‘deep and crisp and even’

What a nice suprise …. just what I needed. There it was as I slalomed back down the lane today. Unfortunately the snowplough – having finally reached Blogstead – expired in a great puddle of hydraulic fluid. It and its friendly driver are now honorary members of the Blogstead community.

Nature at its most beguiling. Blogstead adrift in the Perthshire snowfields like Debussy’s ‘La cathédrale engloutie’

We did manage to get back there today after having to stay overnight in Glasgow – but the lane is impassable and we were without electricity all day. But the Blogstead folk have been taking the opportunity to do some community-building. Communications trenches now run through the courtyard from house to house. We are considering publishing what we think of one another on Wikileaks – or maybe we should launch our own currency.

This weekend marked the 50th Anniversary of the renovation of the ancient Abbey Church of Bangor – after it was reconstituted as a Parish in 1941. The most striking element of the renovation is the remarkable mural by Kenneth Webb on the East Wall. It shows the three Celtic saints of Bangor – Gall, Comgall and Columbanus – receiving their missionary command from the Risen Christ

I served as a Curate there from 1983-6. It’s a long time ago but familiar faces there were in plenty and this is what I said.

It’s been a while. But it’s good to have a Secretary/PA again after doing without for a while. Sharon’s arrival gives us a new opportunity to discuss how we deal with what comes in, where we put things, how we find things, who to blame when we lose things .. Appropriately enough, I like working in the cloud. So we work out how to deal with Google Documents and the mysteries of the digital dictaphone. We’ve also turned the Inbox upside down.

My problem is now very simple. The backlog has all but disappeared. So I am face to face with the difficult things which I have been putting off doing for a while. Where do I turn?