Thought you might like a look at the family wedding last Friday. This is our Mark with Steph married in Pitlochry on a beautiful day. We were very fortunate with the weather – and extra fortunate that the travel problems were only just beginning to unfold. So there were some struggles to get there – bicycle rickshaw, hot air balloon, etc – and greater struggles to get home again. But that determination just added to the day!

It’s good to be back – I did the traditional clergy thing of greeting the Resurrection and then taking a break.

Easter Day in St Ninians was extraordinary – flowers, colour, wonderful music, baptisms and confirmation, crowds of people. I continue to be astonished at the standard of liturgy which our Cathedrals are able to deliver. In the middle of all that, this was the sermon.

A couple of days in Donegal restored body and soul. It included – as is traditional now wherever we go – some intensive and deeply satisfying rodding of the drains. The innovation of WiFi in the Workhouse in Dunfanaghy is welcome and long overdue. Just back in time for a visit to Oban – a continuing part of my life – and a wedding in Glenalmond.

Meanwhile, spring has sprung at Blogstead. The residents are emerging blinking into the daylight after the long, dark winter. And Blogstead will be en fete for the wedding of our youngest in Pitlochry next Friday.

Enjoy .. maybe not the word. But I did enjoy Holy Week in the parish and I sort of miss it. You would feed yourself in at Palm Sunday and emerge battered and bruised at the end. By contrast, I’ve had an extraordinary range of experiences this week – from the rededication of our beautiful church in Aberfoyle to Chrism Masses in Glasgow and Perth, Good Friday worship sitting in the centre of our Cathedral around a cross and more in Dollar – and today the blessing of Andrew and Lesley’s marriage in Auchterarder. Oh and tonight we did the Easter Eve ‘Christ is Risen’ shouting.

When I look back on that, it represents an extraordinary range of experiences. Piskie Cathedrals are in extraordinarily good shape as places of high quality liturgy and excellent music. In our churches, people have been sharing in the leading of worship with a sort of serious intent. And Chrism Masses are always intensely moving.

So …. just for the record … here are my words at the Rededication of St Mary’s, Aberfoyle, the Chrism Mass in Glasgow, Good Friday in Dollar, a Good Friday piece for the Scotsman, Thought for the Day on Thursday and Andrew and Lesley’s Marriage Blessing

I’ve just found myself saying to a friend that Holy Week is the time when I miss the parish most. It’s the consistency that I miss – the feeling of slogging your way through the week as the story is imprinted over and over again on your mind. And the people – wrestling with the question of how suffering can be redemptive alongside people whose story and suffering I know about as they know about mine. I really miss that.

But I’m looking forward to it – Chrism Mass with Bishop-elect Gregor and the clergy in Glasgow and Galloway and here in Perth; Good Friday in the Cathedral and in Dollar and couple of other things as well. I hope to step aside from the Via Dolorosa of the management and leadership literature which in which I have been immersing myself. Easy to be sniffy about that stuff – I’m old enough and tired enough not to want to start doing ‘command and control’ around here. Anyway I think they would just cut the phone lines and leave me to it. But it’s clarifying the way in which my role in leadership complements the contributions of all the other people who are helping us to move forward with Casting the Net.

Meanwhile, a couple of things from the archives …..

I was glad to spend Lent IV in St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. Good liturgy and great music .. a growing congregation showing how good our church can be at building congregations in very secular places. The sermon is here
and the talking version is below.

You may also be interested in Lady Day with Mother’s Union at St Ninian’s Cathedral and today’s Rededication of St Mary’s, Aberfoyle

Well we’re all off to the Cathedral in Uppsala this morning and then to lunch with the Archbishop and his wife – before heading for the airport. We have been warned that the sermon will be in Swedish. But then many of the sermons which I hear and preach seem to be in strange languages.

I continue to ponder the way in which, even in my short contact with the Porvoo Communion, I can hear change in how the leaders of the Scandinavian Lutheran Churches speak. You begin by hearing institutional solidity and security, homogeneous churches in homogeneous societies, lots of money. But they are now talking of the erosion of that model, of the emergence of a proper and helpful distinction between church and a secular society, about the way in which that may free the church to pursue mission in a new way.

The thing is, of course, that leadership through that kind of change is very difficult. Easier to call for freedom for the captives. Easier too when, as is our experience, you can take risks because you have relatively little to lose. Much harder when visible strength is ebbing away, when nostalgia for the idealised past grows, when blaming creeps in. To lead in that phase requires real quality.

But they have to go through that during the next generation. From it will come a new engagement with society – which leads me to the Pope’s visit to Scotland. Of which more tomorrow or the next day.

Soderblom – Room 309 here in the Sigtuna Conference Centre where we are doing Porvoo stuff somewhere near Stockholm. It’s hard not to feel that one is marooned in an ecclesiastical version of Ikea – Soderblom being a stainless steel pedal bin. I fell asleep twice this afternoon in a session on Global Warming in Magnolia. Perhaps not surprising because the temperature was 23C and there is a foot of snow outside.

As you would expect me to say, Sweden is a wonderful country. But before we come back to that … the thing which I do appreciate here is the chance to observe some high quality leadership in the Scandinavian Lutheran Churches. Time to raise the game, I think.

Sweden .. etc, etc. I know they aren’t reading this so I can risk saying …. it always seems to be 1958 in Sweden. There’s a sort of unselfconscious wholesomeness about it which we couldn’t get near in Scotland. There’s money and a homogeneous society and a majority church … but then you find that budgets are being cut by 15% this year and Archbishop Anders is talking about the need to rediscover mission.

Which means that his job is harder than mine. Because it is always more difficult to provide leadership in a situation which is reducing and where people are experiencing a sense of loss. Much easier in Scotland where we are actually getting quite good at being christian community in a secular society. Which brings us to the Pope’s visit to Scotland – of which more tomorrow.

Obanagain today for more of the Episcopal Election. I shall miss it when it is over. Lochearnhead as beautiful as ever in the early morning – mirror smooth with the mountains and snow reflected in it. Still plenty of snow around and frozen lochs on the way to Crianlarich.

Meanwhile I’m continuing to read for the training – US recommendations are interesting just because they are a bit different. I’ve done with Spiders and Starfish and moved on to ‘Finding our Way Again’ by Brian McLaren. Seems to me to offer the best description I have read of that slippery idea that while the secular world has lost institutional religion [and could you blame it?] it is mad keen on spirituality.

For some time now, Poppy has been suggesting that she isn’t getting her fair share on this blog. So she has moved to her own Facebook page – if you want to go through the catflap, she’ll welcome you there at Poppy Chillingworth.

We went last night to Jane Eyre at Perth Theatre – well worth a visit. Co-incidentally, one of the stars was Beth from No 1 taking part in ‘her first professional engagement’ Strangely, her biog in the programme failed to mention how much she owes to her experience as a player in the Blogstead soap opera.

And finally … we marked this week five years since our arrival here. That’s both a short time and a long time, if you know what I mean. What seems strangest in retrospect is the fact that it never really occurred to me that it wouldn’t work out. Must be something vocational about that, I suppose.

Well it’s good to be back. I felt that I went straight from the Oxford high table to the breakfast muffin at Birmingham Airport.

Anyway, I was reading ‘The Starfish and the Spider – the unstoppable power of leaderless organisations’ while I was away. Spiders don’t function if you lop bits off or disable their central brain – starfish don’t have a central system at all. It’s on the reading list for the College for Bishops – I’m doing another week of training in May with the most recent three years of bishops of TEC – as a consumer, I hasten to add.

The suggestion is that organisations which don’t have any central organisation or direction – like Alcoholics Anonymous or Skype – energise people at every level. Efforts to stifle simply make them stronger. Organisations with a centralised structure stifle initiative and flexible response – and can be readily disabled. So that’s the Vatican dealt with for a start! But what of the SEC, one wonders?

Well – we are a church of small government compared with many. We have a fair amount of collegiality and collaboration in our DNA. But I find myself of divided mind. I like nothing better than to be surprised by something that happens at the ‘grass roots’ and we are attempting to create a culture which makes that more rather than less likely. But I suppose that an episcopal church recognises the need for a ‘minding’ function – a bit of protecting, a bit of making safe, a bit of creating a space in which all can be heard and alternative possibilities created. But the distance between that and stifling is very small.

Well, I try to get from one end of Canon 4 – the Election of Bishops – to the other. Keen-eyed readers will have seen a re-advertisement seeking nominations in the election for the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles. But I also continue to do the day job – some time ago we put May 15 in the diary for a large Casting the Net diocesan event. When there is snow on the ground, May 15 seems a long time away. But it isn’t. So we are having to do some rapid thinking about it.

Meanwhile I am in Belfast, having been to Dublin today for the funeral of one of Alison’s uncles. This was the delightful Uncle Harold who died on Tuesday, having driven himself over for lunch with his daughter. He always carried a measuring tape in his pocket just in case.

Then it’s home tomorrow. Oxford on Sunday to preach a Ladyday University Sermon in Oriel, my old College. I’m being met by a retired priest from Oxford with whom I did a placement 35 years ago. Then back to Edinburgh on Monday morning for two days of Faith and Order Board and the Mission and Ministry Board – where we hope to pick up on the outcomes of the Consultation on Mission and Ministry Policy for the SEC which we ran last week.

Vocation?