For the first three days of this week I will be attending the Eastern Baptist Association’s Ministers’ Conference. I always find it a blessing when I attend these conferences – sometimes as much for the conversations between sessions as for the sessions themselves. This time we have some people I am very much looking forward to hearing God through – Rt Revd Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, and ‘freelance community theologian’ Ann Morisy.

The reason I am telling you this, my dear bloggists, is not to make you jealous or to thumb my nose at you (metaphorically or literally). It is to alert you to the possibility that this week’s bloggerel supply may be different to whatever counts for normal. I don’t intend to be sitting in these sessions blogging away about what is being said. And I don’t know whether there will be opportunities for me to reflect to you what I have received during the course of the conference. Equally it is possible that there may be more opportunities than normal and I may serve you a series of bloggettes on which to snack during the day rather than the larger bloggages that I usually dispense.

This seems like a good moment to restate why it is that I spend time writing this bloggerel and posting it on t’internet. Initially I blogged for entirely selfish reasons: first and foremost because the discipline helps me to reflect on my life and faith. I find that God speaks to me as I write, or that writing down what he has already said to me helps me to understand it more. I also enjoy a laugh, chuckle or occasionally a groan and the bloggages give me an excuse to look for a joke that may be relevant, or to think humorously about something. And, if I am honest, I also find the gentle increase in the numbers of visitors to this blog simultaneously secretly gratifying and slightly bad for my ego in the same way that cream cakes are for the waistline.

All but the last could be carried out in private, of course, through a journal. But I am a man of the 21st century and the cyber world beckoned to me irresistibly. So I started posting online and heard from some of you that occasionally some of my bloggerel has been helpful to you too. For me that’s an added bonus, a blessing, a joy. So I now add to the reasons a more altruistic thought that God may bless someone through what I write, just as he spoke through inanimate objects like a burning bush and spoke through an apparently stubborn and disobedient donkey.

My prayer as I write is that this will not simply be a place where you visit and receive some blessing occasionally, but that it may inspire you to reflect on your own faith and life. You need not post it on a blog, but if you find that my ramblings have inspired you to think about your own relationship with God, or encouraged you to continue to try to be a good free sample of Jesus, then that thought blesses me more than anything.

So thank you for blessing me with your visit.

Be blessed, be a blessing.

How many Baptist Ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Change?

How many Baptist Church Meetings does it take to change a lightbulb? Six – mostly dedicated to talking about how good the old one had been.

How many Youth Ministers does it take to change a lightbulb? Who cares, anyone fancy pizza?

How many young people does it take to change a lightbulb? It wasn’t us, we didn’t break the old one.