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Fancy Walking Down a Building?

abseil1

Do you fancy enjoying a unique view of Exeter?

Do you like the idea of looking like Santa?

Do you want to help make a difference this Christmas?

Well, an opportunity has opened up for you to take in the beautiful sights of The River Exe in Exeter, Devon from 100ft up. Join dozens of Santas on Saturday 8th December as they abseil down the @Renslade offices in aid of helping Exeter YMCA tackle youth homelessness across Devon.

So. Are you up for helping to tackle youth homelessness in Exeter, while having a good laugh at the same time? Check out the Exeter YMCA website for more information.

ALSO, The Church Sofa Lads have decided to help out by doing the MAN thing and… deciding to sit back and watch “Mrs Sofa” (aka Anne) as she abseils down what to be honest… is a massive building. I’m sure if will encourage her more then we ever would if you could sponsor her over at her Just Giving page. Obviously if you wanted to keep her company on the jouney down, I’m sure that would also be amazing if you also signed up!

See you there?

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Martin Smith shares his sofa choices

So I recently got back from the 2011 Worship Central Conference, while I was there I learnt many things. Including that one of the worship leaders from my church is even crazier than I had previously thought and some pretty interesting stuff about social media thanks to Vicky Beeching.

However most interestingly this is what I discovered when I ran into Martin Smith…

Martin Smith Church Sofa from Andy Hood on Vimeo.

Do any of you have a favourite sofa?

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Church Sofa Reflection #3: When I nearly died

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ok so I probably didn’t nearly die, but I got your attention right?

Anyway last week I went for a holiday with some friends in the Lake District in the North of England. We spent the week climbing mountains and swimming in the lakes and enjoying open fires and great company. One day we decided to climb Scaffell Pike, the highest mountain in England. The way up was tough, it’s a long way up and the route we took included near enough vertical climbs and several times when we thought we could see the top only to get there and see we still had several hundred vertical metres to cover.

Anyway eventually we got to the top as you can see in the picture at the top. The mountain was covered in mist and it looked pretty crazy but I was enjoying being at the top, that meant we didn’t have to go up any further and was one of the few places in the lake district you can get a phone signal.

Well us being us we decided that it would be best to take an ‘interesting’ route down which meant not the obvious, easy, tourist path. We took our bearing and started following it and eventually found the path we thought we were meant to be on. We pressed on for a couple of hours going down scree slopes, passing mountain rescue points and eventually coming down towards a valley. For anyone who doesn’t know, a scree slope is generally a steep slope covered in large amount of small stones, often made entirely of that, which fall away without much encouragement. By this point I’d given up climbing down the scree and was going down the nice steep wet grass at which point I slipped, slid down several metres and dislocated my shoulder. It wasn’t long after this that a few of us started expressing doubts about if we were on the right path as the direction we were headed wasn’t quite where we were expecting to be according to the route marked on the map. We pressed on anyway assuming we were on the right path and just either not as far along or further along than we thought, this seemed like a good approach until the patch seemed to come to an end and we were presented with a near vertical drop to the bottom of the mountain covering probably about 30 or 40 feet. It was at this point we knew for certain we weren’t on the right path.

Continue reading “Church Sofa Reflection #3: When I nearly died”