Bible translations personified

I love spending time with Blackpool School of Arts CU: they're an exemplary small CU with a real heart for godliness and evangelism.

However, one of the more random things they have assembled is a selection of bizarre icebreakers. Here's the one from Friday: if each translation of the Bible had to be personified by a celebrity, who would each translation be?

Here's the ideas we came up with:

KJV: Brian Blessed
Message: Mike Skinner
ESV: John Humphreys
CEV: Ben Shepherd
NLT: Myleene Klass
NIV: Philip Schofield
TNIV: Declan Donnelly
GNB: Lorraine Kelly
Amplified: Geri Halliwell

Anyone got any other ideas?

Falling apart and being made new

Nathan I have just returned from a CU meeting at Blackpool School of Art & Design, the CU which was only started earlier this year.

Blackpool is quite a place. It's struggling not to live on bygone glory, and it's quite hard to see how the run-down parts of the city will improve in the near future. A lot of what's left in Blackpool is either quite-run down or aiming to appeal at the budget market. We were quite tickled by the GR8 Hotel (pictured), across from which we parked earlier (Nathan accurately put it that this was just the kind of name for a hotel that your 12 year old sister might come up with!).

It was quite a contrast to look at Mark 1-2 with the fledgling CU there: Sam, Dave, Jamie & Tom. Whilst the whole of creation is in bondage to decay (including our own bodies, and the bodies of the leper and the paralysed man), we worship a saviour who has dealt with the root cause of that decay - our sin - and look forward to a day when he makes everything new.

Blackpool School of Art and Design CU

Today I met with Sam, a Christian at Blackpool School of Art and Design, who is planning to set up a CU there in September.

I found this meeting exciting for a whole number of reasons. One of them is that until a couple of weeks ago, I never even realised that there was a degree-level Art College there. Another is the timing: if I'd received a request to help support a CU there before this year there's no way I could have done it. But with the arrival of Adam as Cumbria staff worker, there's now extra time to help. Sam's own story of coming to faith and God's work in his since was exciting. And, perhaps most excitingly of all, he was really keen to be part of the FREE Gospel Project, and even reckons that there's a good chance that all 400 students at his college could be offered a copy of Mark's Gospel. All in all, I came away really celebrating God's sovereignty.