In our worship, is variety the spice of life or does consistency build community? Where do we strike the balance between the two?

As a minister in the Church of England, I have a wide variety of authorised liturgy available to me to use while remaining within a consistent shape and pattern of worship. As a leader in the Church of God, I have a duty to help his people engage with him in corporate and collective worship by making it both familiar enough to connect with and sufficiently fresh as to not grow stale (see the connection between freshness and a lack of staleness).

It's never an easy balance to strike, especially as there is the added layer of working in a multimedia world with an increasingly media-literate population (and indeed, those of the emerging generations for whom a rich diet of media is expected) - the temptation to use cool new worship resources for the sake of it or to satisfy one's own taste is strong. Undoubtedly, employing a variety of media in worship can help keep worship fresh while maintaining consistency - I saw a fantastic way of presenting the Eucharistic prayer at college last week, an audio-visual presentation to accompany the president in place of simply projecting the words or the words with a static image (inevitably, normally, of bread and wine) onto the wall or screen.

There is a real air of permission-giving the Church of England, the sheer number of alt.worship groups is evidence of this. This may well be in part down to the fact that a lot of alt.worship is profoundly liturgical. Where our history is not only recognised but honoured, it is easier to give permission for the expression of worship to be changed, updated or adapted.

I hope that in Bursledon, we are moving towards striking this balance well. Our Conversations service (which will soon see a tweaking of style) and our 1662 Communion (as well as the various other services we run) show that there are a number of points within the cloud where we reside. I use the word cloud rather than continuum or the more ecclesiastical candle because I don't think that worship shows a linear move from liturgical to experimental or catholic to evangelical but rather it's a cloud with three (or more) dimensions in which people move.

So, variety or consistency? It's a balance, we can have - and indeed need - both. We need to keep worship fresh while also remaining grounded. We move towards the future while honouring and being nourished by the past.

Until the people of the USA go to the polls and it's looking like it might be a landslide for Obama. People ask me (they really do) how I think it's going to go and for a long time (even back when the polls were showing a roughly tied electoral college) I've been predicting an Obama win in the region of 100 electoral college votes. The polls are now showing more than that - getting towards the region of a 200 point gap. With each debate being adjudged to have been won by the democrat candidate (both the presidential candidate and the VP candidate), the gap just seems to show a widening trend (see the trend here) and with enough states already polling outside the margin of error for Obama to give him the 270 votes he needs, it's his election to lose now.

Bush states polling for Obama currently include (electoral college votes and %age of 2004 vote that went to Bush in brackets in each case) FL (27, 52%); IA (7, 50%); MO (11, 53%); OH (20, 51%); VA (13, 54%).

The weekend before last, I was at the IME Residential which was led by Jonny Baker. A really interesting time thinking about creativity in a post-modern context. One of those times whose value was not in the new information imparted - for me there wasn't much - but in knowing that Jonny had been approved by the diocese to come and talk about this stuff (alt worship, creativity, grasping the culture of the day without being controlled by it...) which was totally speaking my language. Fantastic. Jonny, incidentally, is a member of Grace, an alternative worship community based at St Mary's, Ealing.

After that, I had a night at home before heading up to Nottingham to spend a week at college doing the Introduction to Theological Method, kicking off my MA. It was a fab week - my mind was really stretched which anyone who knows me knows I value enormously. I also managed to catch up with a few people and to go play in the £10 Hold'em tournament at the Circus Casino in Nottingham. I was doing well - above average stack with over half the field eliminated when with me in the BB, the button raised. I could tell he was trying to steal the blinds and after the SB folded, I checked my cards, seeing AhQd. I had him covered and so I pushed, which of course would put him all-in. Incredibly, after correctly naming my hand ("a strong Ace" he said), he made the call and flipped over 9c8s! The flop didn't help him but a 9 came on the turn. I didn't improve on the river and I was left crippled. We were playing 6-handed at that point and so the blinds got back round towards me very quickly and I was card-dead. Had a great night though.

Speaking of poker, the London leg of the fifth European Poker Tour happened last week. I was keeping up with the action via the PokerStars blog and this entry made me laugh.