Don't be a Dummy!

Greetings from the windy north coast of Donegal! Team RnB are spending the weekend up here in a seafront caravan to spend a bit of time together as a team, getting ready for outreach (exactly one month away…)

Here’s a picture of our DTS students who will be going to Rwanda and Burundi, from left to right, Alison, Meg, Rowan, Kellen & Lindsey:


Every few weeks I meet with a guy called Richard to chat and pray. This is something I’ve been doing for about a year now, but back in autumn when I started back with YWAM I started to neglect and stop doing. I really felt the effects of not having this accountable and prayerful relationship, and so about a month ago, we started intentionally meeting up again.

Something that I really appreciate about our time is the closeness to God in prayer I feel when we pray together. Have you ever had an experience of prayer when you can just very quickly feel the presence of God, tangibly taste and feel Him in the room? Well, it seems that this happens when we pray, and I always come away feeling refreshed and ready to face another busy week in YWAM Belfast, knowing that there is someone faithful and prayerful behind me and interceding for me.

When I was over at his house the other night, I think I was coming with a lot of baggage, there was a lot swimming around in my head, a lot going on inside, and so I wasn’t really feeling in that prayerful a mood. We talked for a while, and then we started to pray. Immediately I felt the presence of God, and then as we prayed, God gave me a picture of something that really impacted me.

I saw myself sitting on a chair on a stage. In my arms was a ventriloquist dummy, and through this dummy I was speaking to the people around me. I was using this dummy as my method of communicating with the world around me.

I thought about this vision, and started to pray into it, and God just opened the meaning of it up to me

I’ve just been very challenged by the idea of what image I present of myself to the world. Am I presenting this idea of “Tom Tate: Super Person”? I think it’s easy for me to outwardly seem very sorted, to have this appearance of being all nicely sorted out, and yet on the inside to feel completely the opposite!

Jesus had something to say about this where it talks about the two-faced nature of the Pharisees:

“You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people's bones and all uncleanness.”
Matthew 23: 26-7

As the leaders of the people, the Pharisees were putting on this façade of perfection, and yet their insides didn’t reflect the outside at all, quite the opposite.

I’ve been challenged in my own leadership in not putting on this façade myself of sorted-ness, of perfection, because, the truth is (not that this is going to come as a shock to any of you…) I’m not perfect…not even close! None of us are, and yet, one of the hardest things for us to do is to admit our faults or our mistakes in front of one another. We don’t want to be perceived as weak or faulty.

This is particularly a problem I see in the Christian world. On a Sunday morning we come to church with smiles on our faces, and all pretend like we’re doing great, like the problems of the world don’t faze us, because we’re Christians! We like to think that we’re somehow immune to the things that non-Christians struggle with… Sorry friends, but this just isn’t true!

This is one of the reasons that ‘broken’ people struggle to come into the church, or are so wary of Christians. We scare them away with our “perfect” exterior, they think they can’t join us because they don’t have this idyllic life so many of us show to the world. If only they knew that most of the time, underneath this perfect exterior on show to the congregation on a Sunday morning is a soul broken just as much as their own.

This picture of the ventriloquist and his dummy has confronted me. It’s challenged me to not filter my words and my actions through my brain, thinking “how is this going to make me look?” because, you know what, this is just my pride, my worry about how people are going to see me and not wanting to look bad. Instead therefore, the challenge for myself is to live in this attitude of humility, acting out of my faith and my relationship with God, not this pride and attitude of self-promotion.

The author and apostle Peter has the following to say about this:

“Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”
1 Peter 5:5

We are called to cover ourselves with humility, like our very clothing. The humility that we walk in should be as obvious as the jumper I’m wearing right now.

I’d much rather be known this God-given humility than any of these pride-induced fantasy exteriors I project to the world.

Meet the Students!

So, i know that some of you may wonder if these students of mine actually exist? I keep talking about them and posting these pictures of random people... well, for your information (and entertainment!) here's a little video of our 12 fantastic students in their natural environment....

Mid-lecture phase Outreach

Last week, as you may or may not have known, we spent four days in the West of Northern Ireland in Londonderry/Derry. Amazingly I had never actually been here before, and for some reason, wasn’t really expecting much of it. I was therefore surprised to find myself falling a little bit in love with this small city.

Everywhere we went, I seemed to enjoy the atmosphere, the surroundings and enjoy the people that we met and the ministries that we were involved in helping out with.

It was a week with a lot of stories that could be told, but maybe I’ll just share the one with you!

We were working in this community centre that’s been up and running for about 35 years, and they were having a visit from a government minister the following week (today, as I write this actually!) and so, we were just helping out to get the place looking good again, washing windows, floors, and even walls! To be honest, it didn’t feel like we were doing much in the place! We were just there to try and serve a bit in the community, but the lady who was in charge of the centre couldn’t get over the fact that these 17 people were willing to give their time to help her out for free (or at least, for some ham sandwiches at lunch time!). She watched us for these two days with an odd look of delight and confusion.
At the end of our time there, we were all just sitting around, and Erin asked if we could pray for her. She agreed, and so we proceeded to pray.

We finished and when we opened our eyes, she started to cry and said “The work you’ve done has been great, but I have never had an experience like that before”. Now, I’m not sure where she’s at with God, I don’t know what she would call herself, a Christian or not, but I think that the exciting thing in that moment was that God was clearly moving in her.

And THAT is what makes all that cleaning worthwhile.

Here’s a few photos of our time:

The view that greeted us when we arrived..there’s not much better!



The team enjoying the aforementioned ham sandwiches:




And finally, I leave you with a picture of the bedroom where the boys slept! Thank you St. Augustine’s church for a magical nights sleep!

Rent "Rent"...

Last night, I finally got around to something I’ve been meaning to do for a good while. You may not know, but I have a minor (and I say “minor”, but mean fairly major…) love of musicals. So, I took a night to watch the movie “Rent”. It finished in the wee hours of this morning, and yet, since then, I haven’t been able to shake it off me.


In case you don’t know what this stage-musical-turned-movie is about, it’s the story of a year in the life of 8 friends at the end of the 1980’s in New York. There are many issues that this film deals with, we see them struggling with addiction, death, sex, drugs, disease, relationships and more, all in the space of 525, 600 minutes…

The thing that strikes me is that this is a world that is so far removed from my own, and probably from most of you that are reading this right now. You might be thinking “Thank goodness!” and I suppose in some ways, I’m thinking that too… And yet, the picture that keeps coming back to me is an image of Jesus, this Jesus who we assume we know, a Jesus whom we think fits into this neatly packaged box we have created for Him, and this Jesus I see is sitting somewhere that I wouldn’t expect. The Jesus of the Bible, the true Jesus who we are encouraged to pretend didn’t exist more often than not, is a Jesus who sat with the tax-collectors, the leprous, the prostitutes, the outcasts and the despised.

These are the people Jesus spent His time with. And, I’m pretty sure as I watched Rent last night that, were Jesus here today, those people who were on the screen were the ones He would be sitting with. The drunk, the addicted, the HIV+.

There’s a whole world out there that we from our pedestals call “the marginalised”, literally millions, if not billions of people living with these questions on their lips:

“Will I lose my dignity,
Will someone care?
Will I wake tomorrow
From this nightmare?”

“Will I” From Rent
(watch it on http://youtube.com/watch?v=2FKJhKwDaTQ I’d advise it! Great song…)

The challenge? As the family of God, our job isn’t to sit in our churches, Bible colleges and houses and read about the love of God, to theorize about what it means to be “Jesus with skin on”. The challenge for us is to DO it. To take this message of the love of Jesus to these “marginalised”, because, the truth is, in Jesus’ eyes, there’s no such thing as an “outsider”.

While not what I would call an “easy watch” by any means, if you feel like you need to be inspired to see this world through some different eyes, I’d advise a viewing of this movie. Give me a call and I’d be glad to watch it with you.

A few pictures...

The DTS has been going great, we’re winding up to head away on outreach in about 7 weeks! It’s coming up quickly! Here’s a few photos from the last few months….

A few pictures from a retreat we took at the start of January to Bushmills on the north coast with a few other year out programs:



Some pictures from my birthday dinner:




And finally, a few shots from a recent fancy dress party we had:



You'll also be impressed to know that I won the limbo competition...that's right all 6' 4'' of me... I was as suprised as anyone! Note the shock on Erin's face behind me in this next picture! Oh yeah....i went to the party as a picnic...in case you couldn't tell....

A Retraction...

Am I allowed to do this? Days after writing that last blog entry, I was asked to put together a talk on something that was pretty close to my thinking and heart at the time. The title of the talk was:

“Disciples & Ambassadors: In & Out of Season”

While putting this talk together, I realised that a lot of the stuff I said in that last blog, I don’t necessarily agree with anymore. The biggest thing that struck me is that I really don’t think there is this mysterious question of “What can I do differently?” Sure, I’m sure there’s something that I’m doing that I could be doing better, but the point seems to be that I was looking for an easy way out. A way to “do” spirituality that was easy for me, and really made me want to engage all the time, a way that was never difficult or found me struggling from time to time.

I think in this time of preparation for this talk I realised something, and it’s something I think I’ve always known, but have also always struggled with! The Christian walk is not an easy one. It’s not one in which we can wander through life on this perpetual cloud of happiness, always feeling like we’re on top of the world, and if I try to make it this, then I’m pulling the wool over my eyes.

I think the challenge for me right now is to figure out how to have a good relationship with God all the time, whether I’m in one of these good seasons and times of my life, or in the middle of a bad one.

I distinctly remember a few times over the last six or seven years when I just couldn’t get inspired to read the Bible. I’d go into town and into one or the other Christian bookshops and see a new Bible, in a different cover, whether it had some cool new name or a shiny metallic cover. I would think to myself, “If I had THAT Bible, I would read it every day!” I was thinking that I’d be so inspired to read it because it looked cool. But the thing was that I would get home, and a few days later, the book that had seemed so new and exciting had now just become normal, my “new Bible” had just become one of a growing collection sitting in a pile gathering dust.

So where am I going with this? I think it all comes down to the fact of what do I value? More than anything I value relationship with God. But the sad truth is that I am a human being, made of flesh, and the flesh that I inhabit on this earth struggles sometimes with what my spirit longs to be doing.

There are no easy answers here. There’s no magical way I can click my fingers and suddenly find the perfect way to have relationship with God. Rather, it’s going to take perseverance, commitment and dedication to this goal. The very least I can say about this is that I’m willing to give it a go.



You should also know that I went bowling with the youth group I help out at the other night. While we were there, I realised that this “new” way of bowling I told you about last time wasn’t all that great after all. I think I was happier (if not a little bit better) in my ignorance of the past 23 years!

Ten-pin bowling...with a lesson

A fellow YWAM staffer on the base here, Ramy, and I, can quite often be found in ‘Glengormley Superbowl’ on a Monday or Tuesday, when they have a “two for one” bowling offer on those days. It’s a good time of getting away for night out, and a chance to talk through our weeks and what’s going on in our lives.

This past week opened my eyes to something I did not know.

Apparently for the last 22 (nearly 23 for anyone who’s counting ☺) years of my life, I have been bowling the wrong way! I have always wondered how people manage to get so much power behind the bowling ball, and always blamed my lack of dedication to an upper body weights routine! But, I realised this week it’s because I have been bowling (try to imagine this…) throwing the ball with the back of my hand pointed towards the pins, instead of my palm facing upwards after I let go of the ball.

Hopefully that makes sense. But if not, it doesn’t really matter! Long story short, I’ve been bowling wrong, and there’s a much better way to do it! I discovered a way that seems to work a lot better, a way that provides me with a lot better chance of getting rid of those pesky pins.

In the same way, I’ve realised that I’m on a bit of a hunt for a new way of doing “relationship” with God. For a lot of my life, my relationship with God has been, for lack of a better word, “cyclical”. I am generally hot or cold in my interaction with our creator, either finding it hard to escape from his presence and the knowledge that he is closer than the air around us, or else, finding it hard to imagine he’s there at all.

I’m not sure why this is, but I know that this isn’t the way God intended His relationship with us to be. One thing I know for sure is that it doesn’t have anything to do with God, no matter what we do, he doesn’t desert us, or leave us abandoned to ourselves. So that leaves me to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the way I’m relating to Him.

What, the question is, can I do differently?

That’s a question I’m not quite able to answer just yet I don’t think! I’m trying to explore God in new ways, discover Him in places I didn’t expect. I think a big part of this journey is seeing God in every aspect of my life. If I try to compartmentalise my life, saying “this is the ‘God’ part and this is ‘my’ bit” then I’m leaving Him out of something pretty serious. God doesn’t want a part of our life, he wants our everything, but this is something that’s pretty easy to say and can be difficult to put into practice!

As for now, I realise that there’s so much more to explore about my relationship with God. I realise I don’t have it sorted, and I doubt (in fact I’m SURE) I won’t have it sorted this side of eternity. But one thing I’m sure about is that there are ways of meeting God that I haven’t explored, and these are the ones I’m interested in. Seeing God in new places and experiencing Him in ways I didn’t think I could!

Here’s to 22 years of bowling like an eejit, and 22 more of discovering that there’s so much more to God than what we see or know now.