Dan Kingsley .com

Hey! I really can’t believe how quickly time goes. A lot has happened since my last update, so hopefully I will try and summarise what’s been going on. I have now been at CAP just less than 3months and it is still as amazing as ever

So lets start where I left off last time…

Everyone who agreed to sign up to give £1 (or more) to CAP on a monthly basis, I’d just like to say a massive thank you… I won the competition, with 20 people signing up to give. This is seriously amazing. Every single pound that CAP gets, we promise that we will take it and use it to help the poor and needy in this nation. CAP is currently on the way of reaching 10,000 people giving on a monthly basis – how exciting is that – we hope to reach this target by the middle of next week! A client said:

“I felt shame and embarrassment, my health was suffering and I was spending sleepless nights worrying. I can now face the future with clarity and confidence – thanks to CAP, I am free to enjoy and celebrate Christmas with my family and friends and can look forward to a new year knowing I have their support until I am totally debt free.”

How cool is that?

OK, so what have I actually been doing since then. Well the majority of my work over the past month or so has been communicating with churches and supporters who are interested in running a CAP Sunday.

A CAP Sunday can be anything from just showing the short 7min DVD, or devoting the whole service to CAP. I will hopefully post the DVD here at some point so that you can see it, but currently it’s not available online, the following though is a clients testimony from the DVD:

So my job has been co-ordinating this over the past month or so. It has been really exciting to see that we have generated over 900 enquiries, with over 350 of these already confirmed to run a CAP Sunday. We set a recommended date of the 22nd November, but many churches are doing it with the next few weeks as well, it has been pretty cool to here the stories coming in from from last weekend.

A couple of weekends ago, CAP had a couple of big events down in London. We had a fundraising dinner at Lords Cricket ground. This was just outstanding, it was such a crazy day. We raised about £149,000 – it was so exciting to just see that money come in at the end of the evening. We had about 400 people at the event (I think, although I can’t totally remember). Here are a couple of photos from the event, it seriously looked amazing! (more can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/christiansagainstpoverty/)

OK since then, things at CAP have continued to be very exciting! More and more are becoming Christians, it does seem that we are having more than 1 salvation every day which just shows how amazing God is, and how he is using this work. I heard a story the other day where a client had been living in his car since his house had got repossessed, but since he started working with us, he has managed to get somewhere to live, food to eat and a budget that has allowed him to start saving for the future, but even more amazing he has come to know Jesus through this awful situation – Praise God!

I have recently been working with churches, building relationships with church leaders and organising talks at their churches from CAP’s great trained team of speakers.

Please keep praying for the work of CAP, for our clients, for the staff and for the vision we have for 2010! Also please pray for me that I continue to work to the best of my ability, that I have the right words when in conversation with churches and that I can continue to push myself.

Thanks for reading / watching this pretty big update, I hope it has inspired you / updated you about the kind of things I have been up to!

Hey guys!

I thought I would give another quick update since I have now been working at CAP for a whole month – how strange is that! It has been an amazing month. So much has happened, and my faith has been stretched way past what I could ever have imagined! Below is a short(ish) video that CAP produced last year with some client testimonies etc, and I think it really shows and sums up the work that we do.

There always seems to be so much going on, with people stepping out with huge amounts of faith on a daily basis! We have just recently re-focused our vision – now praying that there will be a CAP centre in every town and city within the next 5 years. That means we need to open something like 650 centres in 5 years! To put that in prospective, CAP has been going 13 years and we have only opened just over 100! We really do believe that God will allow this to happen!

If you are the kind of person who likes to pray, please pray for me, that I will continue to settle into my role at CAP, that I continue to seek God in everything that I am doing, even the things that seem straightforward, and also that I continue to learn more and continue to stretch my faith to new levels!

This week at CAP, everyone who is working has been given the challenge of trying to get people to give to CAP on a monthly basis. I thought it might not hurt to ask you guys (I did mention it in my last update a little bit, but this time I’m asking properly, and I promise I won’t keep pestering you every time I update!)… If any of you would consider giving even a small amount (I know most of you are students or people with nearly no money at all, but £2 a month is only £24 a year and you can always cancel it if you can’t afford to carry on paying it) – something like £2 a month really does help clients get the support and debt advice that they need! And to give you another reason, it helps me – your monthly donation will be multiplied by 12 and taken off my crazy £2000 target And yet another reason, for every person that lets me know they want to do this, I may just buy them a big bar of chocolate (or maybe even something better) and yes I know that is bribery – but who cares, the money is going to help the poor and needy! Common guys – plus I want to win the competition. Just send me an email / text / phone call / any other method of communication, and I will love you lots and lots!!

Cheers guys, speak to you all soon,

Dan x

Wow! This time just over 2 weeks ago, I was still living in Chester and hadn’t started work at Christians Against Poverty, so as you may be able to guess it has been a pretty busy couple of weeks! But thank God it has been an amazing time

Hopefully some of you will be receiving an email to let you know that I have posted this – I added a couple of you since I thought you might like to get updated – feel free to let me know if you don’t want to though! If you are reading this through facebook then you can subscribe on my website at http://www.dankingsley.com and then signing up on the right, or below:

Your email:

 

So firstly the move to Bradford. I moved to Bradford on Thursday the 3rd September into a house provided by CAP since I was doing their Internship. The house is located just north of Bradford in quite a nice area There are now four of us living in the house, myself, Dave, Debs and Ruth. The house itself and my housemates are all pretty amazing and we seem to all get on reasonably well So if you are reading this and you know me (I guess there will be some randoms out there who don’t know me…) then please feel free to come and visit me and see the wonderful* city of Bradford.

Right, the more important part, CAP! I started just over a week ago, on Monday 7th September. We were told to arrive at work at 8.40, and by 8.45 all of the CAP HQ staff (about 150 at the moment) were in the basement of the building worshipping God. What an amazing way to start a week; and for the 25 of us who were new, a new job! Every Monday morning we all meet together for a time of worship, and then every other morning we meet for prayer. God is truly the centre of this organisation!

So, in case you don’t know, I’ll explain as quickly and as well as I can what CAP do, and then I’ll say what I do. Hopefully you’ll then get a better understanding when I start talking about things!

CAP is a national debt counselling charity working through a network of centres based in local churches. It offers hope and a solution to anyone in debt by creating a repayment plan for the client and then liaising with creditors to decrease or stop interest rates on the clients debts. The repayment plan always makes sure that the client has enough money for food, clothes and their family. The centres around the UK that are run by the local church support and encourage the client throughout the time that they are with CAP, and most clients will be debt free within 5 years. CAP shows God’s love in action by providing sustainable poverty relief through debt counselling, advice and practical help. CAP’s unique ‘hands on’ approach empowers people to help themselves out of poverty and be released from the fear, oppression and worry generated by overwhelming debts. CAP provides sustainable poverty relief as its service teaches clients vital budgeting skills that will last a lifetime. What an amazing thing to be apart of

You can get a FREE copy of John Kirkby’s book which explains even more about CAP and how it started by clicking on the picture above – it seriously is a good read if you want to find out more – or ask me! lol.

As I’m sure you all know I am doing an internship with CAP. This involves working for the charity about 4days a week, and then every Wednesday we have our internship day where we get teaching, management and leadership training, and tons of other stuff (which I will find out about along the way). I am working within the Partnership department building networks between churches and CAP, organising events to raise money for CAP and lots of other stuff. It is a really exciting department to work in, and without it there wouldn’t be connections with churches or money to fund the charity (within reason!). CAP gets no government funding at all, and relies on one-off donations and regular monthly payments to run (it needs something like £150,000 a month!) CAP has total faith in God that this money will be provided each month, but at the start of each month there is never enough money! God is good!

Sorry this is a very information based update, but I thought it would be good to give you guys some sort of outline of CAP first so that when I update in the future you know roughly what is happening! But please give me a ring if you want to know more

Just a small sideline here… All of the interns have a target of £2000 to raise while they are doing their internship (of which I have already raised about £900), so if at any point you feel like you want to give something to CAP then please please do! Either go to my justgiving page – http://www.justgiving.com/dankingsley, or stick a cheque in the post to my for Christians Against Poverty. Or if you fancy giving on a monthly basis (that would be totally amazing) let me know and I can give you a call to sort it out – even giving £2 a month will help people who are in need!

Thanks for reading this long update… hope it makes some sense and now have a better idea of what I’m doing. Hopefully speak to you all soon

Dan xx

*well wonderful might be a step too far, but its generally a lot nicer than the impression I was givin – and yep they do have some amazing curry’s!

Hey, I have added an option to subscribe to my CAP specific updates by entering your email address on the top right of my homepage. Please do this and it should keep you updated with what I am up to over the next year!

I have now finished my time at the University of York. I graduated last week with a 2:2 in Electronic Engineering – which I’m very happy with.

The past three years have probably been the best few years of my life… so far. I have made many friendships which I hope will last for a lifetime (and beyond), I have learnt a lot, grown in my faith in ways that I couldn’t have imagined when I first arrived at York, and generally just had an amazing time!

Thank you to everyone who has helped me make the last three years so special, be that my housemates, my course friends, friends from the CU, or even my supervisors! Thank you!

Starting in September, I will be moving to Bradford, and starting an internship with Christians Against Poverty (CAP). I am hoping that I will use this blog to update how that is going – and other things, so please keep checking back if you want to know what I’m up to

Just a quick post to say that I have spent the last couple of days creating a new website for James College Christian Union.

When doing this I decided that it needed to be as simple and clear as possible, while still clear and good looking!

I did this by using using div’s and then animating them to appear and hide.

Check the website out at http://www.james.uycu.org.uk

Just a quick update to say my abseil last weekend went really well. Thank you to everyone who sponsored me! So far I have rasied a massive £862 for Christians Agaisnt Poverty. You are still able to sponsor me now if you want – http://www.justgiving.com/dankingsley

Photos from the day can be found within my photos – the link is at the top.

The day worked out really well, it didn’t rain that much (apart from at the start), so I managed to do my abseil without getting wet – bonus! It was also cool to chat to some people who are currently working for CAP since I start my internship with them in September.

I’ve just watched a video from the Google I/O demonstrating a brand new, seriously amazing product!

They started off by describing it as: “Email if it was created today!” Basically email is just an electronic version of normal mail, and is really quite a way behind current Internet technology, so Google has decided to put an end to that and create a new platform that works from within the browser and will change the way we think about online communication!

Google wave allows for so much more than what you can imagine! I may well update this post at some point next week with a bit more info about it, but for now, I recommend watching the following video (if you have an hour or so) to find out lots more:

Simply, the following is what Google Wave allows you to do, plus a lot more I’m sure!

• Google wave works a lot like email and instant messaging type services, allowing users to send each other messages and reply instantly or at a later date. The advantage of google wave over such services though, is that you can edit not only your messages, but the messages of anybody within your wave. This works in the same way a wiki would work. This allows you to edit somebody’s spelling mistakes for example, but more usefully it allows you to build on what somebody may have written.
• Another cool feature is something called playback. It allows you to invite somebody new into your current conversation, and that person is able to look back over your conversation. They can see when edits were made and by who. This feature is very useful if you just forgot to send the original message to somebody and they need to find out what and when things were said.
• Google wave is able to have extensions made for it, allowing you to near enough do anything. A twitter extension has already been made allowing you to view your twitter feed from within google wave as well as send a new tweet. The chances are once Google wave is released there will be extensions allowing you to view normal email, facebook and many other social sites and I’m sure much much more as well!

These are just a couple of the cool features available, watch the above video for more!

Since I got back from Spring Harvest I must have been asked the question: “Do you know anything about Spring Harvest and Word Alive, and what happened?” My answer to that question 4 weeks ago was… “yeah I think it was something to do with Steve Chalke saying something in a book about something that Word Alive didn’t like.” The most unhelpful answer ever! This topic is pretty old since the split happened back in 2007, but I thought since lots of people have asked recently, I would write something quickly on it.

OK, I realise a lot of you how read this blog probably don’t know anything about this, or just couldn’t care less! Fair enough, you might learn something if you keep reading… or just stop reading now

For people who are interested, and don’t know much about this topic. Spring Harvest is an inter-denominational Christian conference which happens over Easter over 3 weeks in both Skegness and Butlins (normally, weeks sometimes vary) which attracts about 55,000 people. Word Alive was a large student Christian conference held the week before (normally) the first week of Spring Harvest at Skegness. It was jointly organised by Spring Harvest, UCCF and the Keswick Convention. Word Alive normally attracted about 2000 people. So far no problems! In 2007, it was announced that Word Alive would be relaunched (as New Word Alive), to be held in Pwllheli rather than Skegness, and would no longer be part of Spring harvest. Now this is when people ask why?!

The simple answer (that both sides agree on) is that disagreements over Spring Harvest leadership team member Steve Chalke’s view of the atonement played at least some part in the split. That’s slightly clearer than my waffle of a statement I first came up with. There is no way I can go into this topic in massive amounts of detail, or really explain properly why Chalke disagrees with Penal Substitutiary Atonement, but I will do my best to give you a basis to find out more if you choose.

OK firstly, what is Penal Substitutiary Atonement:

Penal substitution is a theory of the atonement (how God can forgive our sins), especially associated with the Reformed tradition. It argues that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished (penalised) in the place of sinners (substitution), therefore satisfying the demands of justice so God can justly forgive the sins.

The debate all started when Chalke compared  God’s act of punishing Jesus in our place to a “cosmic child abuser”, in his book, The Lost Message of Jesus.

Steve Chalke has since come to confirm his view on penal substitution. In the recent book, The Atonement Debate. He says:

“Though the sheer bluntness of my imagery shocked some, I contend that, in truth, it represents nothing more than a stark unmasking of what I understand to be the violent, pre-Christian thinking behind the popular theory of penal substitutionary atonement. Thus, whilst having great respect for many of those who hold what, I readily concede, is currently regarded as orthodoxy within modern evangelicalism, I will attempt to set out through this essay why I believe it to be biblically, culturally, and pastorally deficient and even dangerous.”

Back to the split between Spring Harvest and Word Alive, UCCF said the following:

“Steve Chalke has made his dislike of penal substitution very clear by likening God’s act of punishing Jesus in our place to a cosmic child abuser. In good conscience, we simply could not allow Steve to teach during the Word Alive week. We’re very sad that after 14 years of fruitful ministry, Spring Harvest has decided to end the Word Alive partnership because we feel unable to shift on this position.”

It is interesting to note here, that it was Spring Harvest that initiated the split, not Word Alive, but it was Word Alive who refused to allow Chalke to speak during their conference.

For a bit more information on Chalke’s view check out Adrian Warnock’s site here where he has multiple posts with Chalke’s view on the topic.

OK, so I’m not going to go into a massive debate about whether Chalke is right or wrong because it would make this post even longer, and I’m by no means informed enough. But my view on Penal Substitution is pretty strong, and I do believe that we all deserve punishment for our sins, and that Jesus did die in substitution for us, and therefore allowing us to have our sins forgiven! (i.e. I disagree with Chalke). I might write a post at some point explaining and backing up why I actually believe this, but I’ll save that for another day. I would also like to say though, that I do still highly rate Chalke as a Bible teacher, but I believe he is doing an amazing job in this country with all the work that he is doing, but for him to disagree on such a core doctrine really surprises me!

I’m not going to lie, I nicked some of the general info about spring harvest, word alive, and penal substitution from Wikipedia.

I’m well aware of my lack of updates recently. I started off well when I re-launched my website, and have since gone down hill rapidly! This has been due to my 5 exams a couple of weeks ago, and now, my 30,000(ish) project which I need to get done within the next month or so. If your interested in my project, keep an eye out on www.elec.dankingsley.com.

This post is mainly to say though, that once I have finished all my work, and graduated from Uni, I will hopefully have lots more time over the summer period where I should be able to help out with some website/graphic design again. I have already got a couple lined up, and so I just thought I would mention this now so people have advance warning! Just head over to the contact page and get in touch! My bulk of time will be from July to September, but should also be able to keep up some continuous work (which I can probably do in the evenings) from then on.