Sebastian Faulks: Devil May Care (James Bond) Fun! What I like about it is that it is still set in the 60s during the Cold War, apart from being a cracking good story. Sebastian Faulks is Ian Fleming!
Michael Frost: Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture Just started to read this book, but finding it useful. The book's premise is that Christians live as exiles in a post-Christian Western world and we need to adapt to that mindset to succeed in mission. Interesting read.
Tom Wright: Surprised by Hope A book I am thoroughly enjoying and a surprising read in places, especially with his view on a new creation. Fun.
Simon Ponsonby: More One of my books for Lent which I am currently enjoying reading while travelling on the train to London. Very readable. Very insightful. (****)
John Burke: No Perfect People Allowed: Creating a Come-as-you-are Culture in the Church This guy was at Willow Creek Church before planting a church in Austin, Texas. It is a thoughtful book with lots of anecdotes, making some very powerful points. His approach is very 'Vineyard' - full of grace and mercy, attacking the prejudicial spirit that can often stop people from walking in and staying.
Brenton Brown: Everlasting God The long awaited album by the South African Vineyard worship leader was well worth waiting for. If Matt Redman and Tim Hughes do it for you, then so will this album. (*****)
Vineyard: All from you A good album from the Burn Service at St Alban's Vineyard. Sam Lane's voice gives many of the songs an emotional energy, bringing to life the christian experieince for so many of us. (***)
I have just come across the blog by American pastor Pete Scazzero and loving it. He is senior pastor of New Life Fellowship Church in Queens, New York City, and author of Emotionally Healthy Spiritually (Nelson, 2006) and has a website by the same name.
His latest post includes a great quote by Russian author Leo Tolstoy: "Everybody wants to change the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
He goes on:
"There is only one pathway - the pathway of Jesus. Ronald Rolheiser in The Holy Longing outlines this as the only way to profound transformation. We repeat it over and over again in our walks with Christ.
1. Name your deaths (Good Friday)
2. Claim your births (Easter)
3. Grieve for what you have lost and adjust to the new reality (40 days)
4. Don’t cling to the old. Let old ascend and give you its blessing. (Ascension)
5. Receive the Holy Spirit for the new God has for you. (Pentecost)"
A couple of posts ago I spoke about getting together with other other bloggers in the flesh at Whitfield House, Kennington, London. One of the aims of the day was to consider the social impact of blogging. Thus, the Evangelical Alliance came up with an idea for a set of cyberspace commandments, which we were subsequently invited to add our two penneth worth to:
1. You shall not put your blog before your integrity.
2. You shall not make an idol of your blog.
3. You shall not misuse your screen name by using your anonymity to sin.
4. Remember the Sabbath day by taking one day off a week from your blog.
5. Honour your fellow-bloggers above yourselves and do not give undue significance to their mistakes.
6. You shall not murder someone else’s honour, reputation or feelings.
7. You shall not use the web to commit or permit adultery in your mind.
8. You shall not steal another person’s content.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your fellow-blogger.
10. You shall not covet your neighbour's blog ranking. Be content with your own content.
I guess the one issue I might have with producing a set of 10 commandments for bloggers is that only the compliant will, er, comply. it won't impact the the mischevious or subversive one iota.
The blogosphere's strength is that it is an untamed, yet evolving self-regulating community and, although it can accomodate an ethical sets of guidelines, it has to be formed on its own terms. The 'conversation' has to had together.
But, let's also remember, as Krish Kandiah, Churches in Mission Executive Director, said, it is only meant to be a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, so let's chill and take them just as that.
BTW, Krish, thanks for getting us thinking. Great day!
I am grateful for the tip-off by Ted in our church for this video. Dan Wilt is the Director of the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Church Studies at St Stephen's University in New Brunswick, Canada. He is also a well-respected worship writer and leader in the Vineyard movement, as well as I know much appreciated across other church streams.
His video resources are easy and accessible for all worship leaders who want to cultivate a heart and mind for worship. Anyway, I've said my piece, you be the judge.
This week I have been involved in a healthy discussion with other
Christian bloggers where, alongside other stuff, we looked at a theology of Web
2.0. Nothing unusual in that you may say, until I tell you it was face-to-face!
Shock! Horror! Gasp!
Having maybe picked yourself off the floor and imagining me
relating to real people in the flesh, you may still be slightly cloudy over
what Web 2.0. actually stands for. Allow me to elaborate very quickly.
When we first discovered the joy of websites they were set
up as informational sites.It was where
we went to be told what an organisation or company did.In essence, it was where we found an online
version of a printed document.
Then along came Web 2.0, a wholly new revolutionary form of online
communication. The internet was no longer a monologue, but an interactive
stream, allowing ‘conversations’. The arrival of Web 2.0 applications such as FaceBook,
MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Typepad, Skype and, of course, YouTube meant that we
could create our own content and publish it for the world to see. We no longer
needed to be spoon-fed content. We can now choose to not only digest what we
want, but also hold any shape ‘spoon’ we wanted too.
But along with that new-found freedom has come some
challenges, such as people will post anything and everything and editorial
control has become a challenge.We can
no longer edit the information we want people to read. Where there was once
just one version of the Bible in Latin which only the monk or educated priestly
scholar could own, read and interpret for the masses, everyone can now have access to
information and can interpret it in their own way.
I guess it is the
ultimate experience of Western Liberal Democracy at work, which is why the
Chinese authorities had such a hard time at the recent Olympics in Beijing.
With that freedom we criticise people, leak secrets, devalue
world brands with our stories of flaws in people, products and bad customer
service experience.I remember a US bike
lock company went almost bust because someone posted a video showing how you
could unlock a bike and ride off on it with just a Bic biro. This became one of
the earliest and most successful virals ever.
Right now all over the planet people are having
conversations with strangers. The chances are they will never meet each other.Then there is the FaceBook
community. If you are on this application, you’ll have people who are vaguely
familiar to you requesting that you accept them as a friend, so do you?
There appears to be minimal accountability on the internet.
You can call yourself anything, say anything, believe anything and feel
nothing. I know this bothers a number of churches and institutions.
One of the things I love about bloggers is that the majority
of them, like me, are not famous. They are not celebrities.Many write because they need to write. And I
think that is not a bad reason to blog.
So the question is, do we, the Web 2.0 generation want our
experiences or preferences to continue in the same way in our offline world.
For instance, if we go to church, do we want to be preached at or have a
conversation?
Do we stay within our comfortable church community of
like-mindedness and take everything the pastor, like me, says for granted or do
we look for the opportunity to say, “What do you mean?...What if...I am not sure I
totally go along with that...Can I just ask a question here?”
Another issue is the apparent loss of absolute truth.
For instance, I heard a fact recently that if anything is
put up on Wiki connected to Islam and is wrong it is corrected in less than two
minutes. I guess this is where life gets interesting. I was thinking that
where Web 1.0 had one contributor/writer/editor (or at most a selected body of
experts) Web 2.0 has literally thousands of contributors. For example, I
read that there are 75,000 editors on Wiki alone. We, therefore, are starting
to take our truth from the many, not the one. Does this lead to
relativism or can The Truth still find a way through? One of the emerging
strengths of Web 2.0 culture is surely self-regulation. It takes a strong
dislike to anyone trying to conform it to its way of thinking.
This made me think about the Bible’s reliability.Being as Christians are a ‘one book’ people,
it could be seen at first glance as being very Web 1.0, but actually that is
far from the case, as scholars will tell us.
It is noted that while historians usually settle on a few or
even a single fragmented eye-witness account, the Bible is made up of literally
dozens of individual sources which were reviewed for patterns of consistency (I’ve got the actual number somewhere, but don’t have it at hand).
Maybe, just
maybe some books of the Bible were written later than their time of happening
to ensure the sources were validated and tallied with one another before
committing to print. An interesting thought, isn’t it? Maybe this goes to show
that there really isn’t anything new under the Sun, just the language and
experience of contextualisation.
So there are some challenges for the Christian Church today.
But these are my mutterings, what’s your take on it?
Tearfund, the Christian relief and development agency has devised an interesting online tool called Carbon Calculator. As you might guess from the name, it takes you through a load of questions to work out if you are a friend of fiend to global warming. I am afraid I have some repenting to do.
Worth doing if you've got 5 minutes, though you will need to know how much you pay for your utility bills to complete one section of it.
I thought it would be fun to see what I speak about most on my blog by creating a word cloud. The most commonly used words are marked by the size of the word in the cloud.
This app is a great tool to use in other more serious settings to see if values really are valued, as well as what things occupy our minds the most. I am not sure what it says about my humble blog, but I let you be the judge and jury on that.
Alongside SU's WordLive, which I blogged on at the very beginning of the year, I thought this little application from the rejesus people was worth a gander. It's for those of us who aren't use to regular prayer or for those who they feel they would benefit from the discipline of someone else's written prayers. No shame in that.
Although it might not be natural for some of us to use set prayers, I believe we can benefit by being open to some traditional ways and have our lives enriched by the experience of others.
The site says: "Prayer is a rewarding and life enhancing conversation with God. But at
times it can be difficult. You can feel isolated from others, running
out of things to say and getting distracted.
Pre-written daily prayers, started centuries ago
by Monks and Nuns, can be a great help. The words already written can
help you concentrate and to know that many other people are praying along
with you can be enormously encouraging. Jesus encouraged his followers
to pray regularly and discipline is needed to accomplish that. Daily prayers
help by developing a habit."
This is a follow-on from the last post and really worth a view, as well as a timely reminder of 9/11, being the seventh anniversary of that horrific day.
If you would like to know more about Hope 08, the people behind the initiative, click here.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was in town at the weekend speaking at a conference organised by Christian aid agency Tearfund and Jesus House for All Nations. He made some interesting comments about the place of the Bible in developing countries:
“There’s nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more
subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.”
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