word | spirit | world | church
I was speaking to a friend and he suggested a startling thought: we want our discipleship to be gamified. On the face of it I could shrug it off, he and I are millennials, gamification is a Gen Z problem. They’re the generation that sees progress in terms of levelling up. We’re the I’m amazing,… Continue reading Repost: Next Level Discipleship
It was sat at a table in the University Starbucks that some of the things I’d read over the last few years about apologetics and Gen Z became real and urgent. I was having lunch with a student who had been around our church for a while. He had come along to my Life Group… Continue reading Repost: Useful and True
A while back I was sat talking with a group of young Christians who would fit within what’s commonly called, ‘Gen Z,’ and one of them turned to me and said that the greatest issue facing her generation of believers was the proliferation of sources of authority. Which is quite a claim, I don’t think… Continue reading Youtubeification
We live in a digital world, or at least so it seems at times. We are surrounded by virtual places and technology that has inserted itself into our lives—for good and for ill. In this rapidly changing world, we have to learn what it looks like to follow Jesus. In lots of ways, it is… Continue reading Digital Discipleship
It’s Epiphany today, Christmas is over, the new year doesn’t start today but it’s as good a day as any for reflecting on the last twelve months. I’ve been writing here at nuakh for about a year now. I’ve written 94 posts, almost exactly 100,000 words of work, some of which have been shared and… Continue reading One Year In: 2021 in Review
This article in the New York Times describes two tools that Facebook are developing for churches. Firstly, a subscription service, “where users pay, for example, $9.99 per month and receive exclusive content, like messages from the bishop” and secondly a prayer service “where members of some Facebook groups can post prayer requests and others can… Continue reading Commercialising Church
Facebook want to work with churches. Which shouldn’t surprise us, why wouldn’t they want to work with anyone they can show advertising too? The surprising bit is that some churches seem to want to work with them too. As has been widely reported, some very large churches and denominations want to collaborate with Facebook on… Continue reading Forging digital tools
If we believe James K. A. Smith’s work in his Cultural Liturgies trilogy, then we are constantly being formed by everything around us and the ‘liturgies’ that they tell us. Everything from shopping centres to televisions to motorways are influencing the way that we view the world. While I think Smith’s solutions are helpful but… Continue reading The liturgy of social media
Back in the summer of 2019 I spent a few months reading everything I could find on Generation Z. I think I’m not exaggerating to say I read every scholarly paper I could access through my University, and every book on the subject in its libraries. I wrote a paper for my network of churches,… Continue reading Generation Z
We live in an age of expressive individualism. This is a bad thing. While any sort of individualism is a product of Christianity, the form of individualism we currently have that places my desires squarely at the top of the hierarchy of goods is deeply destructive to society, to individuals, and to the church. Once… Continue reading 5 Antidotes to individualism
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