word | spirit | world | church
If you’ll do me the favour of indulging me—and if you’re a regular reader then you often do so and I’m grateful for it, or if you’re a supporter then I’m thankful for your help to keep my site advert free—I’d like to tell you about a personal bugbear. Though the title may have given… Continue reading Bring Your Bible to Church
Everybody loves community, or they say they do at least. We live in a land that is parched of the life-giving water of friendship and stripped bare of many of the settings that used to make this easy for people. Robert Nisbet in his book The Quest for Community argues that what he calls a… Continue reading The Quest for Community
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
An inflammatory title! That’s bound to get the punters in. A friend of mine said this line to me a few weeks back. It was a few days before her wedding, and I wouldn’t want to speak to her emotional state but, well, she told me that Instagram was the devil. Except I think we… Continue reading Instagram is the devil
I have been blessed over the last year by the books Every Moment Holy that have come out of the Rabbit Room. These are two volumes of liturgies for ordinary moments of everyday life—written prayers about normal stuff and about the horrifically brutal stuff that sometimes happens to us. After writing about how social media… Continue reading A liturgy for social media
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
Anthropologists say there are three kind of cultures. It’s a crude heuristic but it conveys something that’s true. There are guilt cultures, where social order is maintained by reinforcing guilt for condemned behaviours. People are concerned with right and wrong action. Laws and punishment are the usual social mechanisms for enforcing order. Broadly speaking this… Continue reading Dealing with Shame
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
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