way out west

The Climate Change Jury is back in!

150 major global companies (including companies like Shell, Britsh Airways, Pirelli & Pacific Gas & Electric Company!) have issued a statement saying that the evidence for Global warming/Climate change is indisputable and world governments should legislate for binding limits on emissions for businesses!  So, the businesses themselves say that they are convinced of the problem and that they want to be held accountable for the damage to the environment and encouraged to develop new technologies.  They say that Global business needs...

a sufficiently ambitious, international and comprehensive, legally-binding United Nations agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will provide business with the certainty it needs to scale up global investment in low-carbon technologies.

...and that "global targets for emission reductions should be based on science, not economic considerations".  Of course there is already a fly in the ointment, guess who!  Yes the United States of "not our problem" has issued it's own statement saying it will not support global emission limits for business!  Hmmm, no surprise there then!

Technorati Tags: environment: News

A Straw Jesus?

My favourite Blog post of the day yesterday... I'm thinking of sending it to the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, it removes any need to define the phrase "Straw Man"... The OED could simply print it and then write underneath it "see above"... Perhaps the esteemed Ed. could "kill two birds with one stone" and use it for "False Dichotomy" too... it made me laugh this morning anyway! 

Technorati Tags: Blogging: Emerging Church

a rock epitaph!?

I'm watching the new DVD retrospective/"rockumentary" of one of if not THE greatest Band of all time... The Who - Amazing Journey... as usual there are vox-pops from Musicians and of course Noel Gallagher has a few things to say!  He comes out with a great quote when talking about the song "My Generation"...

If you could put that Bass line in words, that is what you would want written on your gravestone!

Technorati Tags: Film: Music

Piper and the Bridge

Reading one of "those" web sites today I found severe criticism of Doug Pagitt of Solomons Porch because in a podcast interview he described the following comment in this article by John Piper as "medieval" ... the background is Piper is having a conversation with his daughter about the collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis on August the 1st, at the time of writing Piper says that...

Most of us who minister at the church cross this bridge several times a week. At this point I don’t know if any staff was on the bridge. Desiring God offices are about a mile from the bridge. There are no firm facts at this point about the total number of injuries and fatalities.

Piper reports  a section of the conversation at bed-time with his 11 year old daughter as going like this...

Talitha said, “Maybe he [God] let it fall because he wanted all the people of Minneapolis to fear him.” “Yes, Talitha,” I said, “I am sure that is one of the reasons God let the bridge fall.”

Now the author of the Web site says that Piper is stating "right Christian belief" and that Pagitts critique of it as "medieval" proves that he, Pagitt is "no genuine Christian pastor."  Now having spent a week with Doug I have my opinions on him and I'm sure if people have read his books and/or met him in person they/you will have formed your own opinion... but, TBH I, like Doug, am stunned that anyone, let alone someone as public and well known as John Piper would a) teach an 11 year old (especially at Bedtime) that God allows innocent (possibly even Godly people with whom Piper himself ministers) to die on order to make people fear him! and b) that if in the midst of a tragedy he found himself saying the above, that he would then write it up in an article about the event!  "Medieval" seems quite an apt description to me!

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church: Spirituality: theology

You tag "Emergent" and I tag "emerging"...

I, as many do, have the Technorati tags "Emerging" and "Missional" in my feed reader... one thing I have noticed is that the anti-emerging/fundie/KJV only/"there is no such thing as a left wing Christian" (really some say that!) types never seem to talk about the "emerging church" only ever the "Emergent church"... perhaps this is an attempt to perpetuate their handy myth that Brian McLaren is the pastor/pope/cult-leader of the emerging church creating the impression that we are all "under" Emergent village and drool with pavlovian expectation for the next word that passes his lips!?  I guess its part of the culture that there has to be leaders who dictate orthodoxy etc.  and it's been a part of their "ammunition" for so long it ceased to annoy me years ago... so why post this... well, it's by the way of a tip really... if you see the words "Emergent church" as opposed to "emerging church" or "Emergent village" in a blog post then the chances are it is being posted by the likes of EmergentNo, Slice of Laodicea, Christian Research(sic) Network, etc. so unless you want to re-read the same old... the "Emergent" Church is a bunch of Liberal, Bible abandoning, Yoga meditating, Hell denying, McLaren following, Communist, anti-American, Birkenstock wearing, Soul-patch sporting heretics... you can safely ignore it... I can categorically refute this caricature as I for one have never worn Birkenstocks or had a Soul-patch ;)

Technorati Tags: Blogging: Emerging Church

Community Organic Box

Tonight was the first community meal made from the box of Organic and local food we are getting delivered each week from Boxfresh.  Their policy is...

Local (85% of the veg we deliver is grown within 60 miles of Shrewsbury.)
Organic (They are registered with the Soil Association as an organic retailer and all produce is registered organic.)
Fresh (Most of the fresh produce comes to you within 48 hours of picking on the farm.) - which effectively means that the produce reflects the season.

The reason we have done it as a community is that we want to be as ethical as possible; reducing over farming and chemical use, reducing food milage, supporting small businesses... we want to try to be more seasonal; seeing what it might mean to reflect the seasons and their produce, the rhythms of creation, there is something that just seems right about eating food in it's season... rather than eating tasteless strawberries in December lets enjoy them at their best in the summer... and we hope to enjoy the surprise and diversity of making meals from what arrives rather than simply going to the Supermarket and buying the same old things... so tonight we had Sweet and Spicy Broth made from caramelised onions, sweet potatoes, potatoes, carrots, cauliflower, sweetcorn and cherry tomatoes (with Paprika, ground Black Pepper and Tabasco) with home-made bread... perfect for a cold windy evening!

Technorati Tags: Community: Food: Missional: Organic

New Flock

Flock have just released their new build Flock 1.0, it now not only has the excellent "My World" function which gives you access to all your subscriptions, recently viewed sites and RSS feeds, media uploader and Blog posting... it now integrates Facebook as well as Flickr, YouTube and Twitter giving you live updates from your friends/contacts.  I love that I can have switch my sidebar to show all my RSS Feeds, recent uploads from my Flickr contacts or all my Facebook friends... and I can see in an instant who is doing what.  It will also manage on-line favourites through Magnolia and del.icio.us... and all for FREE!  For those who haven't used Flock before it is built on the Firefox platform so has all the flexibility and extras of Firefox with the best Web 2.0 integration I have come across in any browser.

http://www.flock.com/

Blogged with Flock

Tags: Flock, Web2.0, Blogging, Facebook

Trust vs Faith

If you live in the UK you will no doubt be aware that our Government and Revenue and Customs office have made a sizeable blunder... If not then read this from the BBC News!  The records of 25 million (including ours) lost after being downloaded onto CDs and posted to another department... the list of ways that this is rank incompetence is endless and I don't want to go over them here... read the Beebs report and the following comments!  And all over the land people are crying out that they do NOT TRUST the Government!  A Government that spends so much of it's time talking about reducing our civil liberties because of the need increased "security", does not have it's own house in order!  etc. etc.  Anyway aside from the implications for further data-base centralisation including the proposed ID card scheme this whole sorry saga got me thinking about how we use and understand words like Trust and Faith... as is often the case on this blog, the following is me thinking aloud!

Trust - having complete confidence, being able to rely on something or someone, being secure. Dependance.
Faith - a feeling or belief, that something is true, real, or will happen.  Mental acceptance of and confidence in a claim as truth without proof supporting the claim.

One could say "I had Faith in the Governments ability to handle our security correctly and now I have no Trust at all in Government"... in that my Trust (or lack of it) is the result of my Faith being proved to be correct.  The difficulty of this particular example is that we generally use the word Faith to mean a positive belief, the negative being an absence of Faith... I guess this is where we might, in a religious context, draw the distinction between agnosticism and atheism... in that an agnostic has no Faith that there is a God whereas an atheist has Faith that there is NO God.

I wonder whether we, the Church, have become careless with our use of language... we often talk to people in crisis about needing to Trust in God, but when you think about it we are asking people in the midst of trauma to have "complete confidence" in God, instead of encouraging them to have Faith... not an easy thing to do either, but perhaps we might find of way of speaking the language of hope, expectation and mental acceptance.. as opposed to trying to convince people to Trust, to feel able to depend upon a future outcome?

We often hear talk of having A Faith meaning a belief/religious system, but I find this unhelpful, because what we really mean is adoption of a belief system or Trust in God as expounded by a belief system, perhaps even simply Trust in the belief system?  Faith to me speaks more about hope as Hebrews 11 verse 1 says...

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

I guess one could say we Trust because of evidence, we have Faith despite a lack of evidence... Trust is forensic, Faith is relational!  If I aim to make people Trust in God, then I get caught up in trying to hide the crap in my life... I mustn't create any doubt or question in the mind of that person... if they see I haven't got it all sorted and got everything working for me, then why should they Trust in God?  I did hear what I hope is an apocryphal story of a Pastor of a large Church in the North of England saying that he had to own the best Car in the city, otherwise why would anyone choose to believe in God who doesn't give his followers the best there is?  This is close to the ultimate expression of seeking to get people to have Trust, and it is almost guaranteed to turn round and punch the leader between the eyes... when for example he or a member of his family gets sick or has a personal tragedy!  Trust I would say comes from a personal life of Faith, Faith is about taking risks... "leaps of Faith" to use the well worn cliché... and Faith is not static it grows and it faces challenges and it has the capacity to overcome them and grow through it... Trust it seems to me is more fragile, one challenge can see it collapse as the evidence on which it is based crumbles... for example how many times today have I heard people say that the implications of this catastrophic collapse of Government security means that this particular Government is a dead duck, it can never be trusted again?!

Technorati Tags: Church: Mission: News: theology

Its November it must be Winter!

So... it's November the 18th... and todays weather in Telford has been Snow, all day!

Performatism unplugged

I came across Julie Unplugged today in my meanderings around the blogosphere... she has a nice simple way of "unplugging" things from their miasmic academic language... she does a good job on one post-post-modern theory... Performatism (from back in April)...

...performatism moves us from parts to whole. Whereas postmodernism teaches us to stand back from the context, taking apart the pieces, examining them, exercising judgment or exposing the undersides, identifying ironies, missteps, power moves and error as though from a position outside/above/beyond the message (object), performance puts us in contact with a subject who is a complex whole, that is, a person whose meaning and message cannot be teased apart. "The medium is the messenger, and no longer the message: it is the extension of a paradoxical authorial subject pointing out his (or her) own materiality and fallibility."

Put another way, a performatist subject is aware of limitations yet acts anyway. A postmodernist may also be aware of limitations, but the approach to life is much more likely to be suspicious and ironic. The performatist is unhindered by those fallibilities (limits of knowledge, lack of appropriate skills or debilitating attributes) because he or she chooses to act because the act itself is identical in meaning with the person acting (the act is no longer a sign that creates or generates meaning - the meaning is in the act).

Raoul Eshelman, who coined the term writes in "Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism" (from the wonderfully titled journal "Anthropoetics")...

The way out of postmodernism does therefore not lead through the intensified search for meaning, through the introduction of new, surprising forms or through the return to an authentic origin. Instead, it must take place through a mechanism completely impervious to postmodernism's modes of dispersal, deconstruction and proliferation. This mechanism, which has been making itself felt with increasing strength in the cultural events of the last few years, can be best understood using the notion of performance.

He goes on to describe "Performatism" as...

...a new epoch in which subject, sign, and thing come together in ways that create an aesthetic experience of transcendency

Technorati Tags: Culture