sustain:if:able kiwi

another local blogger

Good to see Andrew, an Opawa-ite blogging away at what the flock. Good stuff.

Update: Paul was blogging before Opawa and has also now joined the Opawa blogger list.

Other Opawa bloggers:
me
Lynne
Paul

Why I am Southern Baptist, bible believing and into the emerging church

(Or a Biblical word of encouragement to tallskinnykiwi and a Biblical word of admonition to the notion that the Emerging Church is a threat to the gospel).

OK, I pastor a Baptist church and I live in in Southern Hemisphere. This clearly makes me a Southern Baptist and able to enter the debates here and here. I note the following Biblical texts, that have converted me to being a Southern Baptist emerging church disciple.

Firstly, (we are post-Easter after all), take Luke 24 and the Emmaus Road story. Jesus preaches, and the disciples don’t get revelation. Jesus preaches the Prophets and the Law. I mean, that is one BIG expository sermon. And still the disciples don’t get it. It is not until they are in community with Jesus, eating supper, that Revelation occurs.This Biblical text calls for repentance from expository preaching and a commitment to finding God in community. (Don’t get me started on Biblical scholarship that suggests the two disciples were husband and wife and thus woman were equal participants at the table of Jesus.)

Secondly, take Colossians 1:15. Christ is the Image of God. Move over word-bound, propositional theologies. Christ can also be revealed in images. This Biblical text calls for repentance from solely word-bound, propositional theologies and a commitment to image-based, multi-media worship.

These Biblical texts have converted me to being a Southern Baptist emerging church disciple. I have repented of my expository preaching. I am seeking a Bible based ministry of multi-media worship, sharing food among a community of friends.

worship leader blog list

A US magazine (I’ve never heard of) called Worship Leader has a feature of emerging church, and the little wee emergentkiwi blog gets a mention. So there we are. Maybe its time for me to release my worship DVD!! Tee he. Or is it that they think I can sing!

(thanks Will for the heads up – I wondered why there was traffic from your site to mine!)

bloggers in the flesh

the great unveiling will occur.

Bob the Corner Carlton is organising that moment, when bloggers will step,
from behind their screens,
and become en-fleshed

this naked ritual will occur at the emergent convention bloggers’ forum – lunchtime Thursday (2/3).

drop a comment to Bob at http://thecorner.typepad.com/bc/ if you are personally willing to participate,
to appear un-virtually-veiled,
en~flesh~ed.

enjoying having phil and dan, signpost bloggers with us. we flew them over from melbourne to help us as opawa church leadership process some issues around change and multiplicity in mission.

please read the white space

The most fundamental fact of human existence is that because people are embodied they are always ‘somewhere.’ Philip Sheldrake

I reckon that the internet rips away our margins and our contexts. All we see is text or image on a page. We forget the white space, that words and images emerge from somewhere. When those words are somewhere else, they are best understood from somewhere else rather than from your screen. Tricky aye.

We slam people, we get angry, we expect all the world to be like us. It ain’t. Sorry.

This is not a bad thing though. This offers us the gift of ‘somewhere’, the chance to move beyond our place to another place.

Next time you want to flame someone, practise the discipline of white space. Read the words again from somewhere else.

blogging and theology again or here we go round the blogberry bush

Just when a conversation seems to have exceeded the blog span of attention (2 weeks) Stephen has another go at the relationship between blogs and theology.

At the risk of repeating myself:
the blogging medium allow a conversation,
which is potentially more egalitarian (although don’t most blog conversations essentially occur under a US domain name?)
but provides no guarantee of a conversation either meaningful or worth listening to
and would suggest that the human propensity to insularity might well haunt future conversations as much as it has past conversations.

the blogging medium allows a community approach to theology,
which returns theology to its roots – the essence of the practise of a community of faith
yet I often see little middle ground between flaming and the fawning “best post ever”
and would suggest that future communities will need better manners and better technologies.

the blogging medium is best done in short bursts,
which limits the pursuit of complicated and nuanced arguments, developed over time

the blogging medium allows instant responses to contemporary theological issues
but in so doing, could well become a conversation that ignores those who had the historically misfortune to write in a pre-blog era/error.

the blogging medium allows a “cross-disciplinary/ethnic/cultural synergy”
but having just returned from one such conference, such revolutionary polemic seems oddly ho-humm

internet joy#2

I’ve received over 300 spam through my blog comments in the last 24 hours. No sooner do I clean it up and block the url, than some more appears. So I’ve finally closed comments on all but recent posts.

internet joy

This morning I woke up to 150 emails. 145 were comments to the website, 145 were all the same spam. Wish I’d had this earlier. (thanks coops)

Fight Spam! Click Here!

will bloggers be worse theologians

Further to the good comments by maggi and others here:

I think there’s a category of faith seeking understanding that is not explicitly aware of theological tools and theological history. This is a blog that describes themselves as a “postmodern pilgrim”; and they write Christianly about community or leadership or whatever.

They might not be a professional theologian like maggi dawn or steve garner, but they are wrestling with their pain (experience) or some Scripture or some culture or some bad tradition. This is still faith seeking understanding. This is still theology.

How do we couple the riches of the professional theologian and the depth of the tradition and the awareness that we are not the first kids on the block/blog to wrestle with community or leadership or whatever, with such widespread blogging reflection?

Blogs democratise knowledge. I am not convinced that democratisation will enhance theology, not because their is anything elite in theology, but because blogging can be a surface, skimming occupation that leaves less time to think and reflect.

So could blogs actually make poorer thinkers? Could they mean people skim and link more, yet know less? What does the democratisation of blogging mean for “professional theology”?

the sifting of the sands of idealism

the next generation of theologians will start as bloggers, according to Dan Hughes.

permit me a moment to ask why? and if they start as bloggers, where will they end?

By definition, theology is faith seeking understanding. It is not an elitism occupation but is the output of any and all. We are all theologians. Some of it is good, some of it is bad. So definitionally, the statement is accurate.

But if the statement is to input some magical status to theoblogians, I will need more convincing. As an inhabiter of both clasroom and blogoshere, the debate in the blogosphere is no deeper or more incisive than the debate in a theological classroom. In fact, often the debate in the blogosophere is less incisive. At least in the classroom there are things called assignments that encourage reading.

I love the idealism of the statement; “an explosion of nuanced thinking around the myriad details of existence … a million empowered perspectives … from the interconnected lives and words of the normal women and men of Santiago, Montreal, Mozambique and Bangalore … justice and mercy transforming the small spaces that hold the secrets of the worlds yet to come.”

Yet I note that when Maggi introduces to the blogosphere some inherited and introductory classroom theology , the bloggers swoon here and here.

And so they should.

Will the future learn from the nuanced thinking of the past, theological linking disciplined by critical review of class and peer and editor, thinking weighed with time, so that the dross of a hundred quick thoughts is filtered to leave some real insite around justice and mercy?

Or, will the blogosphere be a pooling of ignorance (no, of course I am not talking about your blog, so don’t get offended), in which, to rephrase Tim Bednar, bloggers become more arrogant than there pastors, and remain so emmeshed in the interlinked present that they gloss over any inherited wisdom?

a moment of cyncism

donut blogs = a blog in which the outside looks much more better than the reality. this need not be deliberate.

raising my google ranking = elevating crap

RSS feeds = a commitment to letting headlines shape one’s priorities

is this fair?

Does this mean that blogsphere promotes only a faux-friendliness that hides a real individualism? asks Tim, wondering why so few people responded to my kiwi~mission~diet:
Steve’s recent appeal for volunteers to adopt a cheaper diet for a week, and donate the difference to mission, did not fall on deaf ears. COMMENTS and Maggi’s extensive musings demonstrate that we read his post. Yet as I write, I’m away from Internet access on a three day writing retreat, no one has volunteered to join Steve. (Still haven’t publicly as far as I can see!)

Like others I was stirred by Steve’s appeal, so why did we not act?

PS I am not looking for strokes, nor am I in the least grumpy at folks. I am just dropping Tim’s comment into the consumption around the dinner table discussion.

via interflora

nice bouquet from stateside
the one that seems to be farthest ahead and most on the edge (imho) is down under. my favorite is kiwi steve his ideas, thoughts and ability to distill and illustrate a concept is a gift i fear not many have. his blogroll will link you to many other like minded.