Doug’s well known for his role in Solomon’s Porch, a ‘holistic missional Christian community’ in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He’s one of the founders of Emergent Village, a social network of Christian leaders based in the United States.
A Christianity Worth Believing is a solid introduction to theology in development, carefully crafted with story, personal reflection and quotes from the Bible, the creeds and Protestant confessions. Pagitt begins the whole book with the story of his family background (explaining his need to stir) and his conversion. It’s the conversion story that sets up the tension that runs through the book. Deeply moved by his experience of a gospel play, a sixteen year old Doug responds with a life changing faith. But within two weeks the guy’s been introduced to the narrow version of Christianity contained in brochures, diagrams and statements of faith focused on Jesus dying to deal with sin so that God can connect with Doug.
Doug takes us on a journey with him as he reimagines what Christianity might be about. He introduces us to contextualisation through the Celtic adoption of the wild goose when talking about the Holy Spirit (rather than the traditional dove). He traces the modern obsession with uniformity back to the Greco-Roman adoption of Christianity in the time of Constantine. Today, he says, we’re still interpreting the story of Jesus through the lenses developed for a world dominated by Greek dualism and gods that needed to be appeased.
I like the way Doug writes about the Scriptures. “It’s in the way that you use it”, he says. Why is it, he asks, that the inerrancy concept is hauled out when we talk about certain emotive issues such as homosexuality but is abandoned when discussing other critical matters? When Paul talked about the Word of God being a sword did he really mean for us to use it as a weapon in our efforts to show that we are right and others are wrong? Doug is inviting his readers to think, really think, about the way they read the Bible, not as a one-dimensional instruction book, but as a resource that brings meaning and inspiration to us at different times and places.
Doug challenges us to take another look at what our focus is about. Is it about getting up and out of here, off to heaven, or out of the world into a safe place? Is that what God is about? Or is it about being down and in, thoroughly integrating faith with every part of our lives in a way that leads to being embedded in our communities? Do we take the incarnation (in the flesh) of Jesus seriously enough that we put it into practice ourselves?
Doug takes a crack at the atonement debate by beginning with the concept of original sin brought into mainstream theology by Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century. He suggests that the new Christendom model needed a compelling reason for citizens to turn up at the church. What better than to say that everyone was totally depraved and heading for hell without the intervention of Jesus, and of course the church as agents of Jesus? As Doug points out, even those who talk about original sin find it difficult to reconcile that approach when visiting maternity wards.
So is Doug a wishy washy theologian who now believes that Jesus was just a nice guy who had some useful things to say about life? Doug doesn’t think so. He admits that he’s had to do some hard thinking about alternatives to the penal substitution (Jesus died to take the punishment meant for us) explanation of Jesus’ life and death. He does this in the book by going back to the Jewish roots of Jesus, exploring the Hebrew concept of Messiah in contrast to the Greek understanding of Christ. Jesus is the fulfilment of what people are meant to do and be (The Human One or Son of Man). But more.
The final chapters deal with our historical obsession with heaven. Once again Doug grounds Jesus’ teaching on the kingdom of God in the Jewish concept of integration of all life together, here and now. He suggests that the Jewish scriptures don’t point too much to the future. In some ways I disagree. The Apocalyptic writings, and some of Jesus’ teaching, do indicate an interest in the long term future of the world. However we’d be hard pressed to find much in the Bible that focuses on what happens to us as individuals after we die.
Doug’s final chapter on future hope and heaven in some ways was a disappointing end to the book. It was like a chapter in progress, not as fine tuned as the earlier work. But maybe that’s a useful framework in itself. Doug’s presenting us with where he’s at now, recognising that he’s still exploring. As the father of a little girl who died at 18 months, I resonate with the story Doug tells in this section. I have a confidence that as we finish in this dimension we are held by God. But I’m not preparing for an ethereal bodiless stint in the heavenly choir.
Doug often refers to the Greeks as the ones who have given us the narrow faith perspectives we have today. I wonder what his Greek friends think of that! The reality is that society has moved along a little since the time of Augustine (as have the Greeks) but still is informed by some of the frameworks established then. The whole modernism/postmodernism phenomenon is in some ways an expression of a society that is critiquing the assumptions provided by those frameworks.
I imagine that A Christianity Worth Believing will be a useful tool for people wanting an alternative to the pre-packaged fundamentalism they’ve encountered in the church, not only in books but in the preaching, songs and explanations of what it means to become a Christian. I’d be interested in seeing or even developing a discussion guide for people talking through the book as they read it. Doug has a Facebook group set up for this purpose.
However I am sure that A Christianity Worth Believing will also become one more weapon in the ongoing culture wars of the church. The book will be quoted as evidence that Emergent and anyone associated with the emerging church really have gone off the rails and become liberals (read apostate). Those who take all their cues from the Westminster Confession will be thoroughly cheesed off by the number of times Pagitt points to the distortions found within. However many Presbyterians will be in total agreement with Doug! It was for this very reason that the Free Church of Scotland in 1892 passed the Declaratory Act.
Final thought. As much as Doug’s book is about belief, I get the sense that he’s presenting us with a Christianity worth living and worth sharing.
Tony Jones, national director of Emergent in the USA, has started up a video series on YouTube, featuring some of the people and thinking found in his book, “The New Christians”. The first features Trucker Frank, a guy who tells it like it is. Frank discovered that Jesus focused on what we do now rather than life after death. Frank got kicked out of the church he was pastoring for talking to the people who had left. The act that tipped the scales was throwing down a fake plant, in its pot, and telling the remnant that they were as fake as that plant…
Being a prophet is an exciting calling but it’s hard to find people who will pay you to live it out.
Tony will be in Australia in October, for Black Stump Festival in Sydney. We’re in conversation about the possibility of a visit to Queensland.
This was the video that got Steve and Kathy banned from GodTube. The senior pastors of World Revival Church of Kansas City (formerly The Smithton Outpouring) have cut out a niche in spoofing the excesses or potential hypocrisies of the Christian churches in the United States. Of course, now that their work is booming on YouTube, the couple themselves are vulnerable to the same ego-related excesses faced by any high profile speakers and writers.
Rob Bell is author of Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith, and Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality And Spirituality. He’s known for his tours of the United States: Everything is Spiritual, and The God’s Aren’t Angry.
Tony Jones has published “The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier”, an insider set of observations on the Emergent movement in the USA. (Jossey Bass)
Tony is the national coordinator of Emergent Village and is working on a doctorate in practical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He’s known for his earlier books, Postmodern Youth Ministry and The Sacred Way: Spiritual Practices for Everyday Life.
Leaving the Old Country
I found the first chapter a bit hard going, to tell the truth. Tony sets out to explain why there’s a need for an alternative to the mainline denominations (Episcopalian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ and Presbyterian), and Evangelical protestantism (the loosely aligned born again Christians who tend towards literal interpretation of the Bible, emphasise personal conversion to Christ). No mention of Catholics here. Maybe the USA is more polarised than here downunder but my experience of the Uniting Church in Australia and Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand is that the tension between left and right is found within those denominations. In smaller countries there’s more likelihood that people will have attended conferences together, perhaps trained together at Bible College, or served together in an interdenominational organisation such as Scripture Union.
I appreciate Tony’s first two ‘dispatches’ from the Emergent Frontier:
Dispatch 1: Emergents find little importance in the discrete differences between the various flavors of Christianity. Instead, they practice a generous orthodoxy that appreciates the contributions of all Christian movements.
Dispatch 2: Emergents reject the politics and theologies of left versus right. Seeing both sides as a remnant of modernity, they look forward to a more complex reality.
I’m reminded of the behaviour of my third child as a toddler. The older two had the seating arranged for television. Kristen found that she had to push them to the left and to the right to get a seat in the middle.
The reality is that our formative heritage biases us, despite our discomfort with blanket generalisation. And so the “liberals” throughout the book are described by Tony (who comes from a Congregational background) as people who are all required to conform to a politically correct orthodoxy combined with conservative traditional liturgical worship. Although I’m living a long way away, I don’t believe that the mainline churches can be summarised through the writings of authors such as Marcus Borg or Stanley Hauerwas.
I did enjoy the inclusion of the Jon Stewart episode on CNN’s Crossfire show - which I’ve written up on my Propaganda blog.
After Objectivity: Beautiful Truth
One of the common critiques of the Emerging Church movement is the perception that these postmodernists have rejected the concept of truth. Tony responds by saying that Emergents embrace the whole Bible, the glory and the pathos. Emergents believe that truth, like God, cannot be definitively articulated by finite human beings. Emergents embrace paradox, especially those that are core components of the Christian story.
I enjoyed Tony’s personal reflections on the art of umpiring baseball and the difficulty of ‘calling’ and ‘naming’ what is true. I appreciated his consideration of the story of Jepthah’s sacrifice of his daughter. It’s a messy situation that calls us to consider our responsibility for our actions and God’s presence in great suffering. I like what Tony has to say about the way in which Christians qualify the word ‘truth’ with ‘absolute’ and other such adjectives. What Tony’s saying here resounds with my experience of attending a range of congregations in which the
Inside the Emergent Church
There are some great stories told here, with honesty. We’re taken behind the scenes at Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Missouri, Journey in Dallas, Texas, Church of the Apostles in Seattle, Washington, and Solomon’s Porch in South Minneapolis.
Tony introduces us to the diversity found in these groups, the openness to newcomers, the commitment to dialogue, experimentation, and also the vulnerability found in small start up groups. Will they last? Does it matter? Will these groups get past the tentative dialogue stages and harden into something more definable such as Mars Hill Church (with Mark Driscoll) in Seattle?
Wikichurch
This is a brilliant analogy for the way any movement forms. Tony talks about the Emergent belief that church should function more like an open-source network and less like a heirarchy or bureacracy. He writes about attempts to move out of the clergy-dominated meeting structures found in most churches and develop an ‘Open Access’ approach to dialogue.
Tony points to the way Wikipedia trusts the collective editorial community to weed out abberations or rogue entries. In the same way he beloieves that the collected people of God, in community with the Spirit, will stay on track and engage with God’s work in the world. Two painful test cases are the issues of homosexuality and women in ministry. Already Mark Driscoll has parted ways with the Emergent crowd, now that it is clear that the Emergent crowd disagree with his hardline approaches.
Tony writes about the need for sustainability in response to criticism that the Emergent churches are not growing fast enough or making enough disciples. He suggests that the messiness of new startup groups can be a good alternative to highly ‘efficient’ congregations in which people burn out or are dominated by egomaniac pastors. Fear of failure is what stops movements like this starting or progressing.
Tony’s epilogue suggests that Emergent Christians are a bit like the feral camels in Australia, once domesticated, but now out in the wilderness pushing over fences, occasionally returning to bother the establishment.
Thumbs up Tony!
If you’d like to discuss the book further join the Facebook Group, administered by Sue McMahon-Jones and Doug Pagitt.
Ben Elton provides a cutting critique of cultural trends at the beginning of the 21st century in this novel set after the flood. Global warming has led to much of Britain being submerged. FaceSpace culture has led to the disappearance of privacy. The Temple (combine massive manipulative Evangelical rallies with Mormon and Anglican structures) are in control of law and order. Trafford, the protagonist, discovers privacy, vaccination, books, humanism and evolution. Somewhat reminiscent of 1984 and Brazil the novel presents darkness and hope together.
This post-apocalyptic world combines elements of technology from today with a loss of standards of living. It’s hot in the UK - so hot that people have virtually given up wearing clothes. Modesty is a thing of the past. Turning up at a physical work space is a novelty. Trafford works for the government, in NatDat, finding new kinds of ‘degrees of separation’ between members of the population.
Vaccination, regarded as a dangerous meddling with nature, has been abandoned. And so the infant mortality rate has skyrocketed in the face of measles, mumps, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, bubonic plague and so on.
Every moment of life, including every sexual encounter, is captured on the WorldTube in a combination of exhibitionism and voyeurism. All foods are sweetened. Women are pressured into breast enlargements. Marriage is not as important as ‘getting married’.
Elton provides a tongue-in-cheek critique of the “Save the World” rock concerts and Evangelical faith gatherings. Faith Festivals in Blind faith are held in Wembley Stadium, with global satellite coverage.
“It was most inspiring to live in a world where ‘people power’ could mean so much, where a single concert could change the world irrevocably for the better, where things could be improved just because the people wanted them to improve. Simply by massing, cheering, listening to music and eating enormous amounts of takeaway food, everyone knew they could make a real difference”.
Time and time again Trafford and his newly found friends reflect on the contrast between reasoned humanism and irrational blind faith. The God of the Temple, Everlasting Love, is portrayed as one who is responsible for both wonderful miracles and the terrible suffering experienced by grieving parents. This is the God who created everything in six days. “Any God who kills a child to punish its parents is not worth worshiping!” Trafford argues.
Elton provides important warnings for us today. It is too easy to sacrifice a capacity for privacy in the quest to develop an online identity. Is it possible to retain the ability to write material that only we will ever read? With the move towards utilitarianism on the internet will we know when we’ve lost the capacity to reflect deeply, to think, to celebrate life, to form our own fantasies? Or will our superheroes of the future be the people who tell us to make money, become famous and look young and sexy?
The dark controlling nature of the religious institution in Blind Faith is only too possible when power and faith are combined in an environment of fear and ignorance. We have the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin’s merciless rule in Geneva, and the complicity of Martin Luther in the quelling of the Peasants Revolt to keep us humble and alert.
In reading Blind Faith it’s important to remember that satire, by nature, exaggerates and amplifies the follies of a society’s existing weaknesses. There are individuals and groups who even now exhibit the disturbing behaviours and beliefs described in the book. It’s our responsibility to live, think and act in a way that ensures that these distortions of faith and reason do not become the norm.
The newly released edition of Time Magazine has named members of the online community as “Person of the Year” for 2006. The editorial team recognizes the unique impact of bloggers and participants in forums such as Wikipedia and YouTube.
Lev Grossman explains:
“Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.”
The magazine on the shelves is featuring fifteen citizens of the ‘new digital democracy’, including a French rapper, a relentless reviewer and a real life lonely girl. There’s a story on the founders of YouTube, an essay on the connections between Web 2.0 and Andy Warhol, the rise of amateurs in new media, the capacity of digital cameras to change history, the second dot.com business boom, and an expose of the annoying downside of the internet.
I’m wondering how long it will take before Time really catches up on the global changes being brought about through the internet. Time continues to assume that its readers will be focused on what is happening within the borders of the United States. Blogging has taught me that while there are a lot of Americans online, the stories are often found elsewhere.
Alister Cameron, blogging consultant in Melbourne, put together this unofficial seal for those who share the Time Magazine award. Thanks Al!
Darren Rowse at ProBlogger lightly suggests that the online Time Magazine article is a classic case of ‘linkbaiting’. Every time someone links to the article (like I have just done) Time zooms up in the online ratings. Fair enough.
Pacific Parks Uniting began with a group of people who were keen to explore an alternative to the hectic pace of a church addicted to excellent performance. We’d been in churches that measured effectiveness by the number of people attending Sunday worship and midweek on-campus programs. We’d also been in churches with a focus on correctness, in which newcomers were carefully tested for right belief and respectable lifestyles.
We were committed to exploring an alternative approach to church that would equip its members to live out radical discipleship largely in the context of everyday relationships. Our gatherings would need to inspire and support people to engage with real life, seven days a week.
To summarise this approach, we started describing ourselves as “Relaxed Church”.
We come together in a welcoming, warm, encouraging and inclusive way.
The primary doctrine that we affirm here is the doctrine of grace.
Serene Jones describes a similar connection between the doctrine of grace and the ryhthms of a church’s life in her article, “Graced Practices: Excellence and Freedom in the Christian Life”, found in Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life, edited by Mirsolav Volf and Dorothy Bass, 2002. Jones is a theologian with membership in a United Church of Christ congregation in New Haven.
Serene Jones describes the ambitious vision-casting process developed by a ‘Millennial committee’. As they presented their plans to the congregations they found people becoming tired, overwhelmed and without enthusiasm. In response, the committee went back and explored the benefits of the good news of Jesus Christ. They unpacked what it meant to live out of justification and sanctification. They revisited the Scriptures and found there the narrative of God’s grace, from creation through to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The congregation’s leaders then began to explore what it would mean to develop gatherings that would be good news to their participants. Practicing the sabbath, grounded in the freedom of justification, became a gift to people already exhausted by hectic lifestyles.
So what would living in the grace of God look like for a new network of house churches? Pacific Parks began with the grace-imbued practices of Sabbath and hospitality. Instead of beginning with running worship services, we started with leadership meetings on Sunday mornings in each others homes, over a barbecue. We moved to public parks and started inviting friends and family. Our first purchase as a church was a large catering barbecue. We followed that up with sports equipment.
At first some of us felt a little anxious, perhaps guilty, about missing out on Sunday morning worship. We weren’t busy ‘running Church’. There were no rosters to fill. There were no offerings to take up and count as we had already made arrangements for direct debit giving. There was no ‘order of service’ and no post-event evaluation. It was strange for people who had spent all their lives ‘doing church’.
We discovered that our energy was now available to focus on expressing the hospitality of God to those around us. God brought into our circles people who would not have fitted neatly into a church committed to excellence. Like the woman with only one outfit for wearing in public who was anxious that her grandson was sipping on a drink during a worship time. We pointed out that most of us had a cup of coffee in our hands. The couple who were living together who joined one of our house churches, later holding their wedding in one of our homes and regularly bringing their extended family and network of friends. The young people who struggled with multiple addictions, who time and time again found themselves responding to God’s grace.
We seek to be flexible, accepting and authentic, creatively responding to others.
As in the relational approach to Church, our relaxed approach is connected with our perception of how God dynamically relates to the world. We believe that God interacts with the world as it is, continually helping creation respond in tune with God’s call. We don’t believe that God has a blueprint that we must discover and follow slavishly. In the life of Jesus we see constant examples of responding to people as they are, in the settings in which they live, using the elements of each scenario.
Earlier this month I met with a family network for a baptism in the park. When the parents of the boy being baptised asked if we had to hold the service in church on Sunday I explained that the Uniting in Worship regulations did specificy that baptism should be held after a sermon during a Sunday worship service. But because Pacific Parks was committed to developing flexible and creative approaches to church, we could say yes to Saturday morning in the local park. Besides, we didn’t have a church service on Sunday. Neither did we have a church building to hold it in!
So where’s the doctrine here? The Uniting Church in Australia does have well developed doctrine around the connection between word and sacrament, designed to ensure that baptism is a corporate experience of the wider Church and not just an individual rite of passage. In planning the baptism service one of my first priorities was to ascertain who the congregation of the faithful would be in this case. I had two couples from Pacific Parks Uniting who would be affirming a commitment to nurture faith in the child and his family. The parents themselves were keen to express their own emerging faith. His parents, sister and brother-in-law were Catholics and were able to participate meaningfully. For others it was a case of being welcome, included and encouraged to explore faith for themselves.
We have deliberately sought to delineate between primary doctrines of Christian faith and more practical doctrines that are not essential in these settings. For the sake of authenticity and consistency we seek to develop shared experiences of faith that are consistent with the Uniting Church services of baptism and communion. However, we sense no obligation to maintain the traditional or even contemporary ‘order of service’ for worship. For example, we rarely sing together. In our earlier days together we did. We bought a keyboard and practiced hard for our corporate gatherings. But as we moved into separate house churches we discovered that not everyone finds singing helpful in connecting with God. We came to see singing as a practice of faith that would be used when appropriate.
We have struggled with issues of sexuality and how they apply to doctrine. The Uniting Church Assembly in 2003 clarified that each Presbytery had the capacity to ordain people on a case by case basis. As a local leadership team we found it impossible to develop a shared understanding of how that related to doctrine. Was the Church’s traditional doctrine relating to homosexuality a primary affirmation, requiring a Christian to be heterosexual or live a lifetime of celibacy? Or was it possible that God was more flexible and welcoming than the Church had allowed for over time?
The next post will focus on doctrine in relation to being ‘Relevant Church’.
ENFJ: God, help me to do only what I can and trust you for the rest. Do you mind putting that in Writing?
ENFP: God, help me to keep my mind on one th-Look a bird!-ing at a time.
ENTJ: Lord, help me slow downandnotrushthroughwhatIdoAmen.
ENTP: Lord, help me follow established procedures today. On second thought, I’ll settle for a few minutes.
ESFJ: God, help me have patience, and I mean right NOW!
ESFP: God help me to take things more seriously, especially parties and dancing.
ESTJ: God, help me to not try to RUN everything. But, if you need some help, just ask!
ESTP: God, help me to take responsibility for my own actions, even though they’re usually NOT my fault.
INFJ: Lord, help me to not be a perfectionist. (Did I spell that correctly?)
INFP: God, help me to finish everything I sta
INTJ: Lord, keep me open to other’s ideas, WRONG though they may be.
INTP: Lord, help me be less independent, but let me do it my way.
ISFJ: Lord, help me to be more laid back and help me to do it EXACTLY right.
ISFP: Lord, help me to stand up for my rights (if you don’t mind my asking).
ISTJ: Lord, help me relax about insignificant details beginning tomorrow at 11:41.23 a.m. EST.
ISTP: God, help me to consider other people’s feelings, even if most of them ARE hypersensitive.
(c) 1987 Ellis N. Harsham
Ellis Harsham was a teacher at St Gregory Seminary in Mt Washington, Ohio, who resigned from the priesthood in 1993 after allegations of abuse from a former student. He served time in prison and was only this year removed from clerical status by Pope Benedict XVI. More ammo for the cynics looking for hypocricy in the church. More ammo for the cynics looking for evidence that the Myers Briggs Type Indicator is flawed. So is it just best to overlook the authorship? Or is it possible that flawed writers have the capacity to enhance the lives of their readers?
Fernando Gros has done his bit to pass on the ‘One Book Meme’ by suggesting I add my responses to his…
One book that changed my life
I’d have to say the Bible is the one book that’s transformed my worldview, given me connections to a community of millions of people, and kept my every day in perspective.
Terry Pratchett’s The Last Continent, set in the land of EcksEcksEcksEcks, with Rincewind, a mystical kangaroo and many other quirky characters.
One book that made you cry
Shattered and Restored, the story of Elsa McInnes’ experience of grief when her husband, Garth McInnes, died of cancer. Garth was the minister in the Presbyterian Church in the area in which I grew up. I read the story not long after my own daughter died, and found the story helped express my own grief.
One book that you wish had been written
The story of J.D. Salmond, a Christian/Religious Education guru in the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand. I wrote the story in 1991 but for some reason never took the steps to get it published.
One book you wish had never been written
The Late Great Planet Earth, published by Hal Lindsay in 1970, was a distraction for me and many other people, setting up a Christian culture prone to paranoid conspiracy theories. This would have to be equal with Chick cartoon tracts.
One book you are currently reading
Stephen Lawhead’s Song of Albion trilogy, Paradise War, The Endless Knot, and Silver Hand. I first read these three books when they came out in the early 1990s. Lawhead’s books are set in the style of Stephen Donaldson’s Covenant series and C.S. Lewis’s Sci Fi series, developing an ‘other world’ version of a Celtic warrior society.
I found Ha! Magazine in the local newsagent today, the launch issue of a rag dedicated to serious Australian humour. Paul Dovas, editor, aims to acknowledge humour and comedy from an distinctly Australian perspective and put it ‘out there for the rest of the world to enjoy’.
The lead article is an essay by Allison Leo on “taking the piss”, an Australian cultural tradition. She says that piss-taking is about making a joke that demonstrates lateral thought, yet does it in a way that makes the target feel better about themselves. She traces this disrespectful and irreverent practice back to Australia’s early days in which convicts turned settlers failed often and splendidly in their enterprising schemes. ‘Taking the piss’ was refined as an art during the two world wars. For a contemporary example she points to the humorous capacity of the two surviving miners in the Beaconsfield mining disaster.
There’s some excellent reviews of Aunty Jack Season 2, Graham Kennedy, RV, and Click. Elena Lonergan reviews her own comedy web site, www.talking-fish.com.
It should be interesting to see if Ha! survives. I suspect that it is a little too intellectual at this point. The common reader is not so much interested in reading about humour, as in engaging in humour itself.
The next issue, due out any time now, is to focus on families and relationships.
Duncan Macleod posts on life, faith and culture in Australia, drawing from his involvement in the creative industry, the Uniting Church, the blogosphere, generational research, the emerging church and life on the Gold Coast.
A Christianity Worth Believing is a solid introduction to theology in development, carefully crafted with story, personal reflection and quotes from the Bible, the creeds and Protestant confessions. Pagitt begins the whole book with the story of his family background (explaining his need to stir) and his conversion. It’s the conversion story that sets up the tension that runs through the book. Deeply moved by his experience of a gospel play, a sixteen year old Doug responds with a life changing faith. But within two weeks the guy’s been introduced to the narrow version of Christianity contained in brochures, diagrams and statements of faith focused on Jesus dying to deal with sin so that God can connect with Doug.
Tony is the national coordinator of 
This post-apocalyptic world combines elements of technology from today with a loss of standards of living. It’s hot in the UK - so hot that people have virtually given up wearing clothes. Modesty is a thing of the past. Turning up at a physical work space is a novelty. Trafford works for the government, in NatDat, finding new kinds of ‘degrees of separation’ between members of the population.
, edited by Mirsolav Volf and Dorothy Bass, 2002. Jones is a theologian with membership in a United Church of Christ congregation in New Haven.
The lead article is an essay by Allison Leo on “taking the piss”, an Australian cultural tradition. She says that piss-taking is about making a joke that demonstrates lateral thought, yet does it in a way that makes the target feel better about themselves. She traces this disrespectful and irreverent practice back to Australia’s early days in which convicts turned settlers failed often and splendidly in their enterprising schemes. ‘Taking the piss’ was refined as an art during the two world wars. For a contemporary example she points to the humorous capacity of the two surviving miners in the Beaconsfield mining disaster.
