The Postmodern: boring the people of Britain since 1999
Do you remember the 1990s? The decade of creative fun in the midst of a sense of Fin de Siecle which gave everything the sense that the clock was on double-speed. It was a decade which became a cultural helter-skelter, where everything was up for ironization. Philosophies of knowledge which traded on their shock-value (ooh! Nietzsche!) and struck a heady alliance between the academy and the media (at least when it came to the Humanities). Routledge seemed to be producing five volumes on postmodernism this, postmodern that,most of which were appallingly-written and made very little sense to anyone, including - I suspect - the sub-editors and even the authors themselves. Then there were the glorious incidents of unmasking this as the intellectual equivalent of the Kings New Clothes, such as the online Postmodern-essay generator, which would randomly produce a huge nonsensical essay which read exactly like one of the aforementioned Routledge books. There was also the famous article on “Postmodern Physics” by Alan Sokal, a physicist who deliberately wrote a nonsensical paper which was duly published by the cultural studies journal Social Text.
For me, what killed Postmodernism as a movement was the morning people turned on their TV sets in September 2001 and discovered what happens when some people, who believe in a life-denying ideology with sufficient seriousness, decide to launch an all-out attack on Western values, symbols, and above all, people. Suddenly, irony seemed curiously superfluous. It was time to rediscover what we had which was of real value. Although some writers sought to incorporate Islamist terror under the wider head of the Postmodern, I just think it stretched the category too far from the original to be at all credible. If we have an intellectual era now, it’s a mixture of social thinking competing for our attention, all of which has its roots in the Enlightenment - politically, things don’t seem very Post to me.
So it is sad that at a cultural level, there is still so much trash around. Too many kids in arts colleges are evidently being educated with an outdated cultural theory from old lecture notes, probably passed on to the present teachers by previous colleagues who left the institution years ago. We don’t need trash now. We need something new, giving meaning, purpose, joy.
So it was gratifying to see one of the best satirists of them all, Clive James, get his teeth into the new coinage from the Royal Mint. The designer of these ridiculous new coins (aged 26, therefore only Post by derivation…) stated that the designs were “to intrigue, to entertain, and raise a smile”. This would be fine if they were chocolate money. But these are coins of the realm. Please, why don’t they say, in numbers, how much they’re worth? And when will these faux-Derrideans please realize that Britain is tired, tired, tired of stale postmodernism?
Posted on Sunday, 13 April 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | 6 comments
Dim the lights baby …
Here’s another computer nostalgia post coming up…
Those of us who grew up either using old VDUs or early CP/M or MSDOS computers may sometimes long for the simplicity of a black-on-white white-on-black screen when we’re writing. I must say that I find it:
- More soothing on the eyes
- Less distracting than a fully-lit screen
- More conducive to creative thinking, and hence writing
There are a growing number of applications out there which attempt to simulate this old, soothing environment on contemporary computers. Lifehacker alerted the world to another one today …
However, for Mac users, especially new ones (such as Rick or Richard), there’s a much easier way to achieve this state of half-remembered innocence and simplicity.
The trick is to press Ctrl+Option+Cmd+8 and dim the lights baby. (Doing it again restores things to normal.)
Posted on Thursday, 10 April 2008 by Paul | Posted in geekism, macolatry | 1 comment
Urbex sites
When I was a kid, just around the corner from our house was a derelict training centre for the Civil Defence (C.D.), formerly known as the A.R.P. The A.R.P. was set up in the 1930s to deal with the impact of bombing raids and other dangers to the civilian population. They continued to exist after WWII as the threat of nuclear attack grew in the early years of the Cold War. The site near our house, however, was largely constructed as a simulated bomb site. Outside was a large notice which said “Trespassers will be prosecuted”. The first time I walked in, I was aged seven, and knew neither what a trespasser was nor what prosecution entailed. The site was a dream world for young boys: there were bombed out houses, a leaning brick tower, many different tunnels to crawl along, and many old broken window-frames to climb though. Each visit would bring some new discovery. It was a health and safety officer’s living nightmare, but when you’re about eight years old, you don’t really care about that. The only thing we had to watch out for was adults, because once I’d made my first foray inside, my parents did explain to me what that notice meant. In fact, the risk of being caught “trespassing” which would have led to certain “prosecution” and inevitable imprisonment added to the thrill of each visit. Occasionally, we’d hear a man’s shout and run like crazy to get out before the long hand of the Law collared us. The cat-and-mouse game added to the fun.
If you google “urbex” you come across a subterranean community of “Urban Explorers” who visit derelict sites around the UK. They deliberately trespass on these sites, partly - I suspect - for the thrill of it, but partly also to document and photograph places which are destined to be demolished. In many cases, this is an exercise in anarchic historical documentation. A very good example is the documentation, using trespass, photography and historical research of the former Government National Gas Turbine Establishment at Pyestock. The whole enormous complex, of considerable historical interest, is due to be bulldozed and turned into a supermarket distribution centre. Two further sites of interest are www.derelictplaces.co.uk and Simon Cornwell’s site. Being the upstanding member of society that I now am, I suspect my Urbexing days are never going to happen, but just reading the websites brings back a certain frisson which I haven’t felt since those early days.
A few years after I began playing there, the old C.D. site was demolished too. It then became yet another housing estate…
Posted on Thursday, 10 April 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | No comments
Rapid Bus transport scheme and the Bristol to Bath cycle route
Many in Bristol will be aware of the worrying draft plan to convert the Bristol end of the Bristol-Bath cyclepath into shared use with a Rapid Bus Transport scheme. Over 9000 people have signed a petition against the idea, and tomorrow there is a celebration of the path for walkers and cyclists, to indicate how precious a part of Bristol this is.
The BBC today have posted a news items called “Bus Lane Scheme hits buffers“, indicating that Mark Bradshaw, Executive Member for Access and Environment, has said that it would now “be focusing on other priorities”. However, in his video statement, he appears to say no such thing: he refuses to rule out consideration of the plan as part of the whole consultation process, so I don’t really see what has changed. I’m hoping that lots of people show up in support of leaving the path exactly as it is …
You can see Cllr Bradshaw’s statement here …
Posted on Saturday, 29 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in bicycles, ecology, politics, rotten boroughs | No comments
No curry tonight then…
I was at St Luke’s Church in Battersea last night, doing a presentation on Alternative Worship. The curate there, Ravi Holy, had invited me to do the talk. We had planned to go out for a curry beforehand, but when we arrived at the restaurant, it was closed, and the following notice was on the door.
Having read the notice, I was rather glad that the opportunity had passed us by.
Posted on Thursday, 13 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in humour | No comments
What it’s like to be Welsh at the moment
You feel like this.
Posted on Monday, 10 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in uncategorized | No comments
On having the armed forces
There’s an interesting, if badly-spelt, debate going on on the BBC Have Your Say website. This follows a recent news report of how personnel from RAF Wittering have been ordered not to wear uniform in the local town of Peterborough, following incidents of servicemen and women being insulted because of anti-war sentiment. The debate includes stories of similar incidents happening to forces personnel around the country (for example, staff from RAF Brize Norton denied entry to a petrol-station on the grounds that their uniforms would “offend the public”).
I find myself getting very angry at this for all sorts of different reasons. One reason is that it feels so unbelievably ungrateful to people who are putting their own lives at risk, and sometimes losing them, in the service of this country. The second is that ignorance on this scale always makes me angry. Because for me it is symptomatic of a deeper cultural, political and theological ignorance which is growing.
I deeply opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq and continue to believe that it did not fulfill the conditions for a Just War, so we should never have got in there in the first place. I believe that history since has borne those convictions out. BUT, once a war begins, the situation changes. We are years down the road now: the decision on whether and when to leave that country is an entirely different one - indeed it is a more difficult one, perhaps, than the decision ever to join war in the first place. So political voices raised in opposing the current occupation need to answer the question of how best to bring it to an end, and in so doing, must address the issue of the widest welfare for all human beings presently caught up in the situation.
And yet, none of these issues bear upon the morality or position of a single member of the armed forces, nor upon the armed forces themselves. These are political questions to be discussed in the wider context of public debate in Britain. They are particularly matters for the government of today. If people disagree with there being a single British soldier in Iraq, they need to bring that to the door of the people who are keeping them there - our government. They are there because we elected a government which decided to join war in Iraq. We also re-elected them afterwards. Maybe we made a mistake, but if so, then we need to own responsibility for that and exercise it in appropriate ways. Insulting service personnel is not an appropriate way.
But this raises the spectre of a much deeper ignorance which, sadly, I have encountered in Christian circles on occasions. Britain, like most nations, keeps a standing army, navy and air-force. Their responsibility is to follow the orders of our democratically-elected government and, when so ordered, to join conflict and in that arena to use a variety of methods demanded by it to bring about the wishes of our government according to rules of engagement set by our government. These include pursuasion, protection, coercion, and, where no other option remains, to kill. In the field of conflict, this also includes the real possibility of being killed in the process, since war is like that.
Having laid it out like that, we may feel revulsion at the prospect of war. Most civilized human beings normally do so, including members of the armed forces. War is a horrendous context to put any human being, but our armed forces have the duty, under the British constitution, to enter those contexts on our behalf and to carry out the will of our representatives in government. They are doing that right now, our our behalf, in Iraq. Wars are a bit like sewers: nobody wants to go into them, but someone in the end does so on everyone else’s behalf. Our armed forces are there and operating “in our name”. Whilst Britain maintains armed forces, they will continue to operate “in our name”.
Whatever the pros and cons of this, it is worth citing another example. A couple of years before going into Iraq, British forces went into Sierra Leone, where a civil war was leading to a systematic abuse of the weakest amongst its citizenry. Following an ineffective period of intervention by UN forces, the country was faced with the prospect of a takeover by the RUF. All the NGOs had had to flee because it was unsafe to remain, leaving the weakest people in the country exposed to terrible evil. The British Army invaded in 2000, and in a short period of time removed the influence of the RUF, demobbed child soldiers, made it safe for NGOs to return, and in a couple of years the country had changed from bloody chaos to democracy and peace, albeit with terrible scars. Again, the British forces did this “in our name”.
The fact is that we live in a world where, in places, people bear and brandish arms. They threaten others with these arms, including the weak in their land and any weak neighbouring countries. If you ask any person who has worked with a NGO in a country which is unstable or subject to civil war, they will tell you that they can only operate with the protection of either a stable and benign local army, or with the support of the armed forces from stable, democratic external countries who believe they have a responsibility for global peace. Sadly, the United Nations is sometimes highly ineffective at providing this support, as the case of Sierra Leone proved (and, arguably, is also being proved again at the moment in the lives of people in Darfur).
About three or so years ago, some time after the start of the present Iraq conflict, I was sitting in a field at the Greenbelt Festival at a service of Holy Communion. An entire litany had been constructed, protesting about the war, with the response “Not in our Name”. I love the Greenbelt Festival, but I found this nauseating. Here we were, a crowd of mostly middle-class, western Christians, few of whom had ever seen a gun fire a bullet, nor heard the sound of rifle-fire in real-life, chanting this liturgical response whilst thousands of British soldiers were risking their lives and carrying out the ugly task of war for precisely that: “in our name”. The “Not in our Name” chanting bandwagon had begun earlier that year, but, crucially, it had begun after the conflict had begun, and troops were already engaged. It was the wrong sentiment, wrapped up in the wrong catch-phrase: wrong, because instead of arguing for a precise course of action (such as “troops out now”) which could be subject to a political and moral debate over its wisdom and practicality, it was seeking to dissociate the protesters from the link with the armed conflict, and therefore the armed personnel who are out there “in our name”. It was a woolly phrase, whose imprecision was at best insulting, and at worst, immorally abandoning people who we, through our democratically-elected government, had contracted to work on our behalf in a dangerous situation. That was bad enough, but at Greenbelt it wasn’t even being chanted to the government, it was being chanted to God. So what on earth was going on?
My conclusion now, which I had dimly been aware of through my anger at the time, but am now much more clear about, was that it was a large-scale attempt at pious guilt-avoidance, founded on ignorance of how politics, and therefore the world, works. So what were we actually saying? There were a number of possibilities:
- Dear God: We do not believe that Britain should keep or use any armed forces. We are therefore pacifists.
- Dear God: We disagree with the British constitution and the concept of executive government acting on our behalf. We are therefore anarchists.
- Dear God: we feel morally embarrassed about this, so we corporately wring our hands in your presence because we would “rather this not happen in our name”
- Dear God: we feel angry about this, but we can’t be bothered to understand it, so we’re publicly washing our hands of culpability for this situation, because we hope that such ignorance is defence in the (moral) law
- Dear God: We forgot to protest about the war when to do so might have made a difference, so we’re salving our consciences for the killing by saying these words to you now (hopefully, it will make us feel a bit better and more righteous having done so)
… or any number of the above.
The words of worship are sacred, and so it’s very important that they be subject to theological and moral scrutiny before people are asked to use them in the offering of the worship of the People of God. The use of slogans in liturgy is therefore a high-risk strategy. In this case, I believe the slogan failed theologically, politically, morally and ethically to speak truth to God, which is rather important in worship. But, hey, maybe most people there didn’t really know what they were doing or saying anyway.
And that’s the problem. There is a kind of growing, culpable ignorance regarding the way politics works. A generation of adults has grown up, formed by a popularist disenchantment with politics, which fails to appreciate that it only works properly when people realise that democracy is about everyone accepting responsibility for their own governance and therefore the governments which we elect. After we, the people, have elected them, we bear a certain responsibility for their actions, because we elect them to act on our behalf. When they send our soldiers into war, they do it “in our name”, and whilst we have a democracy, it will always be in our name. We will have an opportunity to change that government to one which offers an alternative. Some of us won’t get our way, but that’s democracy, and if anyone can come up with a better system, then let’s consider it.
There are three aspects of maturity which sometimes come slowly. One is to realise that sometimes you bear responsibility for situations which you didn’t directly, but only indirectly, bring about. The second is to learn that the act of living brings inevitable guilt. The only thing that can be done about this is to do what we can to avoid incurring guilt whilst we can, but once it is too late then we need to ask for forgiveness, rather than wash our hands of responsibility. The third thing is to realise that ‘no man is an island’ - we work as a society, and we bear responsibility for the actions of that society, because we are part of it.
It’s the sad failure to realise these facts that leads to well-meaning Christians piously indulging in act of (un-)ethical “handwashing” in a Gloucestershire field, and to people insulting uniformed personnel in Peterborough. We don’t want the responsibility, we don’t know what to do with the guilt, and we’d rather the whole world just go away.
Posted on Saturday, 8 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in altworship, politics, rants, spirituality, theology | 3 comments
Postman Pat gets all evangelistic
This is a little gem for anyone who grew up with the 1980s subcultures of British children’s TV and the Charismatic Movement (actually, I sometimes get a bit confused in my memory of which one was which …)
Posted on Thursday, 6 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in bicycles, humour | 1 comment
OpenOffice and Zotero
Today I discovered Zotero. I gave over my day off to some preparation towards upping my academic activity as the year progresses. I have already decided to move over from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice. This is largely because I have never liked MS Word 2003 for the Mac. It has too much clutter and too few features of relevance to me. Furthermore, like most Microsoft applications, the user is steadily gravitating further and further away from actually controlling the application and more in the direction of being controlled by it. In the case of Word 2003 for the Mac, the inability to design my own letter template that actually worked, despite all the RTFM-ing and web searching in the world, finally led me to hate the application which I had quite liked in its 1997 incarnation (although never so much as I’d liked WordPerfect). What finally did it for Word was that the reviews of the latest Word 2008 for the Mac suggest that the chief improvement over its predecessor is that it comes as a Universal Binary. Given that I had come to dislike Word so much, ’similarity’ was not exactly what I was after in the new version. To pay more good money for this application would have required a radical departure.
So I have finally, and consistently made the change. I’m using NeoOffice. This is a Mac Aqua port of OpenOffice, but to all intents and purposes they are the same application, so I’m going to refer to it as OpenOffice - partly because this is the incarnation which I use on my Linux machine. I’ve been mucking about trying to find a new wordprocessor which ticks most of my personal boxes. I’ve tried Pages, the one which ships with iWork 08, which I principally bought for Keynote. Pages isn’t bad. It integrates beautifully with OS X as you would expect and uses the latest Apple HIG. It’s not a bad little wordprocessor, but it is limited once you start pressing it into some serious applied use, which is what I want, once I turn my attentions to writing something serious. For example, it won’t combine both Footnotes and Endnotes in a single document: something I was using back in the early 1980s with my first word processor, when I was compiling a critical text of the Catholic Apostolic Initiation Liturgy for my PhD. If my MS-DOS wordprocessor (the sadly-lamented Perfect Writer, which started life on CP/M) could do it then, there’s no real excuse for Apple’s current offering being unable to offer it now. The second problem with Pages is that it uses a unique, proprietory format for its files. Yes, like most other WPs it will export in Word 97 format (.doc), and does a swish job of producing PDF files, but I really don’t want to get locked into some minority format for any sophisticated formatted project. Thirdly, and worst of all, Pages is restricted to the Mac platform, and for a wordprocessor, it would have to deliver significant extra leverage (such as the ability to write articles by itself) to make that anything other than a net liability. So Pages, in the end, was not up to the job, however pretty it looked on my Mac.
I’ve always watched the OpenOffice project with interest, and occasionally played with it on my Linux box (which doesn’t do much by way of wordprocessing). Yet up to now, I never bothered much with it because of sheer, yet increasingly irritated, laziness of staying in the familiar world of Word. It’s not the prettiest WP in the world, but its feature-set has grown over the years without becoming the bloated behemoth which is Word. In similar way, the Mac incarnation, NeoOffice, looks a bit weird on the Mac, despite being an Aqua application, but it then just goes and does the job. More to the point, it uses an open document format (*.odt) and can also import and export a whole range of other file formats including *.doc, *.pdf and even the ghastly *.docx format which the latest versions of Word use. More to the point, it does the traditional stuff of wordprocessing really well - including robust footnoting. So I think my search is over, and ironically, it hasn’t cost me a penny (except for the Education Version of Mac Office 2003, which I bought some years ago).
But the real discovery today has been Zotero. The citation-footnoting-bibliography capabilities are already there in OpenOffice/NeoOffice, but they’re limited. Of particular annoyance is that when using the “internal” bibliographic system, you’re locked into just one citation format and it’s not the one I usually prefer - Chicago Manual of Style. Zotero, which is open-source, takes a completely different approach and works as a Firefox plugin. At first, this may seem a bit weird but it’s one of its greatest strengths. Zotero is starting to be supported by a *lot* of academic funding, compared to other open-source projects. Once you start to play with it, you can see why: it has *masses* of realizable potential. At its most basic, Zotero is a bibliography/citation application which stores all your bibliography in a database file which it stores locally on your computer’s hard-drive. This is important because Zotero will continue to work, even when you’re disconnected from the Internet. Generating a citation is easy: you can copy it to a file, or onto the clipboard, for insertion in any kind of document, application, etc. That is it at its most basic. But it’s much more clever than that.
Zotero will “read” bibliography off a web page. For example, if you visit an Amazon page to see a book’s details, you just need to click a little icon which appears in the address bar of Firefox and suddenly an entry is copied over to Zotero’s bibliography, as Steve Jobs says, “bang!” - just like that. All the form-filling is just done automatically. It works on most major library catalogues (such as the British Library, Cambridge University Library, etc.) citation indices, and a host of other sources for bibliographical information. If you like, you can add and edit detail, but my experience so far is that most of the stuff goes straight over.
The next clever thing is that Zotero will talk to both MS Word and OpenOffice/NeoOffice via plugins. Once you’ve installed it, you see a series of new buttons on the wordprocessor’s menu bar, for creating and editing citations and bibliographic references in a document. Doing a citation in a footnote is done by clicking a button, then picking the work from Zotero’s database which opens up in a window, click again, and it’s done. The citation can appear *in a whole range of possible citation styles, including Chicago Manual of Style*. You set the style at the start of each new document or as a default.
Zotero also allows the user to affix notes to bibliography entries in much the same way as similar commercial applications, such as EndNote. But unlike those applications, it can easily be ported across different operating systems because it’s linked to the Firefox Plugin API, rather than to an Operating System’s API. It is therefore possible for me to keep identical copies of my bibliography, on machines using Mac OS X, Linux and even Windows (although I no longer use the latter) using Zotero and some judicious use of rsync.
In addition to this, Zotero will also reference a whole range of things, including web pages, in each case producing beautiful bibliographic output. It would take far more than a mere blog post to do it justice, but if you’re doing any form of research which requires compilation of bibliography, then it’s definitely worth having a look.
Zotero is still under development and its features are already very large. I’ve also discovered that there are one or two bugs in the OpenOffice plugin: you can confuse it by inserting citations out of writing sequence (it gets confused with its “ibids” - but there again, don’t we all?) but it allows you to override its guesses in the citation, so it’s not the end of the world. This is a project which is worth watching carefully and I would regard it as fully usable and useful right now.
Posted on Monday, 3 March 2008 by Paul | Posted in geekism, macolatry, theology | 1 comment
St Paul had it easy
The first thing to say is that I think the whole shift of culture in the Church of England after the report Mission-shaped Church has been wonderful for anyone who wants to risk trying to plant Fresh Expressions of Church. When I think back just seven years, the Church of England was comparatively in the “dark ages” as far as church-planting is concerned. At this month’s General Synod, we discussed the final stage of the process which makes it culturally and legally possible for a group of Anglican Christians to plant a church outside of a single parish boundary, and not necessarily wedded to a Parish structure. This becomes possible through a mechanism called a “Bishop’s Mission Order”. It will mean many Fresh Expressions, Alternative Worship communities and Emerging Church groups have a vehicle, within Anglican structures, to exist, flourish and enjoy full legitimation. All great so far …
However, the “Code of Practice” which has been drawn up by the House of Bishops, and which governs how Bishop’s Mission Orders can work runs to 83 pages, six chapters and five appendices. Although essentially an enabling document, it speaks volumes about a large Church which is shackled to structures inherited from a past rooted in Christendom, and for whom the call to become truly missionary (or missional, if you prefer) has come late, perhaps too late, in its history.
Here is a quick look at a simplified “Procedure Flowchart” which explains the process of how a mission initiative (actual or planned) would go about getting legitimation through a Bishop’s mission order. Pretty, isn’t it? Pretty complicated… (If you click on the image, it will download it in PDF).
Having read the document, I found myself thinking, again and again, “what are we afraid of?” The overwhelming fear seems to be that certain territorial or ecumenical feathers may be ruffled by the appearance in an area of a new, young, fast-changing form of church which people are attracted to, but which cannot be controlled by more established Christian power structures. A lesser fear also lurks, based on the assumption that spontaneity, innovation and rapid development will always end in tears, and the fear that this might besmirch the “good name” of the reliable product of the Church of England. Of course, once in a blue moon, this can actually happen (as it did in the case of Nine O’Clock Service).
I have to shrug my shoulders reluctantly and accept that megaliths such as the Church of England do have a low fear threshold when it comes to legitimating anything which is fast-moving, subject to change, hard to understand and therefore hard to control. But at the same time, I wish more people would recognize that we (ie. the CofE) have to be far more afraid of the haemorrhaging of attendance from so many parish churches who stick to the established script, for at the moment it looks like a slow and irreversible death from a thousand cuts. Although I do not believe the parish model to be completely broken from a missional point of view, I do think that it is holed below the waterline as a “default” mode of being church. My guess is that for every one example which works (from a mission point of view) there are probably about forty which are not working and have very little likelihood of ever working again. So the need for the Church to have a “mixed economy” of modes of being church is far more urgent than most people realize. The very kind of communities which we need are those which are fast-moving, subject to change, hard to understand outside their context and therefore hard to control. We need to trust the Holy Spirit a bit more when it comes to mission, and legal or quasi-legal structures a good bit less, because law - however useful it is - does not drive mission, but is there to cater for the odd occasion when things go wrong. So the document (which delights in the catchy title Dioceses, Pastoral and Mission Measure 2007: Part V: Mission Initiatives Code of Practice) had me with my head in my hands on
occasion. I’m grateful that it makes possible what it makes possible, but it doesn’t necessarily make it easy, nor does it necessarily make it possible in a short space of time - especially when it’s not operating in sympathetic or confident hands. I couldn’t help wondering what St Paul would have done in Asia Minor if he needed to go through this kind of rigamarole. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that the whole Church of England (and, sadly, it would appear, the House of Bishops) also need to rediscover that generous Catholic missional spirit we see between people like St Paul, Apollos and others, which worried less about territory and ownership, and far more about the message getting out and transforming the world.
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labour of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building. (1 Cor 3:5-9)
It’s not difficult to redraw the version of the “Procedure Flowchart” which led to the planting of the Church of God amongst the Gentile communities in Asia Minor. Even with the co-existence of Judaizing opposition groups who were seeking to undo (or “correct”) their work, it still took off and became the womb of Eastern Christianity.
Posted on Wednesday, 27 February 2008 by Paul | Posted in altworship, emerging church, good ole cofe, humour, rants | 4 comments
