I was once asked to sum up the gospel in a sentence. I said this: Jesus is Lord. Why is this so controversial? Did you react a bit when I wrote it? It certainly caused quite a stir amongst the nice, well-meaning Christians in my group. Is this not very stark? Surely the idea of […]
This blog post is part of a series (starting here) exploring what Charles Taylor can teach us about how faith and secularity interact in his (enormous) work A Secular Age. One of Taylor’s main points seems to be that there is a big story in our culture that Science inevitably replaces Faith. Matthew Arnold’s poem On […]
I’ve been very preoccupied by my CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit these last few months, which has put paid to my desire to blog. However, at college this week we did a sequence on public theology. This is what I had to say. Life, said the Buddha, is difficult. This seems like a very basic […]
What is the church for? As you can imagine, this question often comes to me as I work my way through my three years of ministerial formation. There seem to be a lot of committees – and I don’t think renaming them “councils” makes them any more glamorous, a lot of OH&S, a lot of […]
It’s summer holidays here in Australia, so I’m going to take a break from telling my apologia pro vita sua, and talk about a new project I’m thinking of investing my summer in, in the absence of paid work over January, and the impossibility of doing anything about that fact while the entire world is […]
One of my issues with the liberalism of someone like Peter Rollins is that I feel like it doesn’t create anything positive. Doubt is a powerful solvent, which is good and right, and some things need to be dissolved. The whiteboard needs to be wiped clean before something new can be created. But something new […]
Last week I posted about the situation of the Christian churches in the West as I see it. I posed the question “What does Christianity have to do with real life?” I, rather rashly, promised to share my thoughts about What Is To Be Done this week. All my thoughts are based on reflecting on […]
If Cafechurch had a theme TV show, it would be Portlandia. The hipster culture it parodies so beautifully, and rather fondly I like to think, feels like an exact match for the culture that Cafechurch is part of. Possibly my favourite skit (at the moment) is “Over” A big part of why Portlandia is amusing […]
For my money, the most important thing about doing church in post-modernity is this: you don’t know what you are doing. Not only that, you don’t know anything at all. You don’t know where you are going, and so you don’t know how to get there either. Don’t feel bad, neither does anyone else, least […]
Alister Pate