It’s quite ironic that the latest Atheist Bus Campaign billboard posters feature children of a well-known Christian musician. Made me laugh anyway.

Seriously though, I do believe that the campaign has a point. Children should not be labelled by their parents’ beliefs (whether that’s Christian, Muslim, Sikh or Humanist). My Northern Irish childhood would have been very different if children of Catholic and Protestant children were not segregated into different ghettoised schools. (Although how much of this segregation was a product of ethnic rather than religious divisions is debatable).

Parents ought to be able to communicate their own worldview and values to their children. The most sensible parents will obviously encourage their children to be inquisitive and open to different ideas. They will know that it is counterproductive to bring up children in a narrow and restrictive environment, whatever the parents’ beliefs.

But let’s not build stereotypes of adults either. People who have a religious faith are often just as open to other people as those who have a non-religious worldview. Let’s all promote acceptance of diversity, even if others don’t share our worldview.

Some characteristics of the emerging church really appeal to me:

• Outward-facing. The technical term for this is “missional”, which really means that everyone in the church has an active part to play in their communities, culture and world.
• Authentic. What we do should be real and honest, and should encompass all of our lives. There is no room for “Sunday Christianity”. Church should not be a rigid structure, but willing to change to accommodate the needs of people.
• Open. There should be respect for and dialogue with people who don’t share our views, in an honest and open environment. The church should explore and
• Respect for the old and the new. Contemporary Christianity can often be a bit like “that song was written in the 1990s, so last decade…”, whereas emerging Christianity realises that traditions through time can speak to us. The emerging

As you would expect from a movement that has grown out of 21st century culture, the emerging church has a very strong presence on the web. There are a lot of blogs, and I particularly like:

Tall Skinny Kiwi – Andrew Jones from Orkney.
The Rubicon – well thought-out discussion on a wide range of topics, with it’s roots in the Salvation Army.
Brian McLaren – one of the main thinkers in the emerging movement.

Last night we were looking at the question “what does a church do?”. Our group started to list all the usual things: evangelism, worship, prayer etc. But we felt that there was something limiting in the language – there were pre-conceived notions of how we “do” these activities. So we decided to experiment with new language. So what does church do?

1. The primary aim of church is to enable people to have an experience of God – wherever that occurs on a person’s journey of faith. This might involve exploring the concept of faith with a friend, praying alongside someone going through a difficult time, or sharing a time of worship and contemplation with a group of people.
2. We also have an opportunity to demonstrate spiritual thought leadership. This adapts and subverts a business concept. It means an opportunity to change the way that people view the world through relating spiritual concepts to everyday life. Traditionally this would be called “prophecy”.
3. Part of our role is to challenge boundaries. This means stretching and challenging people within the church to think outside their traditional comfort zone, but also challenging those outside the church.
4. We have a responsibility to care for others and work towards their wholeness. This can mean that we speak up for those who have no voice, locally or around the world. We treat others as individuals and we refuse to stereotype.
5. Finally, the very nature of the church is one that forms networks and communities. The church is a community of people that is open to and welcomes people from outside the community; it also reaches out through individuals to countless other networks.

Those of us in our group found that thinking about new language was quite refreshing (although a sense of irony was mandatory). The most interesting thing was the strength of the negative reaction from other discussion groups!

The idea is to change our culture’s view of Easter, and the message surrounding it, but not to plan, control or organize the event (no matter how tempting this would be to our control freak Christian leaders). The aim is:

“To change Easter from the non-event anti-climax of a tradition-minded middle-class in a religious subculture.”

“To confront the core problem – that Christian culture is offputting to the secular majority.”

Theo Hobson has floated this idea since last summer in the Guardian and at Greenbelt.

I hope it catches on.

Bono was the keynote speaker at the USA 54th National Prayer Breakfast this morning. (A very strange event indeed, particularly to Europeans who think that the US has a separate church and state.)

Bono said some challenging and inspiring things:

On faith:

…religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…

I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.

Even though I was a believer.

Perhaps because I was a believer.

On justice:

And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.

Let me repeat that: It’s not about charity, it’s about justice.

And that’s too bad.

Because you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drugstore. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.

And he challenged the US to increase aid to 1% of national income:

Mr. President, Congress, people of faith, people of America:

I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing…. Which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional one percent of the federal budget tithed to the poor.

What is one percent?

One percent is not merely a number on a balance sheet.

One percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging waterholes to provide clean water.

One percent is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism towards Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records and away
from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.

Read his full remarks. Inspiring.

This short series aims to challenges what Dawkins describes as ‘a process of non-thinking called faith’. According to the Channel 4 material, Dawkins:

“describes his astonishment that, at the start of the 21st century, religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth. Science, based on scepticism, investigation and evidence, must continuously test its own concepts and claims. Faith, by definition, defies evidence: it is untested and unshakeable, and is therefore in direct contradiction with science.”

I have enormous respect for Dawkins as a scientist and intellectual, and I agree with some of his ideas. I too find fundamentalism frightening and dangerous, whether it comes from the Abrahamic religions or from scientific rationalism. But I don’t throw out faith completely. A more realistic faith embraces uncertainty, encourages debate and dissension, and provides space for people to explore the spiritual aspect to their lives. This usually ends up being much more challenging than following a fundamentalist rulebook.

I also agree with Dawkins that faith schools are a bad idea, contributing to sectarianism. Growing up in Ireland in the 1970s, I didn’t have any opportunity to make friends with Catholics until I went to university – and 17 years of segregation takes a long time to overcome. But education is not the only contributor to sectarian attitudes, so should not receive all the blame.

Madeleine Bunting wrote an interesting critique of Dawkins in yesterday’s Guardian. It has become fashionable among left-leaning Guardian-reading types (i.e. people like me) to dismiss all religion and faith (see Polly Toynbee’s polemic on the Narnia film), so it is encouraging to see a more balanced debate.

I hope that Dawkins’ programmes will encourage more debate, and that people who hold a Christian faith (and others) will engage further.

Update 16/01/2005:
This blog post was quoted in The Guardian on Saturday 14 January – Saturday Web page (p32, main section).

The original apbc.net site (well, actually version 2 or 3) was hand-crafted using PHP over a MySQL database, and seemed to work reasonably well.

The site maintained bespoke database tables for content, user management (we maintain a private contact list) and rota management (to manage the rota for each week’s worship service). There were a few problems with cross-browser viewing, mainly because I was not strict enough in my use of CSS, but it was becoming time-consuming to maintain and extend the site.

Motivation

The whole idea of converting to a CMS was spurred on by an article on Heal Your Church Website.com in August, that discussed the merits of WordPress versus other CMS for hosting a church website. WP seemed to come out fairly well, and as I already had experience of using WP for this site, it was a reasonably clear-cut choice. I considered other CMS possibilities (the usual suspects as specified in opensourcecms.com: Mambo, Drupal, PHPNuke etc.), but many of these are fairly heavyweight content-driven applications intended for enterprise or large community sites, rather than for a relatively static church site. WP has the right scale for the type of site I needed to build.

Building

The design and implementation process was relatively straightforward. It was easy to port across the content from the old site to a new Page structure in WordPress. Date-bound news articles were converted to the more blog-like Posts.

A few pages required hand-crafted PHP code – such as the bespoke rota pages, and management of the viewing of private sites. This was helped by the EzStatic plugin, that allows inline PHP within a WordPress page or post.

We maintain a private contact list for viewing by members of the congregation only – this was enabled by the Usermeta and Userextra plugins, that allow additional metadata to be held for each registered user.

Layout and design used the WordPress themes, which are all based on templates and CSS. I adapted Becca Wei’s nice Almost-Spring theme to incorporate a header picture.

Summary

In summary, the main advantages of using WP, for the apbc.net site, are:

• Ease of editing for non-technical authors – I wanted to extend authorship to several other people;
• Increased ability to extend the site using plugins, rather than having to hand-craft all the functionality;
• Built-in publication using RSS and Atom.

I’m looking forward to extending the site now using additonal plugins – I have my eye on a plugin for an event calendar. If I get some more free time, I might have a hack at writing a WP plugin for church rota management!

The experience has been interesting, and I now have a different opinion on hand-crafting code. It is much better to adapt existing frameworks, particularly those in the open source domain, and to concentrate coding effort on truly bespoke functionality, or on integration. I need to take this message into my day job as well.

They have kept in touch ever since, and this year they, along with their brother Nungsang and another friend, are visiting the Baptist World Alliance conference in Birmingham. So they spent a few days in Glasgow with Marjorie, and we hosted them for lunch, along with other people from housegroup.

Nagaland is in the far NE of India, with China to the north, Burma to the southeast, Bangladesh to the southwest, and Assam to the northwest. It is a small state with only 1.2 million people, who are predominantly Baptist! Nungsang is a Baptist pastor, working as part of the Naga community in Calcutta/Kolkata, and the three women work for the Nagaland government and are active participants in their local church life.

The Nagas were very strongly evangelical, which I must admit I found uncomfortable (I did a recent online quiz to find that I was an “Emerging, post-modern” Christian), but it was good to be exposed to a different culture, there was certainly something to learn about enthusiasm and strong faith.

So, very rewarding to discover more about somewhere so different. Without Marjorie’s friends I certainly would never have heard of Nagaland.