Jonathan Mitchican The Living Church Evangelism of the Weird
Richard Peers Quodcumque Welsh Sodality Talk; Mary, Messy Church and Mission
Justin Thacker Church Times Yes, the poor will be with us — so fight on
Archdruid Eileen The Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley That Was the Church that Wasn’t
Sorry, but I did not appreciate Jonathan Mitchican’s appeal for weirdness. “The weirder we can be, the better”. The trouble is, we are already regarded as weird by many ordinary people, and I can’t see that accentuating that weirdness helps at all. In trying to project “our distinctiveness from the world” we should do weird things, like blessing pieces of chalk etc? Really? My suspicion is that the widening gulf between many Christian churches and society at large is because we are insufficiently “distinctive” IN “the world”… and interest in our faith is less likely to be stimulated by ‘being… Read more »
In 1983 the late Eric Hobsbawm and the late Terence Ranger edited a collection of essays called The Invention of Tradition, in which all manner of sacrosanct customs were ‘discovered’ to be of relatively recent provenance. The volume was somewhat scurrilous for a work of academia and it had an impact upon the cognoscenti not unlike that of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918). Just as in the 1920s the great men and women of the nineteenth century were soon deemed to be deranged rogues and hypocrites because Strachey had insinuated that they were so (though he had, arguably, libelled his… Read more »
Wow. If you’re going to be thought weird by the culture, for goodness’s sake let it be because you’re practising the Sermon on the Mount, not a bunch of traditions with little or no connection with the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.
A very brief comment on Richard Peers’ post: quixotic (not).