The most important talk of my life? #dmingml
A photo from last Saturday night. Me explaining to international friends how to navigate a curry house menu at the oldest Punjabi north Indian restaurant in the UK.
Jason Clark
Trying to make safe spaces for diverse and healthy conversations about church, culture, mission, theology and motorbikes
Filed underD.Min
climate, humour, and the 'terroir' of Church
I'm just listening to Martyn Percy talk with our D.Min GML students about the climate, smell, temperature and 'terroir' of Church life. You can catch the thoughts from Students at our 'Taggregator' site.
I'll post the MP3 and notes later, riveting and stimulating stuff.
Bringing Facebook, Twitter and YouTube together to tell a bigger missional story with Taggregator #dmingml
Most learning environments use their own content management system (CMS). A university might have something behind closed doors and a missional community might use Ning.
For the Global Missional Leadership Community (GML), we wanted to allow content creators to use their social media tools and not restrict people to a platform we choose. Allowing a community to use their platforms of choice and with a tool that brings all those creative spaces together, is so innovative and exciting.
Dave Merwin has done just that with Taggregator and you can get a first look at it in action http://dmingml.com.
So this allows our students to use Facebook, Posterous, Twitter to write and create content, and the http://dmingml.com brings all the content together. And this content is all open to everyone. So anyone wanting to follow along with the GML community can do so and take part by tagging their content with the #dmingml tag.
It's in it's first beta release and has a long way to go, but will go a long way. I suspect this is something others are going to want to pick up on to enable communities to connect together around multiple social media platforms.
For example I want this for my church community. We could set up vineyardchurch.org/community and use the tag #vcs, and then any people in our church using Facebook, Posterous, Twitter etc could tag anything they create and it would pull through to our church Taggregator site.
If your interested do follow Dave Merwin as he develops Taggregator.
Evangelicalism: Dispensing religious goods and services?
I have a short blog piece/article on the Fuller Seminary blog, about a new D.Min course they have asked me to teach. Text is also below, FYI.
Thomas Taylor (1738–1816) was appointed by John Wesley in 1761 (and is one of the few people who had an itinerant career longer than Wesley), travelling extensively over several decades, throughout Wales, Scotland, and England. He was able to observe evangelical faith in relation to a myriad of engagements, physical, cultural, political, psychological, ecclesial, within the emerging middles classes and the birth of market society. In all those engagements with faith, Taylor observed that ‘evangelical religion spread best where trade was growing’.
Taylor was able to observe not only the beginnings of the evangelical tradition, but also its nascent relationship to the rise and development of the market society. He was also well placed to discern the possibilities and captivities of that relationship in its intrinsic nature.
More recently, John Milbank has diagnosed the current relationship of evangelicalism to the market as being ‘quite simply a new mutation of Protestantism in its mutually constitutive relationship with capitalism’. Or, perhaps more crudely, we might combine and paraphrase Thomas Taylor and John Milbank using the words of Dan Kimball that the modern Protestant evangelical church has all too often become about the ‘dispensing of religious goods and services’ to Christian consumers.
