Jason Clark

Trying to make safe spaces for diverse and healthy conversations about church, culture, mission, theology and motorbikes

XKCD and superiority of Atheists and Fundamentalists

Brett Jordan put me onto this site, http://xkcd.com/ subtitled 'A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language'.

According to the site, What does XKCD stand for?: 'It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.'

Superb blog on science, religion, technology, pop culture and faith: http://www.greenflame.org/

Stephen Garner is a friend, but we've never met in person.  He's in New Zealand, and we've spoken on and off for several years via each other's blogs and on email.

Within that I am still amazed at how technology has extended and enabled relationships in my life.

Stephen lectures in practical theology, and has a special interest in relationships of theology and religion with science, technology and media. He's also interested in the interaction of spirituality with technology, and social justice issues relating to technology and the environment.

You can read more about him here, and catch his blog here.

Emerging Church falling into same three traps of Evangelical Church?

Another great blogger to recommend to you, David Fitch.

David has a three part series, in which he explores how the Emerging Church 'must avoid three dangers, three traps if they (we) are to elude the traps that evangelicalism has itself already fallen into.  That’s when I came up with these three clumsy terms, de incarnationalize, de-eschatologize and de-ecclesiologize.'

His latest post explores the possible de-ecclesiologization in the work of Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost.

I've been long convinced and I'm exploring in my PhD research how Evangelicals have had too low a view of Church.  Emerging Ecclesiology continues an evangelical missional impetus, but perpetuates the problems of its de-priorisation of ecclesiology, and separation of Church from Mission.

The Emperors New Clothes: Jonny Baker talking missional common sense

This is just in case anyone reading this hasn't hear of Jonny Baker, one of the most well known and long standing UK christian bloggers.

Make sure you catch this refreshing and perceptive post 'Romantic Tosh'.  It could just as easily have been titled, "The Emperors New Clothes'.

Three simple questions about Jesus, new series

My friend Jason Coker, has started a blog series that I am taking part in, later in July. I'm so looking forward to this.
 
His premise:

The idea is to ask different people how they would explain Jesus Christ to someone who had heard about him, but really knew nothing about Christianity. Their questions are:

  • Who is Jesus the Christ?
  • What has he done?
  • Why does it matter?