Simon Says ...

Friday saw CMS bring their excellent Blah tour to Bristol. Featuring Ryan Bloger , an academic from Fuller seminary in the US who specialises in emerging church; Karen Ward , Abbess of the Church of the Apostles in Seattle; Jonny Baker from CMS; Ben Edson from Sanctus1 in Manchester; and loads of folk from Foundation . I was a bit of a grouch, I confess, but a number of things struck me: 1. I am allergic to the word 'postmodern'. It is either meaningless, and so shouldn't be used, or it is a seriously flawed description of the world, and so shouldn't be used, or else it is describing something anti-Christian, and so shouldn't be used positively by Christians. I have ranted about this before , and I feel another one coming on ... 2. Emerging church looks remarkably like 1960s and 1970s British liberal Christianity. In fact I was sent straight back to reading John AT Robinson's The New Reformation . More to explore here, but as a liberal Christian I fear f...

It seems that a woman has woken up after having a stroke and her Geordie accent has been changed into a mixture of Jamaican, Slovakian and Canadian. (She's widely travelled, at any rate!) It is important to note that Geordie is the only accent for swearing at referees or stupid players who get red cards or try to get their friends sent off. We know all too well the pain of 'forty years of hurt' - it's about that long since we won anything. But having heard a number of attempts at Geordie, by those poor unfortunates who don't speak the language of heaven, and I now realise that they all suffer from medical complaints. This explains a lot ...