Reignite

This blog is five years old. For most of the past five years I've been the only active UK Unitarian blogger. There were one of two that came and went, and Andrew Brown has been publishing his sermons for a long time (not sure I count that as blogging exactly). But now all of a sudden there is a whole blogosphere for the UK Unitarian community. I think a lot of this came from a workshop that Yewtree did at this year's Annual Meetings. That seems to have inspired a lot of people to start blogging. There is now a blog aggregator here and here to keep up to date. It's good to have a community where I've been shouting into an echoey space for a long time.

New BBC sitcom "Rev." Watch here.

I'm sure that all you readers subscribe to the Journal of Bisexuality (who doesn't?). If you do you'll have seen that the most recent issue is a special issue on the subject of Bisexualities and Spiritualities . And it features an article I wrote called "Bi Christian Unitarian: A Theology of Transgression." The copyright is owned by the publishers, so I can't reproduce the article here, but the link should help you to look it up if you're interested. My basic premise is that bisexuals transgress the boundaries of gender and sexuality that we have constructed in our culture. When others speak and write about bisexuals they identify the "problem" with the bisexual who transgress these boundaries, and would rather call into question the existence of bisexuals than the existence of those boundaries. However, when bisexuals speak for themselves they are more likely to call into question the nature of those boundaries. Bisexuals witness to the possibil...

Picture the scene: it's the summer of 2008, and I'm in San Francisco. I'm wandering down the Castro and drop into a bookshop. Perusing the shelves I see a book that I simply have to buy. It is the above book. You might understand my excitement if I tell you in my first period of theological study my dissertation was on sexuality, and in my second theology degree my dissertation was on evangelism. And now I'm starring at book that combines queer theology and theology of evangelism! That sounds like a pretty perfect book to me. There was no way I wasn't going to buy that book. My reading habits being what they are, I've only just finished reading the book. And it's worth sharing some thoughts I've had as I read it. I assume the book is based on a PhD thesis, and it kind of reads like it is, sometimes to its detriment. Some parts (like the biblical surveys) feel like the kind of things you have to do to get good marks in academic study, that don't neces...

I'm pondering the theology of Unitarian ministry in preparation for a conference in Oxford in two weeks where we're going to be discussing this issue. It's very difficult to speak about professional ministry with a community that believes in the priesthood (and prophethood) of all members. We do not have a "high" or sacremental theology of ministry. We say that everything a minister can do, a lay person could do too. So why do we need ministers? In British Unitarianism we do not even have the rite of ordination, which in other traditions, and other branches of the Unitarian family, provides a clearer picture of who is a minister and who is not. And as a small declining denomination we have relied increasingly on various forms of lay leadership. Today the majority of our congregations do not have ministers. So what is a Minister is everyone ministers (verb)? Do we indeed really need Ministers? If we believe in the priesthood of all, then why can't we all do the...

Last week we had about 60 children from primary schools passing through our Unitarian chapel. They were visiting us as part of their religious education, and had also visited a mosque and a Hindu temple before they came to us. So you have 60 primary-aged children, of all faiths and none, sitting in front of you, and it's your job to tell them about Unitarianism. What do you say to them? This was my challenge. I also had to keep in mind that they were visiting us as a Christian church. The idea was to visit a church, a mosque and a temple, Christian, Muslim Hindu (the main religious communities in Bolton). So essentially, it was also up to me to tell them about Jesus. If I had just talked about respecting all faiths, then I would have been failing to give them something concrete. The whole ethos of the day is about respecting all faiths, they had come to us, specifically, to hear about Christianity. So this is roughly what I said: Hello, welcome to Bank Street Unitarian Chapel, my n...