Reignite

So, I've written a book! It's actually something I've been working on for a long time, on and off, (like more than ten years), so I'm really happy to finally get it out there. It will be officially launched at the Unitarian Annual Meetings in Birmingham in April. It is an exploration of whether and how a liberal and pluralistic church can do evangelism. It explores a Unitarian theology that is committed to a self-transcending sense of mission. I argue that we cannot try to grow a church only because we are seeking our own institutional survival. We must have a sense of overarching mission that is cosmic and theological. That mission, I argue, is seeking paradise, seeking a beloved community on earth where we overcome alienation with ourselves, our neighbours, the earth, and God. We then take that mission of seeking paradise into our neighbourhoods and practice dialogue, solidarity, and connection to make paradise real. It's a journey through theology, history...

Fe’ch gwahoddir i wylnos gweddi a myfyrdod y tu allan i’r Senedd, Caerdydd ar brynhawniau Gwener dros y Grawys. Gwener 28ain Chwefror tan Gwener 10fed Ebrill, rhwng 2yp a 6yp Byddwn yn cofleidio’r bobl a’r blaned i’n calonnau ac yn gweddïo i’r ddynoliaeth fagu’r ddoethineb a’r cryfder i oroesi’r argyfwng hinsawdd. Ar y cyd ag eraill yn gweddïo y tu allan i San Steffan, rydym yn gweddïo am drawsffurfio ein gwleidyddiaeth a chreu byd ôl-carbon llawn cyfiawnder a thangnefedd. Mae croeso i bobl o bob ffydd a heb ffydd i ddod ar un neu fwy o’r dyddiau Gwener. Fe fydd yna gyfnodau tawel, ac amserau ar gyfer siarad/canu/defodau. Os hoffech offrymu gweddi, arwain myfyrdod, cân, côr, araith byr, defod, neu unrhyw beth arall addas, rhowch wybod i ni. Neu dewch atom beth bynnag. Mae hwn yn achlysur heddychlon, di-drais a gweddigar, wedi’i drefnu gan Christian Climate Action Cymru, ond yn agored i bob ffydd ac agwedd ysbrydol. YOU are invited to a multi-faith prayer and meditation vigil o...

One afternoon a woman was gardening in her front garden, when she was approached by a stranger. "Excuse me," he said, "I'm thinking of buying the house for sale in this street, I was just wondering if you could tell me - what are the neighbours like around here?" The woman stood up, stretched, and then said, "Well, tell me, what are your neighbours like where you live now?" "Oh, they're terrible people," he said, "Rude, unfriendly, selfish, trouble-makers, I hate them." "Well, I think you'll find the people around here are much the same," replied the woman. The man thanked her, and then left, and she went back to her gardening. An hour later she was interrupted again by a different man. "Excuse me," he said, "I'm thinking of buying the house for sale in this street, I was just wondering if you could tell me - what are the neighbours like around here?" Again, she asked, "Well, t...

When I started my work in Cardiff in 2018  I really had a blank slate. I knew that my job was to be present in Cardiff and to see what happened. As I look back at 2019 I can see the work coming into sharper focus, but it is still early days. But I'm much clearer about what my work is. My work is to find places where community, spirituality, and activism are happening, and to join in the work others are doing towards promoting community, spirituality, and activism. Plus, to find the spaces where community, spirituality, and activism intersect , and to nurture those spaces. I'm also much clearer about where my work is. It is, primarily, in Riverside, a small multicultural neighbourhood, nestled next to the city centre, beneath the shadow of the Principality Stadium. I do get a sense of the work getting smaller and smaller, more and more concentrated on just a few streets, and that seems really important. Specifically what has developed for me in 2019 is a...

(EDIT: January 2020. Since writing this I realised I got the phrase "things are so urgent, so let us slow down" from philosopher Bayo Akomolafe . I must have heard the words, thought about them, then decided to write my own thoughts on this, forgetting what started the process. But I'm happy to acknowledge my indebtedness to Bayo Akomalafe, and I encourage you to go and look up his stuff, because it's very good) We are in an age of urgency. Many people, myself included, have talked about how urgent the climate crisis is. We have twelve years, or eleven years, or two years on some estimations, to avoid a climate crisis that will kill millions. Unless government policy changes right now we will be heading to a disaster. Given that, it's completely understandable that climate activists are operating out of a sense of urgency. We need the government to act now and we will keep acting now until they do. This has made Extinction Rebellion, in my experience, into a v...

Depending on where you're coming from this might be blindingly obvious or something you've never thought about before. But here's what I want to say: one of the strongest predictors of whether a church will grow or not is simply whether that church believes and acts like God is real. God is a church growth principle. This is something liberals don't seem to get. Liberals look at growing Evangelical charismatic churches and they say, “those churches grow because they have modern music” or “those churches grow because they're telling people they will go to hell if they don't join” or “those churches grow because they give people simple answers”. There might be some truth in all those ideas, but we often miss out the most important one – those churches grow because they believe in God. What got me thinking about this was research into what matters to people when they become Christians. The book Finding Faith Today (1992) by John Finney researched 500 people w...

What is the relationship of protest to pain? So often protest is a response to pain. A people feel the pain of oppression, the pain of legal and cultural discrimination and they protest against it. Political protest, political activism is a protest against the pain of a system. Things get a bit more problematic when protest is not connected to pain. The great problem with environmental protest movements is that they are often disconnected from the experience of pain. In theory protest movements like Extinction Rebellion are responding to the pain of future generations, the pain of animals, the pain of the global south, but the protest is not a response to the personal experience of pain. Often privileged white westerns (like myself) do not experience in an everyday way the reality of this pain, and so protest is much more an expression of privilege. I go on protests, not for my own survival, but because I choose to, because I want to, because I have the privileged ability to do s...