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Something has shifted. You can feel it if you stand still long enough. A change in the air. A tug toward the outer edge where the ground is uneven but […]

Advent Reflections for Brave Spaces Daily breath prayers and reflections to nurture brave spaces of community, conversation and church. As fx steps boldly into the new year, we are developing […]

A Free Applied Alchemy Level 2 DIP Taster

This isn't just a legal victory; it's a reversal in the tradition of Jesus.

Hope is a muscle not wishbone or whisper, but sinew and tendon that flexes beneath the skin with every reimagined dream of a better world.

Following on from the post on Hopium which seemed to get a lot of traction I wanted to revisit and update the series of posts I did on rethinking church nearly 20 years ago as so much of theology has shifted. The church, as we have inherited it, is a curious organism. We gather, we sing, we listen, we disperse. But beneath the surface, a tension still simmers when not masked hopeium.  A innate sense that the forms and definitions we cling to are no longer fit for the world we inhabit. As I wrote years ago, western Christianity’s subcultural weakness is not simply a matter of style, but of substance—a deep-rooted commitment to evolutionary tweaks, wrapped up in the idea of progress and an unconscious bias shaped by capitalism. So revolutionary re-imaginings are not given the space needed for real change. We are, perhaps, rearranging the furniture in a house whose foundations are already crumbling. We have mistaken the kingdom for the church, and in doing so, we have shrunk the wild, inclusive, boundary-breaking movement of Jesus into something manageable, measurable, and ultimately, exclusive. The “mustard seed” has grown, yes, but what has taken root in its branches is not always shelter for the world’s birds, but often a haven for scavengers. The vultures of our own dualisms, our own need for security, our own reluctance to let go of the white make sky god reside in our branches and we welcome them both knowingly and unknowingly.