One reason why I need to not do this is because I’ve tried writing about my feelings toward hitchens before. In one interview he told everyone that if you ever want to write to a writer, always do. He said he reads everything and is always encouraged by praise, even if he doesn’t have the time to respond. I love a tech writer called Matt Asay and after consistently being amazed at his articles and insight into the tech world I sent a little message to him saying “Matt, you are awesome, everything you write just makes me happy, thats all I have to say”. And Matt replied “Thanks that really made my day”. It was so exciting being able to connect in some way to the human behind the articles and as a result I felt I ought to write something to hitchens to say thank you.

The christian in me particularly wanted to write something. I remember being at New Word Alive listening to a ex-homeless guy sing about how Jesus had saved him from stuff. I don’t know what it was about that conference but it left me a little cynical, but I really felt strongly that I needed to thank hitchens and so I drafted this letter. I can’t find the draft and can’t really remember what I wrote about it and this makes me sad. It makes me sad for entirely selfish reasons and I don’t want to pretend I actually care about the person hitchens himself (I don’t know him). I’m sad because I really wanted to have that opportunity again to connect with a writer that up until that point is more of an immortal figure or symbol rather then a human (even though one of the things hitchens did brilliantly that others have talked about was that he made you feel you were connecting with a human as much as is possible through one-directional writing). But secondly I’m just pissed off that again something I’ve wanted to do, I’ve missed the boat through laziness or cowardice. I have a long list of regrets of things I’ve really wanted to do, things I wanted to say but missed it. Satre would have me shoot germans for 15 minutes but I don’t think that would actually make me feel much better about it all.

Anyways, I don’t think I’ve had time to fully analyse why I liked hitchens so much. I hadn’t read everything he wrote, and certainly didn’t agree with everything he said. I think the thing that made me like him, is that he wasn’t on a “team”. He joined the atheists and secularists as much as he wanted to but when they did stupid stuff he called them out on it. Then obviously the way he is famously a left-ey but looked like he “switched sides” regarding the Iraq war. But I think the reason why I really like that, is he acts like he is on his own team and the reason why I like that is because as a result he treats you (me) like you’re on your own team. When he debates christians he treats them like they are people, not just representatives of a “facile religious side”. In some ways I think, even if you are horrible to this person (eg Mother Teresa), it is treating the person with respect and dignity. When he is getting angry at Henry Kissinger, when he is complaining that he wanted to see the day that he died, he is also saying that kissinger is worth this anger, that he matters. I feel that this is also a source of his success in arguments. My treating your opponent in either debate or article as a human you cut through the pretence and patheticness of most debates, it makes your defeat so much stronger and honest.

Which leads me on to the next thing, very closely related. His humility. I’ve spoken to plenty of christians about how arrogant and nasty hitchens. Whereas I’m saying that not only is he someone who humbly treats people with respect but he is one of the few public figures to do so. People act like humilty is playing down your strengths but that is just patronising. Hitchens was someone who knew full well what he strengths were and played up to them, but at the same time demonstrated through his life that he worked to maintain them as his strengths. If he had an oppinion he acted like he did everything he could to justify having that oppinion with a clean concious. When he didn’t know what he was talking about, he said it. In fact he usually said it so quickly that the public debate would move on from the thing he doesn’t understand so that the majority of the debate time would be spent on the opponents misunderstandings (misunderstanding that the opponents knows are stupid but wants to aggresively defend anyway). He said to someone on TV once “You talk like you’ve never read anything that disagrees with you”, but hitchens did not talk like that.

Finally one small nigglying thing that flows from that is that whilst he was respectful, intelligent and honest. I didn’t think he was right about everything. One particular nigglying thing for me was how he would use “Occam’s Razor” throughout his arguments and especially in his book. He’d poetically talk about it coming in, slashing away falsehood and saving the day but rarely discussed the complexities of using occam’s razor for anything but an instrumentalist view of science. I never saw anyone else bring this up but maybe there is a debate out there already where this is discussed. I would have liked to have seen him dealing with this, dealing with the complexities that the arguments against various forms of scientific realism pose. Would he care? Possibly not, but I feel like he would have taken any argument against him seriously before putting forward the case for why it should be ignored and it would have been interesting to see that.

Which is part of the wider final and more boring point. Its boring because everyone thinks it including hitchens himself. I would have loved to see how his career developed. People call you an islamophobe but what would you have said to a changing islamic world? If the arab countries currently rising up against the facists actually managed to stabalise. Would you have changed your tone against Islam? I’m sure you would have always hated Islam itself, but whilst you were one of the first to attack Islamofacism I’ll bet you would have been one of the first to praise groups of muslims fighting against the facism you dedicated your life against. I’ll bet in 10 years it would have been clear that “islamophobe” was a ridiculous word to use against you.

So Goodbye Christopher hitchens, I’ve potentially got a lot of life ahead of me, I hope I get to meet more people like you, possibly inpsired by you. I really hope next time I’ll send the damned letter!

I’ve read an awesome rant by a Googler ranting at Google+, the article I read is here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10/13/google_does_not_get_platforms/ and it has a link to the actual rant below. Its pretty exciting but I haven’t figured out if I’m just excited due to my own personal extreme arrogance. I’ve been told that pretty much every philosopher with their own idea tends to try and argue that their idea is something Aristotle said all along. Even if they are completely contradictory, I don’t know if I’m just reading into this post what I want but it really feels like this post reflects a “I told y ou so” to the world, it fits in with what we at the tribes online are really excited about.

That is, the importance of building an accesible platform for the church.

Now that we’re actually starting our business and business problems like, being able to pay rent are popping up we’ve had to put loads of effort into side projects. This is building small websites just to earn money, writing summaries of work for companies that ultimately we don’t intimately care about and building drupal modules to see where it goes. One thing we’ve spent quite alot of thought hours into is our killer app. What is it that we’re doing that will truly provide value? We don’t have to provide much, just enough value that someone will pay us to be able to sleep and eat!

In this article he talks a bit about killer apps. Steve mentions that Facebook’s killer app is its wall and profile. But says that the long term success of Facebook is not the app, its not a good product, its the fact its on an awesome platform. Anyone can make a wall on a profile, I could put together a facebook profile clone in about 10 minutes using Drupal but it won’t have anywhere near the success of Facebook. Its partly because of the huge user base but its also because of the platform. Facebook did not have to predict Mafia Wars or Farmville, as steve puts it, they just make it so other people can come up with their own ideas.

Whilst we spend our time looking at how we can make money, or looking at our killer app that will fuel our platform, or as we talk to the various church networks and churches we’re talking to. There is still the initial vision in site and the world hasn’t changed enough to not need our vision. Our vision is that when we were 14 and 16 building a little discussion forum for our church, we wanted to do it as part of something. We wanted to find tools already working with churches that we could use. And when we turned a “Like” button on our forum into an “Amen” button and discovered a really cool way to take our spirituality online, we wanted someone to tell about it.

There are still plenty of questions though:

• Everyone wants to be a platform, but how do you actually attract developers? Is the church ready for this?
• What does the platform do? Amazon’s platform is its computing ability, Apple is that loads of people use iphone, Facebook is a huge connection of users. What are we sharing? Code? Connections? Data? Ideas? All?
• We need to remember Canal Mania, Railroad Mania and the dotcom bubble, we need to be able to use our own platform and get that killer app.
• How open is this platform? Is it a fully distributed network of websites? Is there a central server with APIs? Is it just some code? Is it just the ideas?

This is a reply I was going to send to Micheal Rush (who was our lecturer for metaphysics) but I spoke to Toby Searle about it and he pointed some issues with the way I worded things. Its such a long post I haven’t had the time to properly go through it and reword it correctly. The issue is something along the lines of originally I seemed to suggest I was saying it is impossible to have a coherent concept of “supernatural events” vs “natural events”. What I’m saying is really, If I were to assert that I am an orthodox christian and believe everything in the bible, but do not believe there are any special supernatural events. Is that coherent? It means when dealing with questions like “How did the ressurection happen?” I wouldn’t be able to give an answer but I could just state I don’t know I think it did happen and it happened naturally.

I’m not saying that this is a desirable state for a christian to be in. Just interested in what is wrong with that when people like the brights put a huge emphasis on the distinction between their naturalism and what they call “supers”. Anyway here is the e-mail exchange between me and toby and we can see if this goes anywhere!

It took me ages to write this. And then when you mentioned that there are perfectly coherent ways of dividing natural vs supernatural it means I’m going to have to change the wording of the whole thing in a complicated way.

Its something to do with a definition of “Natural Law” that forces a christian into a distinction (I’m ok with all events are natural, OR all events are supernatural,but not both happening) that I think is wrong. But we could just assume God is a first cause in random other events other then creation to have the distinction if we want….

So this changes what I was going to say to rush

here it is:

———–

Again this has taken a while! Unfortunately it is not a sign of a well thought through response so much as a sign of these answers gradually taking longer whilst doing this dissertation! This is getting pretty ridiculous for the comments section of a facebook link!

My comment is roughly divided into 3 sections:

- Stuff to do with Natural vs Supernatural
- Stuff to do with my sort of pseudo-falsification posed to attacks on christianity
- A final question about positive reasons for atheism.

So regarding the historicity of Jesus’ death and ressurection. I was asking if it would prove the existence of God if it were true. Do you think that it could Or do you think it wouldn’t even do that?

Regarding natural laws. This may due to my lack of understanding of what counts as a “natural law” and you’re welcomed to refer me to somewhere to read up on it. But I can’t understand a definition of natural law that would allow God to break them and this is why I would say he doesn’t break natural laws. I mean the “Natural Laws” can’t possibly simple mean “Our understanding of natural laws”. If it turns out we find something that breaks “The natural laws” we don’t say its supernatural, we instead change our understanding of what the natural laws are.

I suppose the divide could be “Natural laws dictate what humans can do” and “Supernatural events are only possibly achieved by God”. But then there are biblical accounts of miracles where God enables a human to do the miracle, eg healing through their own touch. I suppose you could then have a divide that miracles are events that can only be achieved through God’s power (I can’t heal anyone through touch whenever I want, but can if God allows me to). But then I have the view that God sustains everything all the time anyway so I wouldn’t be able to accept a divide like this because I’d say even Newton’s Laws happen because of God.

I can’t understand what could possibly be a good definition of “natural order” that would allow a God to break it in the ways outlined in the bible.

——————

Regarding “Would God be worthy of worship if he existed?”. I dunno why that makes his existence a more important claim? Why can’t it just be an “if” that is left there? I don’t know if this is a silly point but isn’t the existence of other minds still debated? Do humans really answer the question “Does my wife really exist” before they ask “Does she love me?”. Ought they?

I mean if there was a good reason to believe my wife or God did not exist, I think that is different. But if there is still an argument raging on both arguments to that question, why not just leave it to one side and deal with more important questions that can be more easily answered for a human?

————-

Regarding falisificationism, I’m definitely not trying to apply pure falsificationism to the existence of God and try and suggest that any of this is science. But I feel that there is an underlying principle that may be applied both ways.

Basically if you say “Extraordinary exidence” is required for “extraordinary claims” without giving an example of what would be a satisfactory set of extraordinary evidence, I feel like this raises similar alarm bells to what Popper felt about psycoanalysis. For example, I have found the historical evidence suggesting Jesus’ death and ressurection to be satisfactory to me. However, most of the good criticisms I have seen levied at the historical evidence seem to attack historical evidence as a whole as not being sufficient for the extraordinary claims of death and ressurection of Jesus. Now this is something I actually accept, I do not feel that historical evidence as a whole is good enough for other people to accept these claims. But I think that as far as any historical evidence could support a claim like this, the evidence for the ressurection is good. I have yet to have seen good attacks on the historical claims that fit within the framework that is consistent.

An example of this is that some people claim that the fact that there are 4 gospels gives us good reason to believe that the ressurection was true as the claims are corroborated. However, some people attack the four gospels citing that there are inconsistencies with the facts between the accounts and therefore we can’t trust any of them. Whereas some people attack the gospels for being TOO similar and therefore they must be copying each other or there must be a 5th Gospel “Q” that is actually the source of all the gospels and so there are not 4 independent accounts but more like 1 or 2. Here the inconsistencies can be used to either support the claims of the gospels or be used to attack them.

So I’d ask, a kind of null hypothesis attitude, what kind of historical evidence ought we see if the claims were true? And do they match up to what we do see?

Does this make sense? (I’ve never managed to communicate the point I’m trying to make with full success)

—————

I’m going to leave the point about the rabbit. I’ve read lots of threads of people discussing whether a precambrian rabbit counts as a true falsifier and all I can do is summarise those discussions, but I don’t actually know what I think. I think your stuff about not being able to go back in time and see the ressurection happen is a good criticism of historical evidence as a whole being problematic, but I have the same issue with that as above.

———–

“Don’t all Christians have to accept that there is an  unquestionable authority?”

The point I’m making is that the answer to this question is the same as the answer to the question “Don’t all scientists have to accept that there is an unquestionable authority?” And the answer is the same for the same reasons. The scientist’s final authority is the external world itself. A Scientist can believe in something with as much consesus as they like, but if the statement is not true of the external world then it is not true. Similarly a theologian can have as many thoughts as they like but ultimately statements about God, if he exists, are either true or false.

However there is a sense where you could simply just say no to both those questions. I also kind of think you don’t need to argue “no” any further for both those questions then simply stating this answer. (Now I do accept that some Catholics think differently, some catholics would see the Pope’s authority as unquestionable. But they are wrong).

—————

I could go into Paul’s arguments that I like, although I do not think that these are neccesarily argument that would convince other people. Certainly they are not about the existence of God and most of them assume some tenets of Jewish law as being true. I think many of Paul’s arguments regarding the inability of the “Law” to fully justify anyone apply to other moral systems though, so I could go into that. However, for fun, I could write up some of the arguments I’ve read recently that I liked?

———

I’m guessing that your paragraph about God asking you to commit genocide is a kind of attack on “divine command theory” which I’ve only just heard about. This is a whole new area of discussion but I do not think the bible provides a moral code. (I mean, it definitely does, but thats not what is important about it). I think the message of christianity is the “Good news” which is God’s solution to morality as a whole. I think that morality, (be it God’s laws, or utilitarianism, or kantian ethics) do nothing more then reveal guilt. The purpose of the Cross is to free us from moral constraints and allow us to do what it is that we really want. For that reason anyone who accepts any moral code would have, I think, a good reason to hate all christians in theory, even if in practise they wouldn’t need to…

Again… this is a massive tangent, whilst there is plenty of theological support for my position, I’m still having discussions with my atheists philosophy friends about whether its at all consistent.

———

The final point, that is kind of a deviation. Say I’m someone who already accepts the position that God exists (and that roughly all the tenets of christianity are true). What are the positive reasons that are should move away from this position? I say “positive reasons” so as to exclude answers like “There is not enough evidence”. Instead I’m looking for answers in the form of “Because there is not enough evidence, someone who accepts the position that God exists should reject that position for reasons, X, Y Z). Where X, Y and Z are the positive reasons?

From what I can tell, Occam’s Razor is sort of the main reason?

From Toby:

Hi jamie,

Sitting in my lunch break and had a chance to have a brief look though. Looks pretty good.

As you say, I definitely think you ought to say more about natural laws! I think they can be defined through physical cause and effect relations.

Also, not sure if I can explain this right, but I am a little uncomfortable with the bit drawing similarities between the resurrection and pschoanalysis. It seems to me that if they are similar in the sense that niether counts as popperian science, but I think you are trying to say something different and I don’t quite get it!

Thanks for a cool lunchbreak though.

Toby

Here is what I think is my response:

Regarding why I care. I think its a mixture. I do find the CvA debate interesting from an intellectual stand point just because it seems so clear that something is dodgey. Every Calvinist or Arminian I’ve met or read seems to assume incompatibalism without any argument or realisation that they are doing so. So I think this is significant but don’t really exactly know how. It might turn out that that they actually agree with each other for example.

From a more personal level I think there is a “middle ground” that shows a much clearer gospel message to our generation. Whilst I’m more sympathetic to arminianism, I find their solution to the problem of pain (pain is caused by our free will) problematic. 1) There is plenty of suffering that isn’t caused by individuals (tsunamis) and then you end up with a wierd view that our sin causes earthquakes. and 2) many of the pain and suffering that people caused is usually part of a chain of events. In relationships with some of the nastiest guys I know, you can usually see a particular girl that messed them up, and then see someone before that, that messed her up. Rather then “Free Will” I tend to see the world as a series of broken people that can do nothing but break other people, because out of brokenness comes more brokenness.

Telling broken people they need to fix themselves, I think is like telling a depressed person they “just need to be happy”. Instead they need to be “rescued” out of their brokenness. So this leads me to a much more calvinistic way of explaining the gospel.

Alternatively you might argue that 1) isn’t wierd and 2) just means you need to chase back the first cause. Well if you go down this road you’ll probably have to chase it back to the fall. (Whilst I find it wierd that me stealing something now, could cause an earthquake in Japan, I don’t think its wierd to suggest that when sin first entered the world, the whole world was changed in some almost supernatural way). In this case you end up with original sin and you basically have calvinism. You could still possibly argue about whether eve had free will but I think that moves the argument into the very theoretical. For all intents and purposes the people I encounter arn’t free.

And yet… I still think calvinism is wrong. I still think the smug manner in which calvinists say free will is just an illusion is wrong. I think we do have a very real free will that is able to choose Jesus… I don’t think that very real free will is a complete naive libertarian free will but neither do I think the whole “We have free will, but God dictates our will and we then act freely on that” is satisfactory.

How different business models interact with each other

Introduction

Recently activity regarding Drupal Church Distributions have increased. Open Church has released a demo and its pretty good at fulfilling the basic features offered by the smaller Church “Software as a Service” (SaaS) companies. They have in fact beat us to the initial stage that we were aiming to have done by now but he’s done it better then we could have anyway. Particularly the clean theme seems to fit with most of the user experience features that are in fashion at the moment. For example the nice use of a front page slide show. As things are starting to happen I thought it would be appropriate to write a post detailing who we are and where we stand when it comes to difficult topics such as ‘ownership’ and money as it definitely looks like Open Church is a financial venture rather then purely out of passion like the old Drupal for Churches people were.

Who we are?

The Tribes Online (TTO) consists of 3 individuals. I’m Jamie Abrahams and I’m currently studying for a Business Masters of Enterprise researching into the viability of TTO as a financial venture and the impact of social networking on people over 65 in the church. Rob Mumford is finishing a Computer Science degree also at the University of Manchester whilst Andrew Belcher dropped out of physics at Oxford and is currently a freelance web developer who has worked with many Christian organisations. Our plan is to look for a fourth person to take a role of “creative director”. Whilst we were all still at school we started a small church discussion forum for our youth group, there were many people that helped out with setting it up and it spiraled into quite a large website with 50 new members a week at its peak. We learnt quite a bit about online communities and community management throughout that time. We also learnt about the benefits and pitfalls of using the Internet in a ministerial context. Whilst people on the outskirts of the community found it easy to get involved, fights had to be squashed very quickly on the Internet. We worked with phpbb and started discovering that we needed the forum to influence a front page to get information out to people more easily. We had three specific goals:

1) Our prayer forum was by far the most prominent and successful of the forums, being used almost 24/7 and we wanted to quickly graphically represent what people were praying about

2) Our youth group was spread across two centres of worship that were connected but also had distinct communities. There were also multiple adult congregations and some younger youth groups. We wanted to build a multi – site environment where groups could maintain their own look, feeling and branding whilst sharing some resources. We wanted local forums combined with “Global forums”

3) We found that in the forums conversation dynamically spiraled into something more significant. Events would get planned in the forums and some theological discussions turned into collaborative articles. We wanted some way of taking content in the forum and dynamically displaying in other places such as Sermon Libraries, Resource Libraries, Calenders, etc.

We are now a bit older. Facebook now dominates the world and forums are not as significant as they used to be. We think that Drupal is the way to go instead of a CMS based on phpbb but we still feel that the way that the Internet brought people together was key. It was so awesome being about to see what your real community was actually praying about. It was awesome to see the friendship that started through the “virtual reality”. As we moved it to the adult congregation we found that forums were actually valuable organisational tools, far superior to the e-mails they tended to use and the ideas spread from there.

What is the Tribes Online planning?

First and foremost we care about building the global church. Looking at innovations in the secular and corporate world such as Microsoft Sharepoint, Facebook and Basecamp we think that the church will truly benefit from applying these concepts to a church world. The particular aspect of the Internet we want to focus on is the way it can connect real human beings to other real human beings and the way information can spread through communities organically. There are many churches that are doing things fantastically, especially in America. However, they tend to be churches with lots of money and resources to build tools that then don’t benefit other churches. For example we really like the resource library of www.desiringgod.org. We think it would be awesome if even smaller churches could easily start building their own libaries of resources from sermons to articles.

We’re still working on exactly which ideas we want to run with. Our first project is a prayer wall that is artistically designed that takes a random selection of posts from a church’s specific community. We then want to build sermon libraries with the ability for questions to be asked to the preacher. We want to go further and build church administration systems that allow people to have a single sign on to their site and whilst they get notifications they can also upload sermon notes or check their rota.

Because we want to build the whole church it has to based on Open Source software. But we want to go further. We really want to investigate building some kind of wiki and tool that can harvest ideas and publish research. There are lots of churches that have experimented with Facebook and Twitter for example, we want to create a resource so ideas can be submitted, played with and case studies studied. This means that the ideas as well as the code can travel and build the global church. I think this will be more important as the church grows in Africa, South America and China.

How and why are we planning on making money?

There are 3 business models that we hope to combine. We hope to give the software away to technical Christians with the time on the hands to get involved in testing and development. Whilst charging more significant amounts of money for consultancy fees we want to provide a Software as a Service model for small churches. Finally there is a possibility of producing books and resources (available for free online such as desiring God but also in shops). They will have less access to customisation but the innovations harvested from contributions and the consultancy will filter back down to them. We’re heavily relying on Acquia’s business model with Drupal Gardens where I think they do a fantastic Job. We think we need to charge some money for a few reasons:

1) This allows us to spend the time developing the free software

2) Churches tend to take free stuff less seriously. One charity I know who really wanted to work for churches for very little suggested a business model where he’d charge a church or charity appropriately large consultancy fees but then make a personal donation back to the church! The reality is that if we are right about social technologies being key we need churches actually using it, not just the tools existing.

3) Marketing and training churches is important, this takes individuals time and so will need money. This gets churches using it and knowing how they use it. I think we want to fit around a similar model to how “Cell churches” spread or even Alpha courses.

Licensing and Sharing Code – Working with the Competitors

Obviously as we’re working with Drupal everything with be under the GPL. This means all the code is shared. Ideally I’d like some components using the AGPL license so even Software as a Service companies such as us would have to share their code. We are thinking of working with CiviCRM to encourage this. This means we’ve thought about two possible ways of providing a SaaS to churches. Acquia provide fantastic hosting either using Amazon’s Cloud network or Drupal Gardens or we could build our whole system using Aegir. The advantage of Aegir is that it means our entire infrastructure will be open sourced, not just Drupal but even how we will manage to thousands of potential sites together. The scary and awesome thing about this is that it means that future competitors could compete with us using literally every aspect of our software! (Whilst Acquia provides the advantage of being much more stable then anything we’d make alone).

In the UK there is one large Church SaaS provider called Church Insight. They are so large they will most likely always remain a competitor. However, the smaller companies (I know of 3) have features that could be easily duplicated on Drupal. This means that whilst we will compete initially, if The Tribes Online takes off we can collaborate with our competitors rather then swallow them up. Whilst it makes the business venture more risky I strongly believe that giving the Church this choice eventually benefits the church more. It means innovations even across companies will be shared and will allow church website companies to remain small and fast moving.

Why have we not approached our competitors?

Up until now we’ve kept a low profile. We’ve been trying to build a church install profile or work with Drupal for Churches but we have certainly said nothing to our future competitors. The main reason is that we are all very young and idealistic. I have been working on this idea for about 6 years and plan to take it as far as it can go. But any good business people reading this will probably know that Entrepreneurs who focus on ideas and not customers get eaten up. So we want to actually build something before we speak to people so not to waste their time whilst working on a more sustainable business model. We do have an Atrium site left up with ideas building up and we’d be happy to work with anyone but think its likely most people will want to leave us alone until we have something of substance.

If people want to steal our ideas or work with them, that is fine however!

The introduction of Open Church.

Our original intention was to duplicate the features of the smaller Church SaaS companies in the UK. Open Church has done this already and so now we want to divert our attention to building that genuinely unique tools. However I think its likely that we’ll just continue flying under the radar. I also think that the UK and the US market are sufficiently different that we wouldn’t really be competing for customers anyway. However if you want access to our Atrium site and there are some ideas you like that you’d want to work on with us that would be awesome!

Do we want a product?

Basically because we care about the church and not the company I don’t care if some other Drupal people make us irrelevant. So far most people (including Open Church) focus on the site building side of things and we really think its the social side of things that is key to building up the church and so we don’t think we’re irrelevant yet. However, we’re all young so there are plenty of other things we can do if someone else comes along and does a better Job then us without needing us!

Couple of Features we’re looking for:

1) Building simple church website – Open Church achieves

2) Provide a variety of themes that work with the modules used. (Major selling point for UK competitors)

3) More Social Technology. How does feature X connect a human being with another human being? How does it build up the local church?

4) Back – End Administration: Contacts, Rotas, Projector Slides, Sermons, Bulletin generators, Room management, Task management, etc

5) Build a wiki – A resource where ideas can be discussed, researched and explained.

In the Foyer of the student union we create the Pangaea Prayer and Meditative Space. It had to be neutral and open to people of all backgrounds and so we built activities that Christians could use for their own prayer and meditation, stuff you might get in a 24/7 prayer room but the activities could be used by anyone however they wanted. We had 6 fantastic Christian DJs playing sets of meditative and euphoric chill out electronic music. We had an artist decorate the room with posters and a painter in the front whilst people could join in painting with poster paints. On the walls we had a Prayer and Reflection wall where people could jot things down and a map of the world with events that could be prayed into. Finally at the corner we had an absolutely beautifully set up prayer room with a variety of activities for people to sit down and pray.

The night went down really well. Some people were originally hostile to the idea of it at a very secular event but so far the reception has been good. The music was great and the atmosphere was chilled out and relaxed, helped out by the cushions, doughnuts and free tea. However, what was interesting was that by far the most successful aspect of the prayer room was the one thing that was much less secular. We gave out tokens for people to receive prayer, dream interpretation, healing and future telling (prophecy). The people involved with this regularly do things like this at events such as Glastonbury or the mind/body/soul convention in Manchester however these events, though secular, are much more “spiritual”. I didn’t know how the students of Manchester who are just on a night out would take this. But we saw for about 4 or 5 hours a constant stream of students being prayed for. They seemed to love it and many people were bringing their friends.

We’re hoping to have a debrief in the future including some pictures of the event and some of the stories of how the praying went. The room certainly encouraged lots of interesting conversations throughout the night and there are a few stories from the prayers. We hope to be back in Pangaea for the summer which is even longer lasting from 8 until 6 in the morning. Winter Pangaea saw a great reception from non-christians but the prayer room section itself was mainly used by the people helping to organise the room. For this summer I’d really like to push to get more Christians involved, I have a goal to find at least 40 christians who are not organising this event using the prayer room for at least 15 minutes.

One thing I’ve loved most about clubbing in Manchester is how awesome it is to worship God outside of the church. In a club you can raise your hand, shout out praises to God or even speak in tongues and you’re just part of it all. In a club the inspiration to praise God surrounded by what happens in clubs is huge. Finally many Christians find the world of non-Christians terrifying. They think that most people are against them, I’d like to see Christians coming to this prayer room and realising that actually that as long as they approach non-Christians with love they can quite easily express their faith out in the open. With a larger group of christians I’d really like to see prayer spill out into the other rooms.

When the Holy Spirit fell on the disciples during Pentecost the first thing they did was pour out and worship God in the Streets. We’re keeping that going!

A friend of mine linked me to this article:

http://www.goodmanson.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/websitewisdom.pdf
where the website is http://www.goodmanson.com/church-technology/the-truth-about-church-websites-and-effective-online-outreach/

One thing that is interesting there, is that on the second page near the top of the second column, 39 percent of people said that the feature they wanted most from their church website (which I’m assuming they don’t already have) is “connect with other members”. Personally this is one of my pet peeves about church websites. They all seem to be “online brochures”. Either boring understated brochures such as church in the UK or really big flashy brochures as they tend to be in the US but brochures non-the less*. I’ve seen lots of good use of advanced web technologies to connect people with the paster/leader/vicar such as sermons, blogs etc. But very little for new comers to a site to connect with actual people in the church.

The article talked about people requesting the ability to pray online. When I set up a youth website the online prayer board became the most successful aspect of our site. We had a fairly large group of 14-18s (about 90 ish) and at that age it was invaluable having an ability to post anonymous prayers (though moderated) at any point in the week, exactly when you needed it. Around exam time there were plenty of posts at early hours of the morning! (though perhaps advice on the uselessness of late night-day-before-exam revision was needed :S). This fits with a feature that actually connects people with other people in the church (rather then just the pastor, or just a brochure).

We’re planning on creating a drupal church distribution / work with install profiles (yes I know, another one! I’ve heard of plenty of other attempts). We’d be aiming it at the UK market which I feel will need to be less flashy then then the idea outlined by Geeks and God. Currently working with a couple of churches including one church that wants to find novel ways of connecting a congregation with its overseas mission partners.

However one worry I have despite this research is that of control. The Church is famously lead by people who like control over stuff generally. It’s also famously very involved with its own image. Many times I’ve watched American comedy programs where they show a clichéd Christian anti-abortionist teenage that might also be head of an abstinence society in their school. They then show this person having sex to point out some kind of hypocrisy. Whilst this is sometimes similar to the Pharisee and teachers of the law Jesus attacked, the reality is that this shouldn’t be shocking. Christians are Christians because they KNOW they are sinners! So it shouldn’t be shocking when Christians are found sinning as that is what they are. If anything those that feel they don’t need Jesus ought to be morally superior to us admitted sinners! (I realise this is an over simplification CS Lewis’ Mere Christianity deals with this topic better then me.

However, the reality is if a church leader allows new comers and people outside the church to connect with the human beings inside the church. Not only will they have less control, they are allowing people to connect with a sea of sinners. Will this be a problem? Will it be embarrassing to come across a church prayer wall and find the inevitable prayers of those addicted to internet pornography and trying to over come it?

So there are a couple of questions. Will people find it difficult allowing the lack of control that comes from connecting people to other real people?

If people do find this difficult is this something that we’d want to fight (As in fight for people to connect to real people despite the problems of control)?

I post it here because if there is ever a piece of software that will successfully connect humans with humans on a smaller scale, I feel like Drupal is the only way, much more then bespoke systems (even if they are open-source)

*I’m British and I don’t mean that as an attack. I quite like boring understated stuff. I heard an interested documentary about the American view of the famous British show Countdown. They couldn’t understand why we’d have a actual personal Carol Volderman literally picking the numbers on some card rather then computerising everything.

So there is a fantastic film called the Devil’s Advocate. In this film Keanu Reeves is courted by a succesful Law firm owner played by Al Pacino. Now if you haven’t watched this film I suggest you skip to the next paragraph because I will spoil the film a little here (the rest is safe). However it turns out that Al Pacino is the devil and has been using Keanu Reeves to create the antichrist and finally defeat God. In one of the final scenes, Keanu Reeves challenges the devil with “You know that you are going to lose right?” to which Al blows it off as “Enemy propaganda! Have you considered the source?”

This is my issue with the question of heaven and hell. Everyone seems to think that Heaven is a place filled with “Good” stuff and that Hell is a place filled with “Bad” stuff. Now good things should happen to good people and bad things to bad people so therefore heaven should happen to “Good” people, I’m a generally good person so I should go to heaven. But this is the thing that confuses me, people very rarely consider the source of this information. Why does everyone think that the Christian heaven is a good place? The Christian God thinks that his heaven is good? But what if you reject the Christian God? Surely you’d reject his heaven too?

Philosophically this can seem like a difficult thing to picture. Heaven is understood as a good place because its kind of philosophically defined as just a “place of eternal goodness”. However, one example I quite enjoy is regarding sex. In the Book of Matthew, Jesus essentially says that there will be no sex in heaven. Now many people struggle with the idea that Christianity says you should wait until marriage until sex and that you should have sex with only this one person. I’ve heard people tell me that Christianity should modernise. Now if you can’t handle sex with only one person (where there is evidence and reasons that suggest that could actually give you better earthly sex anyway so you aren’t missing out on much). How on earth would you be able to cope with a sexless eternity in heaven?!?

Now I can tell you why I do it. Whilst I think there are good reasons to suggest that Sex with one person who you love for ever on earth that gets better and better as you understand each other better, are powerful. They are by no means conclusive. The reality is that I believe that the God who created sex will be able to give me good advice on how to deal with it. In essence, I trust him. Some people big this up as “faith” which they see as some crazy metaphysical religious thing which I have or don’t. It’s just a case where it makes sense, given what I know of God, to trust him. Then at the same time my experiences tend to confirm that actually his advice was good advice anyway. Similarly when I think about heaven and its lack of sex. I might think about all the awesomeness of sex on earth (its possible to appreciate to some degree the awesomeness of sex without experiencing it directly, women are awesome). This fills me with more hope, the God who made THAT has said there is something coming without it that is going to be BETTER! See for a Christian, the reality is that we don’t have concrete things in heaven to enjoy. We’re not going there for sex or riches. We only have one promise, that it will be with Jesus. A fantastic quote by Dinesh D’Souza; “People get confused that they think that the Gift from God is salvation but actually Christians believe that the Gift of God is salvation”. The thing christians “get” in heaven is God. Its Jesus himself that we long for.

But what if you don’t trust God? What if you don’t think Jesus is worthy. Well then all my “evidence” that God’s way of doing sex is best could probably be explained in other ways. Or maybe they are pipe dreams (you might say “Jamie, its unreasonable to expect the first will be ‘the one’”). The reality is if you don’t trust God you probably won’t trust what he says and won’t want to do what he says. (This is the converse of Jesus saying that those who love God will do what he says). The reality is that you’ll only think Hell is bad if you trust him in the first place. So we have a wierd situation here.

If you are angry that God is sending you to hell. Then you think Hell is a bad place. You can only think Hell is a bad place if you trust God. If you trust God you won’t go to hell (pretty much*) so you won’t have a reason to be angry. So you are no longer angry that God is sending you to hell. (Cause he isn’t).

Or

You are angry that God is sending you to hell. He’s sending you to hell because you don’t trust him. Because you don’t trust him, you don’t trust that Hell is a bad place. So he isn’t sending you to a bad place. So there is no reason to be angry with him.

In my understanding the issue has been answered. However there are a couple of niggling questions.

Do you as a Christian really think Hell is Good?

Well obviously not. I think that Hell is a very bad place indeed and Heaven will be awesome. I think everyone really wants to be in heaven. But the reason why I think this is because everyone else is actually wrong. God exists, his name is Jesus and Jesus is worthy. Because God is actually good and what everyone needs him, heaven is actually good because its with him. Conversely Hell is a place of extreme suffering by virtue of God not really being there. So I think Heaven is good, I think Hell is bad and I think you’re heading there. The point I’m making is that there is no good reason to be angry at me. Either I’m wrong, in which case I’m wrong anyway and maybe you should feel sorry for me, or I’m right in which case it appears you agree with me so you’re not heading to Hell after all.

But you just said?

Right. This is confusing. Why would anyone in their right mind go for something that is bad? Well the way I like to think of it, is a kind of extreme anorexia. You imagine a person who is very skinny, they are starving to the point that their hair is falling out. You go up to them and present them good food. In this thought-experiment the food is exactly the right kind of food. Its not going to make them throw up even though they are hungry, its going to nourish them and it looks awesome. Most people who are sane would eat it. However, it is possible to imagine someone who will still not eat this food. They are anorexic. They are refusing food even though rationally they ought to eat it, they want to eat it and it would end their suffering. Now to a normal person anorexic people seem totally crazy, there seems to be literally no reason why they wouldn’t eat. In reality there are doctors and counsellors who can usually get to the bottom of the problem. These people will find reasons that have brought the anorexia on (they hate themselves, they think they look fat, etc). However, in this picture we have someone where all the best doctors have tried to find the reasons and they can’t. Literally everything has been done but they still won’t eat.

Now, the debate in the philosophy of religion and to a lesser extent in theology is whether this person could exist. I think it is possible for most people to imagine because most people aren’t doctors and can imagine someone who is this crazy. BUT there might be some niggling faith that eventually with enough doctors and time this person will come to eat. This is what philosophers argue. There are some who think that people will eventually know God is good and still for some reason reject him (more traditional christianity) and there are some people who believe that eventually all humans beings will eventually realise that God is good and then they will be in heaven (universalist christians).

So what does Jamie think?

Well, I tend towards the traditional Christian. The issue I have with the universalist approach is twofold. Firstly it is incredibly arrogant. When Christopher Hitchens writes a book entitled “God is not Great” and emphasises again and again that not only does he not believe God exists but believes it would be bad if he did. This universalist Christians has to say that not only is Hitchenswrong about facts (He does exist) but you’re making no sense about your feelings towards him, that Hitchens actually does want to grovel before a higher being, he’s just lying to himself. Now I have no problem with this arrogance, except that in my experience the kind of person who is a universalist tends to be the kind of person who scorns arrogance in favour of being “accepting”. Their apparantly accepting view is actually much more strongly arrogant. However the issue I have is that it seems like blind faith to believe that eventually everyone will be solved even in my anorexic example. I don’t think it’s impossible to think of a person where no one can find the reason to the point where there isn’t any. I think in order for me to have the faith that everyone will eventually think like that, the philosophical arguments aren’t convincing, I think there would have to be an external source of certainty such as a pretty good biblical argument that I have yet to have seen.

What about all the pitch forks, fire and brimstone

I suppose I should mention that I’m putting forward a particular view on the theology of hell. I don’t think its a place of literal fire, I don’t think there will be demons with pitch forks. I don’t think Dante’s Inferno is an accurate picture of the afterlife. I think these are medieval stories to scare people into conformity. Probably this view needs to be justified (there were loads of good talks about it at New Wine!). However I’m not going to do that here.

*Pretty Much? and I’m still angry

Yeah, it doesn’t seem that just trusting God’s attitude towards heaven and hell is correct is another to warrant salvation. So there is a little more to it, however if you trust God’s attitude towards these things but there is some other issue in the way. Well the purpose of apologetics is really to go from questions to more questions! So feel free to comment!

Here is an example of how the church can possibly benefit from this using technology and a fairly controversial example – Homosexuality.

The story

I attended a church that was more conservative on the issue of homosexuality. They believe that the biblical text suggests that homosexuality is a sinful act that ought not be practised. Regardless of your personal opinion on the matter I think this is a clear example of where authority is important. The pulpit is not supposed to be a place for random arbitrary opinions, it is not like the comments section of a newspaper. Authority is not about control but it is about trust. If someone is in a position of authority in the church they can be challenged in the same way that the Apostle Peter was challenged by Paul over the issue of eating with gentiles. However, someone in authority is trusted to treat their position with respect and know that people trust them. So in this conservative church, whenever someone in authority preached about homosexuality and the bible, it tended to be negative. I think this is right. I think you can disagree with that whole church and suggest reasons why homosexuality is o.k. But for the church that has made its stance it makes sense for the preachers to “tow the party line”.

However, one person from the church told me that they were proud that they had never let a gay person in their house. Now this person wasn’t particularly horrible and with all the controversy and media attention I personally think it understandable how this person reached their position. Unfortunately, this is not the position the church would want to encourage (this is important, what is interesting here is not that I agree or disagree, or really what you the reader thinks, it is interesting because even this church would not agree with their attitude). But isn’t this to be expected if homosexuality is talked about in a negative light all the time? Even saying “They are sinners but we should love them” isn’t a positive attitude to have to an actual person (It can be but isn’t inherently in that sentence).

Also at this church was someone who worked in the fashion industry. Many of this guy’s colleagues were gay. In a conservative church environment it was interesting hearing this guy’s opinion on the topic of homosexuality. It was essentially that he quite liked his gay colleagues and specifically it was much easier being a Christian in this work environment compared to say a London banking job heavily involved with alcohol and macho-ism. What is interesting here is by speaking to this friend I could get an insight into his attitude towards a bunch of people. His statements were neither agreeing nor disagreeing with all the controversial issues of homosexuality. They weren’t statements of doctrine on gay bishops nor attitudes towards policy regarding gay marriages. They were simply one human being’s attitude towards another and I think these attitudes are invaluable. (Both of them, the more homophobic christian brother and the more accepting, they are both part of the church here).

Now, if you disagree with the authority in this case. (The doctrine of homosexuality this church excepts) then this story won’t go far.  You would still have to go through the normal channels of arguing about doctrine, campaigning in church communities, writing articles, etc. However, this story highlights something I think is important. The reality is that you can leave authority exactly where it is. Good Doctrine will help but it will not ultimately change your attitude. Understanding that Racism is wrong and that all people are created in God’s eyes will not fully stop you crossing the road when you see a hooded black teenager. The reality is you need to interact with people, you need to spend time with gay people or black people to truly influence your attitude to them.

Authority can stay where it is. We need something more, we need something from the Christians who aren’t necessarily in authority. This is what impacts the church today anyway and will continue to. We need to encourage this and help people connect with it and in doing so we will open up control. If I am able to connect with more people in the church on an issue such as racism or homosexuality, then the person in the pulpit will still have authority, but now less control over exactly what I think. Fortunately for us the church already has a method of this, anglicans like to call it “the peace”.

On-line testimonies – blogs

Now the important thing about this company is that we are not creating new churches. We are merely facilitating and encouraging the good things that are already there. In the church life we already have something that moves complete control from the leaders of the church but allows the leader authority – that is testimony. If at a baptism someone stands up and explains their testimony and they tell you something scripture told them, it is normal in the church to enjoy this whilst not believing this person to be an authority on the subject. Similarly when Christian books are read about people’s lives they are read in a different manner to a book of theology or doctrine. In fact one way of wording “testimonies” is just “getting to know the impact of God on the lives of Christians around you” and probably the church would have benefited from the two people in my story just sitting down and chatting about their lives. This is great.

However, how do you personally meet up and get to know about the lives of everyone? Even if your church only has 50-100 people let alone 900 it gets difficult. Some churches have tried having “testimony” sections in the service for maybe 10 minutes where christians in the church just tell stories about what God has done in their lives that week. This is quite cool but is also daunting and sometimes there are particular stories you just don’t care about.

So a simple way to do this is to use blogs! If we could get a church of say 100 people and manage to get every person to blog maybe once a year. That is 100 awesome testimonies about their lives and God that I would have access to. Secondly, I had a friend who wanted to go into fashion design and another who wanted to become a model. How cool would it have been if they had known there was an old, experienced Christian working in that industry in their own church they could have spoken to? So here are some conclusions from this:

• Fellowship. We can all read blogs of well-written Christians online and using wordpress.com! The tribes on-line is about connecting the thoughts and eventually the people within the church to each other.
• Accesibility - We need to develop ways to make it incredibly easy for anyone to blog. We could try a bunch of things, intergrating blogs with e-mail, automatically giving blogs to everyone who signs up, have pieces of paper that people can write out and submit like they might do anyway if they were going to give their testimony during a service.  We don’t need an army of regular bloggers, but we want as many individual people blogging. Its not the number of articles but the number of people that provide diversity.
• Relevance – We then need to develop clever methods of making it really easy to connect people. WordPress.com does this tremendously well. Depending on my categories and tags I can sometimes get total strangers reading this, we need to find out how to do this within the church. Maybe my fashion friend would have tagged his post? Then maybe other modelling friends would have tagged their profile with being interested in fashion and things would have popped up?
• Importance – We need to test and investigate this with case studies. We need to find real life solutions to real life problems and examples of them rather then the more theoretical post I’ve written today. Once we have these stories of how the web actually did connect the fashion designers to those in the industry and how that went, then we will be able to show the church why blogging just once or twice in your life time is worthwhile.
• Same Authority – diluted control – These blogs will never be the authoritative opinion of the leadership in the church. This does not dilute authority. But the blogs will remove some control. The leader of the church will have less control over the total image of the church because the blogs will represent the genuine thoughts of the individuals that make up that church. Some will be scared of this. Well with our software if you’re scared you just turn off “multiple blogs” and it is fine! But hopefully once our wiki gets going we will have a lot of stories of why it is worth the risk.

However, it turns out that in a week of digging this artilleryman had dug a hole that would have taken the protagonist less than a day to dig. The man is so happy with his work he starts drinking and playing cards. This guy is a visionary. He is also an idiot with no sense of what it takes to carry out the vision. I am the artilleryman!

I like ideas and I like talking about all the fantastic ways the church can move to better itself and the world. I’m usually quite good at telling other people about my ideas and getting them briefly excited and sometimes I’m even right about these things. However, it is important to realise my limitations. I’m a dreamer and I live in the clouds, I need to surround myself with people who live on planet earth.

This means 2 things. Firstly, it means it is incredibly important that I look to my peers, Andrew and Rob. Unfortunately, Rob is a bit of a dreamer too, just a slightly more grounded dreamer. Andrew Belcher on the other hand is a very practical person. Secondly it means that we as a team of people need to look to the wider community. Dreamers don’t last long in the open source community. These communities are described as “Do-ocracies” where people who DO things have power and therefore the projects that succeed, succeed because someone has taken the time to actually write code. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the idea sounds nor how much support it has. If no one does anything nothing is done! This is one reason why I am trying to talk my idea down a bit. I’m blogging about it but not announcing it in the real world until we have something of substance to talk about.

A dream of the future church

There is an area where my skills are important. The reality is that we are going to be working with “the church” as in the whole global entity and the church is simply not perfect. In fact there are many Christians who lament about how it is sometimes harder to work with other Christians then non-Christians. Personally I have found it at times difficult to navigate the labyrinth of politics and culture in the church and sometimes I leave with a sour taste in my mouth.

The important thing, I think, is this. This company’s aim is not just to create a product and certainly not just to make money or just to save the church money. It is to influence the church. I believe that, in the same way Facebook and Google are trying to encourage a more open society and attacking some aspects of privacy. I believe the church will benefit from being more open. Sometimes we may be right about these things and sometimes we may be wrong. What is important is that although we are trying to influence the church for the better (and ultimately serve the church). We will NOT be making the church “Good”. That is not our job, the guy who has the job (God) is on it and we know he WILL succeed. This means that throughout our involvement with the church some of it will be difficult, some people in the church might not be very nice and sometimes we might get hurt or burnt out.

But this is just what the Gospel is all about! The beauty is that God uses terrible people to make the world awesome with it. The beauty of that is that it means I can take part in God’s plan for the world. When we do work with the tribes online, it might be sad that the church isn’t perfect. But how awesome will it be if God uses even the 3 of us to be a tiny part of his plan to totally complete his church?

The vision and the dream is that our interactions with the church will be joyful!