my contemplations

You know what must be one of the worst things in life to do? Re-typing something! I absolutely hate re-typing! I don’t mind writing, I do that a lot, and actually like doing it. But when I loose something and have to re-do it, that’s really bad. Although usually it ends up being written better. Well, I lost this post. Saves it on a flashdisk, and I think I didn’t stop the flasdisk the last time I used it. First time I loose data this way.

So, Scot McKnight from jesuscreed.org is visiting South Africa. Attie Nel from Attie se Koffietafel got him over for Pentacost. We have a tradition in the Dutch Reformed Church to celebrate Pentacost with a series of church services over throughout the week, Mcknight is leading these in Attie’s congregation, and Attie dis the rest of us the favour of arranging a whole program full of other speaking arrangements for McKnight.

Yesterday morning I attended a lecture McKnight gave on the New Perspective on Paul. Actually it was presented to the fourth year New Testament class, Stephan Joubert’s, from e-kerk, class, but it was opened up so that the rest of us can also attend. There wasn’t a lot of visitors however, but I found it interesting to see how bloggers got together. Attie en McKnight got together, both bloggers. I visited, because of blogging. And Tom Smith also came to visit, although we didn’t talk about it, I guess also thanx to blogging.

I found out that McKnight disagree with the New Perspective, and the things flowing from it. Also with NT Wright’s idea that Paul was writing against a Roman political system, an idea very influencial in the later works of Brian Mclaren (Secret Message of Jesus and Everything Must Change). I also found it interesting that McKnight was introduced as a leader in the emerging church, this while I can swear I read McKnight himself writing that he write about the emerging church from the outside. However, I think this he does very good, do read his article on What is the Emerging Church? if you haven’t doen that yet.

Then later I had the oppurtunity to have lunch with McKnight and some other pastors from our denomination. We had some interesting conversations on the theological influences on South Africa. Someone at one stage summarized it like this: We are Dutch people, watching American television, reading German theology and talking an obscure language which no one understand. Interesting that British theology never really had a big influence on South Africa.

OK, I’m back to my old absolutely minimalist look. Change might be good, but I can’t seem to find a theme which I like better than the current one.

Well, I’ve had a number of looks on blogs over the past 18 months or so of blogging. More and more I’m going for minimalist looks, rather than very complex three-column looks. This new onw is opting for a kind of ancient look, nothing else really changed though.

Had some conversations with a friend who is studying marketing over what the trend is in design. I think it’s going minimalist, getting rid of the cluttered designs of the past. You?

Many answers are provided for why one blog. Some whould say they blog to ramble their ideas into words. Others blog to get rid of some negative emotions, to discharge somewhere. Most of us doing more than mere journaling when blogging whould agree that we also blog to indoctriniate others with our ideology. OK, you might not agree, it doesn’t sound very postmodern, but we would like to share our believes, whould like to influence and help form others, and hopefulle we are also open to be formed in the process.

Why I blog? Probably most of the above, probably some other reasons as well, but the moments at which I feel the strongest about continuing, is when I meet up with people whom I got to know because of blogging. I’ve met some very interesting people, bloggers and readers, over the past year. Many from South Africa, and some from other countries as well.

Earlier today, as I was driving through Secunda, I met up with Jacques Bornman. Jacques is a pastor at Kruik, an AFM church in Secunda. They really try to go to lenghts to make people, especially those not comfortable with the church idea, feel at home. So if you live in the area, and are looking for a church, go pay them a visit.

We met a couple of months ago, and I promised him that at some stage when I’m going home I’ll take the Secunda road, and pay him a visit. I didn’t quite get round to it though, although I didn’t forget about it. I contacted me a couple of days ago through facebook and asked if I’m still coming around sometime. As it were, I was going back to Pretoria form my parents’ today, so we made an appointment.

The nice thing about meeting people through blogging, it that by the time you meet face to face, you have some idea what they are interested in, and usually you meet because of some mutual interest, so immediately there is something to talk about. He showed me around their church first. Now, I’m not a big fan of large churches, and not a big fan of churches spending lots of money on buildings, but if ever I were to build a church, I want it to be something like what they have. But, maybe one day when I blog about church buildings I’ll tell more about this one.

We spent about two hours talking, mostly emerging stuff, missional stuff. About South Africa, the poverty question, the rich-poor situation, what we like in our work etc. OK, but I don’t really want to talk about our conversation, that I might do tomorrow. But in answer to the question: “Why do I blog?”. I just realised why I blog while in that conversation. I blog because of the people I meet along the way, and I’ll keep on blogging to meet more of these amazingly interesting people (not just the pastors) that I’ve met along the way, people that have really influenced how I think about things.

So, if you are ever in the mood of meeting, I’d love to, send me a message!

Year is coming to an end, so I thought I’d post something on blogs I’ve been following through the year. First, I have to admit, I don’t always get to reading blogs, so I like is if what I’ve read was really reallyworth it. Obviously, that doesn’t always happen, since it is blogging, and blogging is… well, blogging. And sometimes you just write, just to write, and others read it and think “what the hell was that about?”. And you just shrug and go on, and blog again, and think that “you know what, maybe nobody actually read this, but what the hell, I’m just writing anyway!“.

So, here is some of the blogs, the people who write them, and some of the posts I remember really having a profound influence. Now, this means that I’ve remembered that specific post since it was written.

I’ll start out with Glenn Hager. I don’t get round to Glenn’s blog that much anymore, but we started out blogging about the same time, more than a year ago, about the same stuff. I got onto his blog through wordpress tags, and we followed and commented on each others blogs for a while. He wrote this one post once, which I really struggled to find, on a woman named Kimberley which he met, just practical story on what we do with the Kimberleys in our society, with the poor, those with no hope.

Tony Jones was the direct influence that got me blogging, and although I knew about emerging church and stuff, he was the one that pushed me in a direction which I liked. His post on orthodoxy got me thinking, along with the article, which I found again (thank you google). He first blogged here, but recently moved to a new blog.

Then there is my good friend Tiaan. Constantly pointing out my English errors when  Maryke couldn’t get to the post first (that’s a full time job), and faithfully commenting just to comment. For the moment he is the only other student from the theological Faculty at TUKS actively blogging.

My dad’s also a blogger, he is a missionary in Swaziland, and does a lot of work on AIDS. But one post that really stood out was this one. Telling the story of how the people from one of the little congregations in Swaziland was caring for a man, building him a home, although he was a drunkard, because they wanted to show him that God loves him. Wow!

I sometimes take part in the conversation going on at emergentafrica, although I’m a bit worried about the direction it is sometimes taking, I think Roger is doing some great stuff. Personally I think Cori wrote the best post which I found there this year, really challenging us to get away from the philosophical stuff for a while and go to what really matters. She also has her own blog, but only blogs sporadically.

There is a few people in this life who has really had some profound influences on my life. I’m not going to name them here, but many of the names you wouldn’t have ever heard, they are just people I’ve met somewhere, friends. One of them, Nadine, is also blogging. She is 18, and has been a great mentor to me on all things teenager.

There was a number of other blogs I’ve read through the year, but let’s stop here. This is the blogs, and especially the posts, which I immediately think of if I think of this year. Next year we will be starting a new blog, so if your an Afrikaans reader, look out for it. A couple of theological students from TUKS will be joining hands in a group blog teo@up, but currently you won’t find anything there.

Haven’t been blogging for a while now. It’s amazing how fast you get out of touch with your ideas if you stop. If I keep on blogging, I tend to have something to blog about, once I stop for a week or two, I just can’t seem to think what to write about!

But OK, I’m back to blogging for now

From July - October is the time for camping on our churches. And the past few years this has been a hectic time, with camps almost every weekend, and some week-long camps as well. The last two camps was one with primary school kids in the congregation where I grew up, and one with 17year olds in the congregation where I am currently. This last one was really an amazing camp. One of those experiences which you just can’t say what caused it, or how to repeat it. But the young people really started talking about there thoughts about God, and questions and stuff. Amazing deep stuff.

They have been doing there last year of “Sunday school” and we took them on a camp at the end of it. I think it all started on Friday evening. We did an activity where they were blindfolded, and then led up to a point where they had to leave the hands of the rest of the group, and then took to a rope. They had to find the end of the circular rope, with people stading around, telling them that they are here to help them, the whole time! The end of the rope is when you ask for help, and the blindfold is taken of.

Through a process of reviewing we then started some conversation. The activity is made a metaphor for talking about God and faith, and we also started talking about the Bible. And then at one stage the pastor that came with me asked a question about how we understand creation (we knew that there was some creationists in the group). This started some discussion, but somewhere in this I think they started to see that it’s OK to ask questions.

They started some conversations among themselves, and on Saturday we had some individual conversations with everyone. They asked questions, and shared ideas, among themselves, and in the individual conversations some questions came out as well.

I think some of the following is what get’s asked a lot by young people in our context:

Why do bad things happen? A lot of them have lost friends through death. They mostly believe that God has a purpose with everything, although they doubt this sometimes, and some find it better when they get told that maybe we do not need to believe that there is a purpose behind everything. I’m actually very much troubled by the fact that so many of our young people have this idea, as I’ve also said here.

Some other questions is the classis: “Where does God come from” and some questions concerning the devil. Some of them don’t know how to handle the evolutionists, and rather decide not to believe the scientists at all. But OK, this is all church youth.

You will find by facebook status in the sidebar. I got the idea from Adam Cleaveland Walker. For the facebook fans also blogging.

Log into facebook, onto your profile, go down to mini-feeds.

In the right hand corner, click on “see all”.

Now click on Status stories.

At the bottom of the stories, you’ll find My Status, right click, and copy shortcut.

In WordPress.com, go to presentation, to the widgets.

Drag the RSS 1 widget in.

Open the text, and past the shortcut into the URL box.

Set it for the amount of feeds you would like to see (mine is set to 3 feeds at the moment)

Wahlah! You have you’re Facebook status shown to everybody who visits your blog. Now everyone will know that you are down, having a bad time, and leave you a comment to chear you up, or something And now Maryke will actually know what I’m doing with my life