Yes, the commenting system on this blog is messed up. It's the silly verification system for stopping spam - it doesn't seem to work. But if I take that off, I get something like 100 spam comments a day.

Rest assured, your comments are saved in a temporary table in the database, which with a lot of manual work I can make them "live". It's just tedious and time-consuming I only get around to it every few months.

Man, I wish I'd chosen a different platform back in 2004 when I started this site. Wordpress would've been good...BLOG:CMS is just horrible.

So the solution is to upgrade. The only problem is that I haven't found a clean upgrade path (i.e. making sure posts AND comments are preserved in all the right places) yet. So it's either waiting until one is available, coding one myself, or somehow importing the comments later.

In the meantime, you can email your comments to me - roger [at] futurechurch dot co dot za - along with the url of the post you're commenting on - and I'll put them up.

And if anyone wants to sponsor a site upgrade...

Neil Cole, church planter & coach in the Simple Church movement is the guest of David Broodryk (from the church planting network, Kingdom People) and Floyd McClung (from the church planting network, All Nations).

Neil is the author of Organic Church and co-author of Beyond Church Planting: Pathways for Emerging Churches with Dr. Robert Logan.

This one day seminar is Neil's only event in Gauteng. It is scheduled for Saturday 21 March at the Coventant Life Church in Midrand from 9:00 - 16:00.

Contact person: David Broodryk
Tel: 083 - 289 3495 or 011 - 318 2499
Email: david at kingdompeople dot co dot za
Get more detail on this event here:
Kingdom People Special events
Facebook event

Background info about Kingdom People and All Nations:
Kingdom People
All Nations

I just signed ONE's petition calling on the African Union to keep its promise to the new unity government of Zimbabwe and I hope you will too: http://www.one.org/zimbabweandtheau The consequences of years of poor governance in Zimbabwe are poverty and disease on a tragic scale demanding a global response. Public hospitals have been without running water for months, creating a petri dish for easily preventable killers such as cholera. More than 3,000 people have died in Africa's worst cholera epidemic in 19 years. Schools have been shut down because teachers can't be paid. The agricultural sector has collapsed, half the population requires emergency food aid, and humanitarian aid groups are struggling to keep up. Now Zimbabwe has a new unity government, but in order for it to have any chance to tackle these problems, it is going to need the African Union to do everything in its power as guarantor of the new government. Add your name to the petition and show the African Union that the world is watching what it does in Zimbabwe: http://www.one.org/zimbabweandtheau

My first church service in 2009 was special: attending Vespers at St Nicholas Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg, as a result of an invite from Steve Hayes to those involved in the emerging church conversation to see what we can learn from each other.

The service was beautiful, full of imagery and ritual. I was particularly struck by the use of gold in the paintings and icons - unexpected beauty in one of the less beautiful neighbourhoods in Joburg.

Some of the liturgy was in Afrikaans and there was much use of the space in the church - not just the front but the whole building, as the priests processed through it at various times. The choir singing was beautiful and reminded me of the chanting of the Benedictine Monks at uMaria weThemba in Grahamstown.

To help prepare the non-Orthodox visitors for what goes on at Vespers, Steve posted Notes from underground: Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee with links to resources on Orthodox Vespers.

The Greek Orthodox church is one of the three main streams in Christianity (the other two being Catholic and Protestant) and is the stream I know least about. It was tempting to bring a critical eye to bear on my lone Orthodox experience and to then apply that to all Orthodoxy everywhere, but that's not fair! And so during the service I kept reminding myself to come back to the present, to be present to what was happening although it was different, and search for G-d within it.

It was great to see Cobus and Maryke (now married - congratulations!), as well as Reggie Nel, Andries Louw and Arthur Stewart there...and of course, the Nieu Communities apprentices for 2009.

After the service we had a conversation with everyone who attended about what the service was about and I enjoyed the format of being able to ask any question we wanted to. More churches can learn from this way of welcoming strangers.

Although most of the service was Greek to me (*sigh* that's really weak, I know, but I couldn't resist) there was something beautiful and haunting about it. The knowledge that this way of worshipping G-d has been largely unchanged for almost 2000 years - and that in that experience I shared that much history with all of those who have done that before - that was profound.

Others have blogged about the experience:
Andries Louw - Negotiating identity between orthodoxy and emergence.
Cobus van Wyngaard - Orthodox-Emerging dialogue.
Reggie Nel - Vespers worship, strange but intriguing.
Steve Hayes - Orthodox emerging missional dialogue.

Lent starts on Wednesday, a season of self-examination, repentance, and turning towards G-d, as we prepare for Easter, a celebration of the infinite G-d breaking into our world in love and revelation. As regular readers of this blog know, I was an apprentice with Nieu Communities last year. Their parent organisation is called Church Resource Ministries who are releasing their second Lent devotional this year.

CRM staff from around the world have contributed their reflections to our second Lent Devotional. This edition is woven around the themes of “Thirst”, “Seize”, “Relinquish” and “Prevail” and brings together the power of Scripture and the rich and varied experiences of our staff.

Join me and follow it every day on email by signing up at http://www.crmleaders.org/lent/

Tom Smith has written a great post on "A pathological condition of Christianity" where he quotes a definition of fundamentalist, including this gem:

“It chooses those parts of Scripture which fit in with the dominant ideology. So, for example, it often focuses more on issues such as homosexuality and abortion, on which the Bible say little or nothing, and ignores issues such as poverty and wealth, on which it says a great deal. Being itself so entangled with the dominant ideology, it fails to see how conditioned and unfree - and therefore anti-spiritual - its biblicism is."

Does criticising someone mean you don't like them? I grew up with this belief - that if I said something negative about someone (or their ideas or practice) it meant I didn't like them. I've often seen this with other South Africans: that (mostly) criticism is something that only happens behind someone's back and it usually equates to not liking the person either.

The gift of Americans to me is this: it's ok to criticise someone, to do it to their face and for that not to affect the relationship.

I first saw this a year before I started studying at Baptist Theological College in Joburg. There was a visiting speaker for the week (and BTC let me sit in): Michael Holt (and his apprentice Nathan Smith) from Reach Out Ministries in the States (I subsequently considered apprenticing with Michael for a year and also spent a weekend with him in his home in Asheville, North Carolina). Michael is a gifted speaker and was guiding us through a book, "How to speak to youth (and keep them awake at the same time)" by Ken Davis.

After Michael had trained us in the principles of public speaking, each of the students had to present a 5-minute talk to the rest of us. Once the talk was given, we the audience had to do something which was culturally foreign to us - and was, to be honest, uncomfortable.

We had to critique the talk...while the speaker was still in the room (!!!!!).

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We join people in your country and around the world in congratulating you on becoming the President-elect of the United States. Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place. We note and applaud your commitment to supporting the cause of peace and security around the world. We trust that you will also make it the mission of your presidency to combat the scourge of poverty and disease everywhere. We wish you strength and fortitude in the challenging days and years that lie ahead. We are sure you will ultimately achieve your dream, making the United States of America a full partner in a community of nations committed to peace and prosperity for all.

- Full text of a message from Nelson Mandela, the first black president of South Africa, to Senator Barack Obama, the first black president-elect of the United States of America. (Source: The New York Times)

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My last post examined some of the reactions of Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction. I mentioned that I'd previously misunderstood deconstruction, and this is true: I thought deconstruction was de-struction, that it was a purely negative critique. So, I thought, to "deconstruct" something was to tear it apart until nothing was left, to show all the ways that something which is trying to be something good is, in fact, not, and at the end of the process you're left with nothing, just the wreckage of what you started with.

I know plenty of people who still think that is what deconstruction is. An acquaintance of mine who runs an alternative expression of church helped a friend "deconstruct" God, so that all my friend had left after the process was...nothing. And my acquaintance thought this was a good thing, that he had somehow performed a valuable service.

He is wrong. He did not "deconstruct" God, but rather de-structed God, destroyed God, collapsed my friend's idea of and relationship with God so that he was metaphorically left writhing on the floor in pain, having had God effectively removed from him.

That is not deconstruction, I am pleased to say (and was relieved to discover). I would denounce the process my friend went through as almost abusive (and I've chosen to distance myself from and not engage with that acquaintance of mine any more, because he is dangerous) and so write this post to those who think that when they critique the church and God in a purely negative way, they're doing the noble work of deconstruction. They're not. They're just breaking stuff. It's easy to point out the flaws in almost anything and everybody can do that. The more difficult - and the more affirming and creative - work is what deconstruction calls us to.

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"Postmodernism" is a loaded word for South African Christians: it polarises people into binary opposites before either side has said anything. It either means that you are doing some really cutting-edge things when it comes to cultural engagement for the sake of the gospel, or it means that you don't believe in truth, the Bible or much else.

If you research postmodernism a little, you'll come across Jacques Derrida, who coined the word "deconstruction."

Most people I know haven't a clue what deconstruction is, but think they do, and use their understanding incorrectly (I know: I used to be one of them).

Below I've posted a few extracts from John Caputo's book, "Deconstruction in an nutshell" (1997) (which has helped me to understand what deconstruction actually is) where he talks about the reaction Derrida has provoked. If you exchange "Derrida" for "the emerging church conversation" you may get a sense of why many of us are frustrated with people who criticise us before they actually understand what it is we're saying. I post this because of the strong resonances with critics of postmodernism and the emerging church conversation in South Africa at present. Read more