New commenting policy

Conversation (Photo credit: Bright Meadow)

Breaking news. I’m going to stop doing something I LIKE, to enable me to do something I LOVE more, and better.

I really LIKE engaging in conversation with readers of this blog. I find it opens my mind, enables me to think better about things that matter to me, confirms some things in my mind, and challenges others. More often than not, even the aggressive attacks on myself and my faith result in me having to properly think through why I think the way that I do, and provide an even greater foundation.

But I’m going to stop. This has been bubbling away for a while now and it feels like the time’s right; let me explain why.

Commenters on this blog fall into only a few categories:

1. friends and family who want to encourage or challenge me
2. people I don’t know who want to encourage me
3. (the majority) people I don’t know who disagree with what I’m saying and have no intention of changing their mind

For each of these categories I’m going to respond differently:

1. speak to them personally – I already know them!
2. send them a personal thank you e-mail because (a) the encouragement means more than you know and I’d like to acknowledge it, and (b) it’s just nice to get to know new people!
3. reply to this comment with a link to this post and nothing else, and follow up with a personal e-mail to enable the conversation to happen anyway

I’ve not been sure about doing this because the response to 3. doesn’t seem to encourage healthy conversation; away from the public eye I might misbehave! But here’s what I’m hoping will happen:

• other commenters will get involved to step in when they agree with me, thereby improving the conversation and enabling others to get the benefits I’ve been enjoying
• commenters who are just angry at me personally and leave anonymous attacks without any interest in an actual conversation will stop wasting their own time (I honestly don’t mind, it keeps the stats up on the blog so makes me feel good about myself!)
• engaging in discussion will take up less of my time because I’m on e-mail a lot more than on the blog

So hopefully that all makes sense. Just to be clear on the way comments work, I approve your first comment, then anything else you add will go through automatically. So if you want to remain anonymous for your comment but still have the conversation, explain that in your comment and leave your e-mail address, and I’ll remove that before approving it.

Ironically(?), leave a comment if you have any questions.

Oh, and I reserve the right to leave a comment anytime I want to.

#TOAM Rob Bell: hero or heretic?

That was the title of one of the sessions I attended at the Together on a Mission conference, and it was certainly interesting.

Some background may be useful – Rob Bell wrote a book called Velvet Elvis. He suggested in it that doctrine is often stated as such fact that it’s like bricks on a wall, but that it should be like springs on a trampoline. The result is that if a brick has to be removed or change shape, the whole wall falls down, whereas flexible springs would make Christianity more enjoyable.

The picture’s a nice one, but his infamous example shows its weakness – he asked the question, ‘what if the virgin birth wasn’t true?’ Actually, in and of itself the virgin birth shouldn’t make any difference, but there’s a big problem.

The springs don’t sit on their own – take out the spring of the virgin birth, and you then have to lose the truthfulness of the Bible, Jesus’ divinity, and a whole host of other issues, without which we really wouldn’t have a Christian faith at all!

So if the question is ‘is Rob Bell a Christian?’ I’d have to say that I think he is. He affirms the authority of the Bible, believes in substitutionary atonement, and doesn’t actually question the virgin birth (he just uses it as an extreme example to get a rise out of the reader).

But if the question is ‘should I listen to Rob Bell?’ I’d have to say no. While no individual idea is fundamentally heretical on its own, his focus is not the same as the Bible would recommend. In other words, it would be quite easy to read any of his books as an agnostic, ignore some minor points and still agree with the whole thing. That wouldn’t be awful, were it not that Bell’s intention is to write from a Christian perspective.

This whole session was really interesting and can be found as an mp3 download on the Newfrontiers website.