Archive for the “articlez” category
Passive assent or non-cooperation with evil?
by Geoff Hall on 18 April 2012 with
"Memory of the Berlin Wall" Copyright, 2012. Geoff Hall
What happens if governments around the world don’t receive a mandate from their people? What if a majority of registered voters choose not to vote? If only 25% of voters choose to vote, whose interests is the government representing? The bigger question of course is how do the 75% majority of the population respond?
Considering the chaos and destruction caused by the grasping of power, why do we vote for our political parties and their sales representatives? Democracy is like any other product, it has currency in an internal market, but recently it has expanded to the export market.
Exploring Identity
by Chris Lorensson on 17 October 2011 with
I’ve written a lot about the topic of identity, and it’s even the topic of my first book, Mirror. If I had to guess at the main reason I’m here, I’d say it was to excavate our history in order to uncover the truth about our identities. Jesus’ teachings walked a fine line between selflessness and identity in Him. To gain our lives, we must lose them. To lose our life is to gain it. His disciples reeled at this seemingly contradictory philosophy, and I would argue we have only a few examples of a life which exemplifies this principle.
I believe our identities are a sort of lost key to the locked door of community’s progress. I believe God made us each for a specific purpose, and that purpose is written in our identities. But speaking broadly—as the Community of Christendom, do we know who we are?
Sure we do—we’re the bride of Christ, children of God, brothers and sisters of Jesus, beloved, cherished, treasured. Hang on a second—when someone asks me what do you do, I don’t reply with I’m a full-service design agency, specialising in user experiences on a digital platform because to say that would be to describe my company, not myself. I think that what we call ‘identity’ nowadays largely is a description of our company—our community. It’s what we do and who we are as a whole— rather than as individuals. When I’m asked that question I reply I design experiences, and when I’m asked who are you? I reply I’m Chris because I have a name, a purpose, a father and a community around me, wherein my functions and purpose are exercised. My point is that I am not my community— I am an individual who makes up a key part of my community, but there are two identities here, not one.
The Joy of Prioritisation
by Chris Lorensson on 10 October 2011 with
I want to talk a little bit about prioritisation. Not really in a heavy sense, but just practical little things that I’ve learned the hard way.
For the past 6 years I’ve carried a memory of a span of time in my life when I felt closest to God. The more I recall this memory, the more romanticised it becomes in my mind. Now, the reality of it is so far from me that I’m not sure it happened at all. But I’m not quite ready to let it go, yet, and this post is all in the dim light of that distant memory, which I will refer to hereon out as the good ‘ol days.
The Good ‘Ol Days were simple—God had broken through my desire for significance by simply replacing that hole inside me with Himself. The Good ‘Ol Days lasted, for me, about 3 or 4 years. I spent a lot of time walking and talking with God. I was constantly starved for the Bible. In everything I did, I thought of Him.
The Bristol Festival of Literature – 14th – 23rd October, 2011.
by Geoff Hall on 21 September 2011 with
From October 14th to 23rd Bristol is to hold its first Festival of Literature. Being a writer, I was excited by this and thought the City Council must have had an epiphany about developing the Creative Economy in Bristol. I eagerly got a shot of hypertext markup language and visited their site to confirm my expectations. I clicked on numerous links and tried various searches to tease out the information from their site and came up with…nothing!
This was not particularly surprising, considering Bristol for all its swagger and self-imaging as a radical city, has a very conservative, provincial mindset. As far as a distinctive policy for developing the Creative Economy, Bristol isn’t even a member of the Dance Consortium, whereas radical cities like Bradford and Milton Keynes are! Figure that one out. Bristol seems to get its radical self-image from rioting, which isn’t radical, but misplaced self-indulgence. Go figure! If you are working-class or black in Bristol you will experience a greater sense of marginalisation, this doesn’t mean the power of the place is radical, (unless radical = tense?) it informs us of a city which is diverse in its cultural makeup, but which doesn’t embrace difference too well, as diversity threatens the conservative well-being of Bristol. Read the rest of this entry »
Dissatisfied, disaffected, disenfranchised and frankly…completely dissed!
by Geoff Hall on 30 August 2011 with
With the publishing of ‘When is the right time to give up?’ I received lots of personal messages asking me not to! That was very comforting! At least people were reading what goes on in the ‘Neosphere’, as Marshall McLuhan called it (I think). (The Neosphere is a new virtual repository of human knowledge).
What we know as the World-Wide Web is nothing less than a storehouse of human knowing. We may not agree with much of it, but hopefully the more knee-jerked, bigoted and ill-educated comments on YouTube which can be filtered out and need not attract our attention the better!
In this Neosphere you have to be careful how you talk, tweet or update your status, because you could end up in jail. Talks of rioting are strictly forbidden and so if you wish to overthrow your Government you have to be careful how you phrase it! It would seem that any form of resistance is undesirable and when we don’t give in to rather basic urges of rioting, looting and burning down other people’s businesses, our silence or inactivity is presumed to give tacit assent to what our Governments get up to in the ‘name of the people’.
Read the rest of this entry »
Affirmation for the world, the flesh and the rebel
by Geoff Hall on 22 August 2011 with
“Christians should be troublemakers, creators of uncertainty, agents in a dimension incompatible with society.” Jacques Ellul
My! How far we have fallen short of this? Jacques Ellul, a critical, perceptive writer who was once a member of the French Resistance and author of such classics as ‘Propaganda’ and ‘The Technological Society’ kind of stirs things up for us with this little thought. We immediately reject it, don’t we for we are not called to be troublemakers, but peacemakers, creators of certainty and not uncertainty, aren’t we? Agents of incompatibility? What is he driving at? Surely this is hyperbole, right? He’s said it just to make us think and then we can run back into the safety of our churches? Isn’t the world unsafe enough already?
It seems to me that Ellul’s call is for the artist, for those with subversive gifts, artists of the subtext, in other words artists of uncertainty. The clue is in his former job title, ‘Member of the French Resistance’. Think about it.
Read the rest of this entry »
My vision of ‘church’ for today
by Chris Lorensson on 20 July 2011 with
I’ve written a couple series here on Upptäcka Network about Why I don’t go to church much and articles On community, and I wanted to follow it up with some changes I want to see—some ideas for how we could ‘do church’ in today’s culture. There were a few key points I highlighted in those series, and I’d like to use them as a starting point for thinking about how our models of church might improve in the next 10 years.
Changing God’s Mind
by Chris Lorensson on 9 November 2010 with
Forgive the lack of citations in this article- but they are not unknown references.
It seems to me that, as mentioned before, God originally intended Adam and Eve (and I’d like to highlight them here are as being representative of mankind) to walk with the animals. You know- the “lion laying with the lamb” sort of thing. As such, I suspect that Adam & Eve were not originally meant to eat them.
As I understand it, (and I am no expert or enthusiast) meat is generally unhealthy for humans. Indeed also as I understand it, any animal products of any sort are nowhere near as healthy for the human body as fruits & vegetables, beans, nuts etc.
Let me clarify that this is not an article about vegetarianism or veganism, or even animal cruelty. This is about how God deals with a fallen world. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATED: Design and Response
by Chris Lorensson on 25 July 2009 with
Hi all, I’ve gone through and made some updates to the article Design and Response: finding handmade people in an identikit world, so have a read if you haven’t already. It’s pretty long – about 10 short chapters, and it’s about how the way God made us correlates with design as a discipline, and what we should do about it.
Have fun, have a read!
More Mauretania
by Chris Lorensson on 28 November 2007 with
Last night I was walking round town, and remember that neon sign I told you about, I tried to get some video of it (it was lit up all nice at night time) but my phone kept screwing up, but one of the photos managed to survive.