Following yesterday’s post on this subject and Bill Kinnon‘s kind comment on it, I went back to his site tonight and found a link to this post by Heidi Daniels. I’ve left a comment there: her experience is of pastors who wanted to mediate her relationship with God. So much for the Reformation heritage of the priesthood of all believers, then. Clearly much of the Protestant, evangelical and charismatic churches (and I still count myself within those traditions) only pay lip service to that great doctrine.
It’s also been interesting to be in a meeting tonight where we effectively did some ‘digital faith’. We were discussing holding a Saturday festival for the ecumenical partnership in which I serve, but without making it some boring AGM. Partly we arrived at the idea of a festival rather than an AGM by surfing between different ideas that had been expressed earlier in the meeting. Then when we talked about some of the format for the festival, we wanted a section where people could express their hopes, dreams and visions for the partnership. We haven’t got it all nailed down yet, but basically we want an interactive, open-ended conversation rather than just the church leaders telling the members of the congregation what to do. I think we agreed there would need to be some input to begin the process – someone has to start the interaction, and maybe there is a leadership duty to do that – but I think we were unconsciously using the digital model I discussed yesterday.
Technorati Tags: BillKinnon, HeidiDaniels, digitalfaith, church, ministry, priesthoodofallbelievers
Big Circumstance 
Oddly, my experience was not so far different from Heidi’s. Other than that I probably didn’t read as much theology as she did at 13, and I DID leave the church for quite awhile because of a lot of the same issues she talks about.
One of the things that I think is fantastic about blogging and Christian discussiong groups on the internet is the ability to interact and talk about faith with all sorts of people. The downside – on discussion groups, anyway – is that under cover anononymity people can often forget that they are speaking to another human being.
All in all, I think Christian blogging is different from face-to-face discussions, but I have learnt an enormouse amount from people on the internet about what they think and believe.
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