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The Church Sofa Weekly Roundup – The Getting Millennials into Church? Edition

My regular round up of random things found online this week

Something on Getting Millennials into Church

Foxnews.com has a piece on what churches need to do to engage “millennials”. It seems to be that using technology is key.

In an unrelated piece of news, the guys behind the ChurcHome app have published a piece on Foxnews.com.

Something not funny…

Sojo.net have made an interesting argument as to why Christian Nationalism is destroying America.

Something to watch…

This weeks theological Twitter low point…

Well.

Submissions are open for something a little more positive for next week…

ThatAndy

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A Week In The Internet – The MAN edition.

With thanks to the AsboJesus

This is The Church Sofa Week In The Internet. A quick roundup of stuff that caught my attention in many ways.

Play the MAN You Are

Satan tries to obscure sins by rendering them nearly impossible to define. He smuggles effeminacy into the church by forbidding any specific definition.

Desiring God

The Desiring God guys have put together a super long piece on why they believe effeminacy is wrong, and indeed a sin.

As a result of reading the Desiring God site, I kinda want to grow long hair and wear a pink shirt.

A Public School Swagger?

About this tweet from the good old C of E…

Dearest C of E. I do like you. Your online stuff is generally quite good. But please don’t be that Twitter Account. Is a “public school swagger” really seen as a good thing?

Unless of course you mean that tweet ironically, and you actually have an interesting opinion about people with a “Public School Swagger”? In that case. Well played.

Social Media Firms and Mental Health.

Well. After the tragic suicide of a young teenager, Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care called on Instagram to deal with images of self harm on its site. Instagram has thankfully reacted positively to this call.

Church Times has written on this with the title “Social-media firms are failing to protect children from harmful content online, says bishop”, and within the text of the article say…

Young people had expressed to her a desire to report harmful content themselves, she said, but they did not want social media to be “demonised”, either.

Church Times

Isn’t there a hint of demonization in the title?

There’s something about how the media is treating this story is grating on me a little. I guess in the field of mental health I wonder if we’re looking in the wrong direction?

Perhaps we should be discussing unrealistic images of life put across by not just digital media, but media in general? How about cuts to Mental Health Services and other services around the country? Could we talk about pressures on the family unit in general?

What do you think?

#5Weekstoolong

For those who haven’t heard. Imagine you need to sign up to benefits. Imagine you’ve lost your job and you need some money to get you sorted whilst you look for another job? (For one example).

Imagine being told you have to wait for 5 weeks at least before anything comes through?

Does that feel too long? Join the campaign hosted by The Trussell Trust (The foodbank guys). Help them do something about it.

Thats it.

Thats it. I’m done. That all felt a little ranty this week.

Sorry about that.

Is there anything I should of ranted about instead?

Maybe this should be called The Church Sofa rant of the week?

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/
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Weekly Round Up – The Donald Trump. Chosen By God Edition?

You know how certain parts of the America Church, really really like Donald Trump? With that in mind, I guess it isn’t massively shocking that there is a message put out by his press secretary, that Donald Trump was chosen by God. According to CNN Politics…

Andy Flannagan from Christians in Politics has been asked about this by Premier Christianity:

… I’m much more concerned about whether somebody is doing God’s will than whether or not they’re ‘God’s man’. We get obsessed by that in our laziness as people; we want to know that somebody will give us a simple black and white answer. Then we don’t have to critique or analyse how somebody acts. We want to just know who the goodies and who the baddies are! But life is much more complicated than that.

If you look through scripture, you’ll see that God cares just as much about howthings get done and how things happen as what is happening. He cares about the ethics of our leadership.

Say a Christian plumber comes round your house because you’ve got a leaky pipe, and they say they’ve fixed it and then leave. Then you find you’ve got your ceiling flooded over the course of the next few weeks, so you call him back and tell him he did a terrible job. Then he says: “But hey God has chosen me to be your plumber!” You wouldn’t put up with that and so we shouldn’t really put up with it in politics either.

premierchristianity.com

God. As in God on Twitter has had something to say about this…

So thats it confirmed. God didn’t want to Donald Trump to be president.

Personally, I’m not sure what Sarah Sanders was on about.

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/
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Church Sofa Weekly Round Up

Welcome back to the weekly round up. A collection of random stuff I may not have got the chance to comment on during the week, or possibly something that went under the radar at the time. (After all, 2 years on we are all still arguing about Brexit).

Anyway…

Have you heard the one about Mormon “gay ‘cure’ therapist” who has come out as gay..? Actually its not funny, I’m not sure why I started the sentence like that…

According to Pink News…

David Matheson, a notorious Mormon practitioner of gay ‘cure’ therapy, is now “pursuing life as a gay man.” The therapist was one of the best-known Mormon practitioners of conversion therapy, setting up the Journey into Manhood program in line with church teachings that direct gay people to repress their feelings and marry someone of the opposite sex. But Matheson, who trained under Joseph Nicolosi of National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has now admitted that he is gay.

Pink news.

The BBC are coming across a little more gentle with their online radio snippet with him.

On a different note… Chad Bird has taken a slight fantasy edge to baptism…

If we had eyes to see what really happens in baptisms, we’d treat them as R-rated acts of violence. Not only is a person about to be killed. Not only are we about to witness a drowning. Horrific monsters writhe in the water. Dragons of the sea lurk therein. And a bloody battle, with crushed heads and butchered bodies is about to go down. To treat baptism as cute or sentimental or symbolic is a lie. Abandon all such foolish notions. Every baptism is war.

In a sign that 2019, may make 2016 and 2018 look like a teddy bears picnic, it’s been confirmed that the Doomsday clock has been frozen. (In case you don’t click on the link – its a bad thing…)

And finally…

One could argue that not everyone is convinced by certain… opinions expressed by Mike Pence, the American VP. Someone who has come out to argue against him this week – Lady Gaga. Questionable language from the start…

Do you know of anything else that people should read? Leave a comment below…

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/
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Explicit Content Found in Bible.

Here’s a piece of local news that was picked up by The Families Online website:

A mum has taken to social media to share her disgust over the leavers gift given to her daughter and other Year 6 pupils by their school.

On the last day of the school year, pupils that were leaving a Church of England primary school in Exeter were given a copy of the bible as a leaving gift. In itself that may not seem unusual, but when they began reading the bible they were shocked to discover that it contained dark and explicit content.

(The content in question by the way is Lot sleeping with his daughters in Genesis Chapter 19.)

Read more over at the familiesonline.co.uk website, but the article goes onto say that the mum isn’t complaining about Bibles being given as gifts as such – but she is complaining about the content of The Old Testament.

While it would be easy for me to take a typically “so-what” position in regards to this, Sofa does feel that this says something about how the Church presents the Bible. In that it can be easy for Christians to forget about some of the more “difficult” passages, and how it can seem to people not expecting to find them in what can be expected to be a safe yet boring book.

Should there be more discussion about the Bible when giving them out? I don’t know, and I certainly don’t know what form that discussion would take.

After all, do people expect the Bible to get a little Game of Thrones at points?

Perhaps she is right, perhaps New Testaments should be given out, with the Old Testament being marketed as the “prequel to help you understand the whole story”.

I guess if we could take a positive from this. There is a discussion about Bible content taking place. Not if the Bible is true or not, but what is actually in the Bible.

But if I am allowed to be facetious for one moment, perhaps there should be a translation of the Bible that is at least marketed for an older audience? Based on when I first watched some of the more violent films of the 80s and 90s, I can only imagine that may increase interest in the Bible in young people.

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/
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The Morning After The Game Before

Well. For some bizarre reason, I thought I should write something about last nights England game. On the Sunday night before the England match took place.

With me so far?

So obviously, at the time of writing I have no clue what the score is.

I could write something about Football coming home.

I could write something about managing an upset 5 year old who has got caught up in the emotion of it all. (Possibly my fault)

Or I could present a How to guide to how to react, the morning after the England Game.

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/
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Jeff Sessions, And That Bible Quote…

Have you heard the thing about the american Attorney General Jess Sessions, and his attempt at using the Bible to justify current practice of separating immigrant parents and children.

Wondering what Jess Sessions actually said?

Here it is… or at least a only slightly edited version of it…

I’m sure there are a number of other Bible verses that can be picked out the air for something like this. What other verses could he have said?

Isn’t using the Bible to encourage people to not question the law a little… I don’t know… dodgy?

 

ThatAndy

Married. Dad.

Blogger / WordPress / Email List Guy.

Photographer.

Support worker. Short sentences. I write Bio in.

http://andymackay.org.uk/