Many of us believe in a supernatural realm. Whether it’s a mystical god, to ghosts or goblins, to vague unseen spiritual forces or whether it’s the god of a religion we happen to follow, many of us have a sense of something beyond.

Something we cannot see. But we have a sense is there.

Now, as a Christian, I don’t believe in ghosts at all.

But myself and many others believe not just that there might be a supernatural realm, but that there is a very real one. One where spirits from different sides are at work.

There are terms like ‘spiritual warfare’ banded about in church.

In the context of the Christian faith we talk about a presence in this unseen spiritual realm who is a person, called the Holy Spirit. This Holy Spirit is someone we do not physically see, but who we merely see by the impact He has on ourselves, others and the world around us.

When we talk about people being touched by the Holy Spirit (he says in very good Christianese) then we mean they have been interacting with someone unseen – but very real.

Indeed, God Himself is someone no one has seen.

Lots of people talk about Him and being in His presence, but no one anywhere has ever physically met Him.

He is unseen.

The only direct physical representation we have of God is (more…)

We all have a social self. A self the world sees, the part of us that we like everyone to know, the best parts of us. The words we use to interact with those around us, the image we present to the world.

The social self is merely an image projected by us, which we control, which ensures that people don’t see the darkest, most shameful or vulnerable parts of us. It’s the self we let people see, that interacts with people on a daily basis. We don’t generally let most people past this self – only those closest to us tend to get beyond it.

In many ways this is the self which protects everyone else from seeing what’s really going on inside, from who we really are.

The interesting thing about this is, that this is an exact, word-for-word description many use of the digital realm, the world of social media, the self that exists on Facebook or Twitter. (more…)

I recently went to the birthday party of a good friend. I only knew one person at the party – the person who’d invited me.

By the end of the evening I’d chatted to at least 5 or 6 new people in depth – and made two new Facebook friends. I’d also managed to grow my own self-confidence into the bargain.

Somehow, being around people, physically interacting with them, made a difference to me. I have new friendships in the digital realm now, but there was a connection made in physically interacting that couldn’t have been made otherwise.

It works in reverse too.

For example, the day before the party above, I met and had dinner with someone in London. A friend who I had chatted to on both Twitter, Facebook and Skype. Someone who I had built up a good friendship with and talked to about some important issues only in the digital realm.

A person I considered a good friend, but who I’d never met in the flesh before that day. (more…)

For so much of my life I’ve tried to control everything. Relationships, work, creativity, circumstances.

Even my faith.

Yes, I’ve tried to control God.

Sounds ridiculous doesn’t it? On the face of it it sounds patently absurd, no matter what your view of God is like, when you hear the term ‘God’ you don’t think of a being you can control. The whole idea is impossible.

But I’ve tried to do it nevertheless. There are several cunning ways my soul comes up with to do this, many of which I do without even making a conscious decision to do so.

First, I can get angry with God and make demands and accusations of Him, which are patently ridiculous and make assumptions about His character which in reality I know aren’t true.

Second, I don’t give Him a chance to respond. I don’t spend enough time listening to Him to hear what He has to say in response.

Third, I restrict God to human boundaries – I treat Him like He’s human and sees things from my limited perspective. This above all is something that it’s so easy to do that I often don’t realise I’m doing it. (more…)

After writing a lot on relationships and the role of women in the last few months, I felt it appropriate to share a little on the issue of masculinity. So in the next few weeks we’re going to be having a series here on this issue – including a guest post next week, with the female perspective on masculinity.

When writing on masculinity there’s always a danger that you can be accused of being under-qualified. In the church even more so – as a single man in his 30’s it can be easy, both culturally and in a church context, to be seen as not a ‘real’ man because I’m not married.

This kind of sums up the point I want to discuss – that a lot of what we have been reliably informed is what makes a man a ‘real man’ is not actually Biblical, but just cultural traditions which have come through misinterpretations and misunderstandings of scripture.

This post covers both singleness and masculinity – partially because so often the subjects are linked, especially in a church context and partially because that’s largely my experience – often I’ve felt that because of my singleness, that somehow I’m not a real man, not as masculine as married men – that is partly my perception, but also partly down to the attitudes and language of some people I have met or heard speak on the subject. (more…)

We are now well into the first week of advent. As we approach the second week of advent, having thought about the heart of our lives, the rhythm of our lives, the shalom of God in my previous post now it’s important to go to the root of how we see God. Part of the calling inherent throughout creation is a pattern, a rhythm of death and resurrection, and the time of advent is very much a time of preparation and renewal.

It allows us to examine ourselves again before God and given that Christmas is about Jesus birth and coming in the flesh, it’s important we examine our attitudes toward how we see God. So what I wish to do today is to examine this more fully – maybe not quite in a way you may expect, but with something I believe is fundamentally important to a healthy view of God and His creation.

So let’s begin in scripture. In Genesis 28 Jacob gets sent away by Issac. Whilst he’s away, in the very same chapter, he lays down to sleep, putting his head on a stone to rest it. The lowest of the low it would seem, totally alone and thrown out, having to lay his head on a stone. But during this sleep he has a dream, a dream about God. God says the following to him: (v 13-15) (more…)

I have been in big discussions in the last few days – on social networking sites, ironically enough – concerning the truth and reality of relationships established and sustained through social networking. Statistics on the nature of human relationships and communication – saying that most communication is non-verbal, for example, and allegations that these relationships are somehow superficial, have been made in what has been a healthy, friendly discussion.

I have no problem with people disagreeing with me in this issue, healthy discussion can and should involve those who disagree, respecting one another’s opinions whilst engaging fully with the issue. Displaying love for one another in a Christ-like way, yet still confronting the issues head on – and it should be this way with all discussions which take place anywhere – in the digital realm and in the physical realm.

Yet I have also seen in the last week people I respect being involved in discussions on other issues, discussions which I have contributed too, but where the discussion has resulted in people I care about being upset, uncomfortable and hurt. The tone at times has been cruel and hurtful, people caring so much about being right and ‘winning’ the argument, that the core values of love and respect have been forgotten.

I have to say, being honest, seeing people I considered friends upset and offended in this way actually made me pretty angry. Put it this way, I wasn’t feeling too loving or respectful to the people that had treated them that way. (more…)

Hi people! As many of you will know (some of whom because I met you there), I attended a conference a couple of weeks back on Christanity and social media. It followed an awards ceremony the previous day so the whole weekend was called ‘Christian New Media Awards & Conference 2011′, or more simply, CNMAC11. At the conference were several guest speakers from the Christian, digital and creative realms alike, speaking on many different issues around how we as Christians deal with the digital media, how it can impact our lives & culture and its power to change the world. There were seminars on how to navigate twitter, to write code for your blog, how to do handle self-promotion and balance that with being a Christian and pointing away from yourself, and about the importance of retaining a balance between interaction in the digital world and non-digtial world.

One thing that became crystal clear to me is that there no such thing as the ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ worlds, because the online space, the digital realm, is part of the real world – it’s just as real, although different, from physically interacting with someone – and that was abundantly clear by the number of ‘Twitter-friends’, who I’d only known online, that I met and felt like I’d known them for a long time.

There’s a lot to discuss coming from this conference and I have a lot more to share. But for now, I want to share with you a little audio recording I made whilst at the conference with Dr Bex Lewis of the Big Bible Project and #digidisciple (more on that in a future post!). There will be a link down the sidebar eventually but I wanted to share it with you here first, so listen (carefully, the beginning is a bit muffled!) and enjoy me talking about the conference!

I must admit I’m a bit of a fan of Apple technology. I’m not so addicted that I have to possess every new piece of equipment they create – I don’t own an i-pad for example – but I am a fan of their creations. I admire their simplicity, their creativity and sheer audacity, which is implicit in everything they do. They have such imagination and are often the innovators and trendsetters in their field, much like I’ve often advocated Christians need to be every field, which is a whole other blog post.

The truth though is that I can’t get my i-phone out and try to get it to comprehend me, or understand me fully. It might know a lot of facts about me – it knows my Facebook friends, Twitter followers, websites I’ve visited, stuff I’ve written, phone numbers of friends and family, and personal details like my address – but it doesn’t understand me completely and cannot explain or understand the depths of my soul, my emotions, what makes me weep, and the complexities of why I do what do, have the friends I do or how I work inside and out, on any more than a factual level. It cannot comprehend the depths of me. I mean, we’d think someone stupid if they asked their phone or computer to understand the depths of their soul wouldn’t we?

Now, the i-phone is a created object. We designed and created it, and so have set the boundaries within which it can work. We have boundaries we have to work within and which limit us, some imposed on us, some of our own choosing. So by definition, as we have defined the boundaries within which the phone works, it’s never going to be able to break those boundaries.

It might work hard, it might try to expand and grow, but the phone on its own is very limited, and there’s only so much it can do.

Human beings have spent thousands of years trying to understand the mystery of God. Great theologians have come and gone, and come up with new and fresh understandings, we’ve had the Bible interpreted and re-interpreted countless times and it has had a profound affect on our values. We have used our imagination to come up with images – through words, pictures, songs, and poetry, to describe God and try and understand Him.

All of these things can point us towards God, and connect us to Him, and bring us into deeper and more intimate relationship with Him. All of these things are good in themselves and helpful in us going deeper with our creator and understanding Him better.

But there is always one simple problem.

We are God’s creation.

We didn’t create Him, He created us.

We are all, essentially, creations of His imagination. (more…)

Last weekend my blog went down for a while, and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t access the dashboard to post anything, I couldn’t read the blog, I couldn’t access the server. I was worried I’d lost all my work and my investment in my blog, and all I could do was e-mail the server people and hope it would get fixed. I was totally dependent on someone else I couldn’t see and had never met. I didn’t know what was going on or how it was going to turn out. Obviously it turned out okay in the end, but even now I don’t really know what went wrong. At the time I was furious, e-mailing the server people with all sorts of questions which I wanted explanations for. But it made me realise something.

We’re all looking for an answer.

We seem to spend our whole lives looking for answers.

Life seems to give us so many questions, some on a very subconcious level, and we are constantly making decisions, even elementary ones about what we wear and what we will have for lunch.

But deep at the root of who we are, we all want ‘the’ answer. We want to find a viewpoint, a perspective, a way of seeing life, something that grounds us.

Something that can help explain everything and which we can put security in.

And a lot of us, when we find whatever that is, we like to know as much about that point of view – and sometimes the others – as we can, so we can defend that view to others and to ourselves. (more…)