Training your dog in evangelism

A friend has the maxim that, if he has a bright idea, he waits for at least 2 other people to come up with the same idea before doing anything about it......

Being out and about is vital as lots of life in Derwent is conducted out on the street so we got a dog, and it was brilliant to see the kind of 'God things' that happened as a result. Billy looks like a greyhound on steroids but he's actually a lurcher/Staffordshire bull terrier cross so he has got quite a lot of street cred because of his quite 'tough' appearance. When we first took him out for walks, people would say things like, 'Would you look at the muscle tone on that?!' The irony is that he wouldn't hurt a fly, but Billy's unconventional looks have certainly sparked many a chat we wouldn't otherwise have had. There are a number of neighbours we now count as friends through these haphazard conversations. (read the full story here)


and from a new book on sharing faith:

Some of their ideas are pretty quirky - like getting a dog just so you can chat to your neighbours when they happen to be in their garden - but the idea behind them is the same: to get talking to the people around us.

Their ideas are laid out in their new book from Moody Publishers - A Field Guide for Everyday Mission: 30 Days and 101 Ways to Demonstrate the Gospel. 

"Walk your dog when your neighbors are outside. Strike up conversations. Invite them over. No dog? Here's your chance to guilt trip your spouse into getting one," they write.  

There. You were thinking about getting a dog weren't you? Not that 'guilt tripping your spouse' is a great way to conduct your marriage, though I'm hoping that quote is tongue in cheek. 

It's also an ethical dilemma: how does a Christian (or any person for that matter) justify spending money on feeding, insuring, housing etc. a dog when there are human beings who have neither food or homes? 

I once did a research degree on a chap who declared that his dog was his spiritual director. It took me years for my attitude to our canine friends to recover, though now we own a dog, I can occasionally see what he was getting at, even though I disagree with just about everything else he said. 

Matthew Fox research paper

A few years ago I did a research degree on theologian Matthew Fox. That's this one:

as distinct from this one, who stars in the serial Lost:

For those of you with long memories, Matthew Fox 1 published a book back in the 80's called Original Blessing, and the 9 o Clock Service in Sheffield (NOS) got heavily into his thinking. NOS was a pioneer church, which nowadays would be called a 'fresh expression', embedded in youth and urban club culture, and completely unlike anything else in the CofE. It fell apart after revelations of abusive leadership started to come out. There's no connection between the abuse and Fox himself, but the adoption of Fox's theology was part of the way NOS distanced itself from mainstream worship and theology. There was very much a sense of 'you don't understand what we're doing so you can't criticise us' which the NOS leadership hid behind, and Fox's 'Creation Spirituality' was part of this. The first few minutes of the BBC's Everyman report on NOS is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I9emFLBORY .

Fox was thrown out of the RC church for various misdemeanours, but then recieved into the Episcopal church in the early 90's. So he's a fellow Anglican, but that's one of the few points of agreement I probably have with him!

At the time there weren't any substantial critiques of Fox's work, so I spent 2 years ploughing through his many books and analysing it all. I dug out the floppy disks the other day, and have managed to translate most of the content into a Word file format, and the next step is to get it onto the web somehow. I won't publish large chunks of it here, as this blog has already become much more wide-ranging than I'd intended (!) but if you're interested in a copy, email me via our church website.