Why angels preferred working in the first century

God is Dead?

Black Sabbath have just released a new track which has sent #Godisdead up the top Twitter trending tags. It's a shame you can't include punctuation in a hashtag, as the full title is 'God is Dead?' That question mark makes all the difference.

Having never listened to Black Sabbath in my life (not intentionally or knowingly anyway) it was quite an experience to treat myself to 9 minutes of this. Riddled with biblical and apocalyptic imagery (I'm sure John, author of Revelation, would have been top billing at a 1st century heavy metal convention), the song concludes:

but still the voices in my head 

are telling me that God is dead

the blood pours down the rain turns red

I don’t believe that God is dead.

Sorry atheists and Nietzche fans, nothing to see here. Try this from another Sabbath track, After Forever:

Could it be you're afraid of what your friends might say 
If they knew you believe in God above? 
They should realize before they criticize 
That God is the only way to love 

32 years later, Black Sabbath are still keeping the faith, in their own peculiar way.

PS 'God' has tweeted in response "A better, more shocking title would be 'Ozzy is alive?' "

#prayforTwitter

Here's a report from the Christian New Media Conference at the weekend: a snippet - 

Social media consultant Bryony Taylor shed some light on how the Twitter hash tag #prayForMuamba sparked prayer across the nation for footballer Fabrice Muamba who collapsed during a game earlier this year.

She said: "Twitter seems to have broken a barrier in talking about praying. ‘Pray For Muamaba’ was not the only hash tag with the word ‘pray’ in it . There was a ‘pray for Japan’ hash tag last year after the earthquake. It seems to me that it’s become a copied phrase, a normal response to a crisis on Twitter."

Between March 17 and 19 there were over 600,000 tweets with the hash tag ‘Pray for Muamba’ in it. Among those were tweets from Steven Gerrard and Wayne Rooney.

News publications are also picking up on trends sweeping across social networking sites. Earlier this year, the prayer tweets for Fabrice Muamba made the front page of The Sun with the headline ‘God is in control’.

"People pray, everyone prays. As it says in Ecclesiastes. God has placed eternity in the hearts of men. We have that longing for God in us," Taylor continued.

"People are looking for God and people are willing to say so on platforms like Twitter. Although we’ve seen this year some evidence of violent bullying on Twitter, the big story should be this one about Muamba."

Which makes me wonder how many people are doers of the word, and how many are merely tweeters. It was amazing to see the #prayforMuamba tag take off, and to see those prayers answered. Despite being a fairly regular tweeter, I'm still not entirely sure about it as a medium - it's hard to have any kind of nuanced conversation there, and it's easy to feel that, by retweeting a charity appeal, you've somehow 'done your bit', when all I've done is poked my keyboard. 

With so much communication going on, and both good and harm being done, I wonder how many folk actually pray for the Twittersphere itself?

Fame at last

Robert Peston @Peston retweeted to 155,049 followers:

davidmkeen david keen

@Peston all getting a bit Pythonesque "Nobody expects the Spanish debt position"

Jun 13, 10:48 AM via web

Guidelines for Social Networking

One of the issues of managing your own time is that there aren't 'company' policies or procedures to guide/police what I do. Particularly with blogging and tweeting, I struggle to work out the optimum amount of time, usually swinging between too much and none at all.

Tim Chester has produced some guidlines for use of social media. Some of them are about time use, some of them are about character and values:

Twelve Guidelines for Social Networking

1. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say were the people concerned in the room.

2. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t share publicly with your Christian community.

3. Ensure your online world is visible to your offline Christian community.

4. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self reflects a self-created identity rather than identity in Christ.

5. Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self doesn’t match their offline self.

6. Use social networking to enhance real world relationship not to replace them.

7. Don’t let children have unsupervised internet access or accept as online friends people you don’t know offline.

8. Set limits to the time you spend online and ask someone to hold you accountable to these.

9. Set aside a day a week as a technology “Sabbath” or “fast”.

10. Avoid alerts (emails, tweets, texts and so on) that interrupt other activities especially reading, praying, worshipping and relating.

11. Ban mobiles from the meal table and the bedroom.

12. Look for opportunities to replace disembodied (online or phone) communication with embodied (face-to-face) communication.

what do you think? Is there anything else you'd add? Is there another set of guidelines you use?

Atheist Pop

For some reason I got involved in the #atheistpop thread which became a top Twitter topic yesterday evening. There seemed to be 3 sorts of contributors: people who replaced 'God' with things like 'a completely mythological idea who doesn't exist' in the titles of pop songs, the ones who were funny, and the ones who tried to be funny. Oh yes, and spammers.

Here's a few of my favourites:

It Looks Like I Will Have To Buy My Own Mercedes-Benz

Sympathy for Gary Neville

Oh! Think twice! It's another day for you and me in relative material comfort

I wish it could be Winterval every day.

By the Rivers of Birmingham

Hallelunein

Hitchens Baby One More Time

YMAA

Stairway to Upstairs

Nice Day for a Registry Office Civil Ceremony

You'll Probably Walk Alone at Some Point

Unlikely Concept of Natural Justice Chameleon.

Promised you an improbably coincidence.

Bat out of Oblivion.

My prize would go to Archdruid Eileen, who was responsible for several of the above, but I'm sure you can think of more.

Speaking of Twitter, Church Mouse has the latest 'Twurch of England' top tweeters, based on a scoring system which wants to be everyone's friend by giving you a high score. Strangely, lots of contributors to the #atheistpop thread seemed to be vicars.

new Twurch of England website

A large piece of cheese to Church Mouse and Peter Ould, who in their spare time (I'm struggling to remember what that is) have put together a new Twurch of England website, with live feed from CofE tweeters, list of who they are, and associated blog.

The live twitter feed only consists of clergy (does CM himself/herself qualify on this count?) at the moment, it would be interesting, though quite time consuming, to widen that out to non-clergy, but you've got to start somewhere.

They've created a copiable widget for blogs to use, and even made the Church of England happy, according to the endorsement on the site. That for me creates a whole raft of questions: can an institution be happy, or be said to have emotions? But enough of that...

Friends, Followers, Comments, and Community

Taking a straw poll among my Facebook 'friends', I gave them the following options:

who are your Facebook 'friends'?
a) People you've actually met
b) 'a', plus people you've had a lot of online interaction with
c) anyone who asks you
d) other?

'a' seems to be the overwhelming favourite, with a few b's thrown in. I tend strongly towards a, plus a bit of b. I've had a number of 'friend' requests from people who I've not met, but had some online correspondence & exchanges with, and it's sometimes hard to know which side of the line we're on. Is an e-friend the same as a pen friend?

The Twitter notion of 'followers' is much more straightforward: block pornographers and people who want to sell you stuff, and everyone else can join the party.

In both mediums, it seems to be more personal stuff which moves people to respond. Tweet about cricket, and nobody cares. Mention a suspected hernia, and suddenly several people have offered encouragement and prayer. I even had a go at planning a school assembly via Twitter this morning, and it worked quite well!

On the blogosphere, the same thing seems to happen. Two blogs I regularly visit have had posts about personal suffering in the last few weeks. The comments threads are bursting with good wishes, and shared humanity seems to transcend whether the commenters normally agree with the blogger or not.

In one case, the blogger posts under an assumed name, and blogs 'in character'. Working out how to pray for them has been a bit weird, and though the commenters have rallied round in scores, there's a real sense of powerlessness. If this was someone in the 'real world' who we knew, then there would be phone calls, and concrete offers of support. As it's a virtual persona, all we can do is leave comments, and hope that someone, somewhere, knows the guy for real and knows what he's going through.

I'm not even sure on the etiquette of linking to them, whether that will promote 'grief tourism', or promote some heartening examples of support and grace on the blogosphere. It's an area where the 'rules of engagement' are still evolving: in face to face encounters, we've been honing our sense of etiquette and what's acceptable for centuries, online we're starting from scratch, with the added problem that words aren't anything like so effective as communication in person.

Wikio top religious blogs for October

The Wikio 'top blogs' for October (which actually means September) were published this morning. Here are the blogs in the top 250 which deal wholly or partly with religious/faith themes. In case any of us are tempted to take ourselves too seriously, all but one of these are outranked by a blog on cupcakes.

16 Archbishop Cranmer
67 Heresy Corner
97 The hermeneutic of continuity (worth a look at this post as an alternative to some of recieved wisdom about the papacy)
123 Gates of Vienna, but I'm not going to link to it.
126 What does the prayer really say?
130 Thinking Anglicans
136 Bartholemew's Notes on Religion
137 St. Aidan to Abbey Manor
162 Anglican Mainstream (for the 50th time, it's not a blog!)
178 Catholic and Loving it! that's their '!', not mine.
200 John Smeaton, SPUC director
202 Islam in Europe
222 The Ugley Vicar
229 Virtue Online (not a UK blog, so still not sure what it's doing here)
240 Of Course I Could be Wrong,

the Wikio blurb says: The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles. I still can't work out why blogs with twice my readership and links in, like Church Mouse, Clayboy, and Bishop Alan, aren't on this list.

The main trends seem to be a general falling off in blogs which focus wholly or partly on Anglican infighting, and the discovery of wikio by parts of the Roman Catholic blogosphere. Some of the first trend could be explained by a good month for cupcakes and home crafts, who could soon be challenging Dale and Guido for the top spots.

in other ranking news......
Church Mouse has his latest list of top twitterers in the CofE, so if you're trying to find out if your vicar is tweeting their sermons, that's the place to go.

Peter Ould has compiled the a list based on the slightly odd Alexa rankings, which has evolved into a top 40, and gives some indication of the breadth of Anglican blogging. Some of the juxtapositions are quite amusing: MadPriest is new into the chart, 1 place above Rowan Williams, or the 'Grand Tufti' as MP likes to call him. He's currently on a recruitment drive amongst Roman Catholics. Don't blame him: see above.

Unlike the two chaps above, I don't bother doing original research, I just crib from someone elses!!

You and Whose (Barmy) Army?

Think of the top users of new media, and cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew wouldn't automatically spring to mind. However, with the aid of 22000 followers on Twitter, 'Aggers' succeeded in extracting an apology from an Observer journalist who made some off-colour remarks about Agnews' interview with Lily Allen at the weekend.

Article here with more details.

After spending just over a month on Twitter, Aggers now has an army of 22,000 followers, many of whom will, as it were, go into bat for him.

Clearly, Twitter is now the shot heard around the world, whether it's Lance Armstrong commenting on his team mate or Jordan venting. And such is its power to make mass contacts, magnetise crowds and apply lobby pressure that any fuss can be over inside 24 hours without a physical blow being struck.

My own attempt at use of new media to apply pressure to the media is (so far) less succesful. A few more members for 'Lets have the 2013 Ashes on Free TV' would be lovely.

Twitturgies

Possibly one of the best tweeters around, poet/preacher/artist Gerard Kelly's Twitturgies is worth following, if you're on Twitter. They also feed onto his blog. Here's a few examples:

God be in my fingers, hovering over keys. God be in each call and conversation. God be in reach even when the network isn't.

To fear God is wisdom. To be afraid of God is a prison. Trade my terror for tenderness, God, and my cowering for confidence

Give me a poet's heart, God, and an architect's imagination. Let my love for the has-been fuel my passion for the yet-to-come

We are fragments of the mirror of God; 6 billion shards of his shatterred image. Glue us together God. Make us a mirror ball

Reading those, it strikes me that Psalm 119 reads a bit like a twitter feed with a #bible hashtag.

The Tweeting Civil Servant

A Whitehall chappy has produced a 20-page guide to Twitter for fellow mandarins. Some of it is quite sensible:

... once anyone does follow a Whitehall Twitter stream it recommends they should automatically be "followed back" on the grounds that it is not only good etiquette, but could result in a poor Twitter reputation if not done ‑ and in extreme cases could lead to the account being suspended.

In urging his fellow Whitehall civil servants to use Twitter, Williams sets out several grounds rules for the kind of content that needs to make it work:

• Human: He warns that Twitter users can be hostile to the "over-use of automation" - such as RSS feeds – and to the regurgitation of press release headlines: "While corporate in message, the tone of our Twitter channel must therefore be informal spoken English, human-edited and for the most part written/paraphrased for the channel."

• Frequent: a minimum of two and maximum of 10 tweets per working day, with a minimum gap of 30 minutes between tweets to avoid flooding followers' Twitter streams. (Not counting @replies or live coverage of a crisis/event.) Downing Street spends 20 minutes on its Twitter stream with two-three tweets a day plus a few replies, five-six tweets a day in total.

• Timely: in keeping with the "zeitgeist" feel of Twitter, official tweets should be about issues of relevance today or events coming soon.

• Credible: while tweets may occasionally be "fun", their relationship to departmental objectives must be defensible.

Alongside the promised tweetable content of minsters' thoughts and reflections following key meetings and events is something rather more sinister sounding called "thought leadership". Also known as "linked blogging", the idea is that by highlighting relevant research, events, awards and other action elsewhere on the web, the department's Twitter feed gets a reputation as a reliable filter of high quality content.

whole piece here at the Guardian. The full document is here, composed by Neil Williams, who works for Peter Mandelson covering 'digital engagement' (and I just thought that meant shaking hands).

Do we want our taxpayers money spent on this?

Top Twits

Couple of Twitter lists compiled recently:

Iain Dale has the top 20-ish political twitterers who also have a blog. Congrats to Matt Wardman for getting in amongst them.

Church Mouse has the 'top 10 twittering bishops and clergy', based on a twitter grading site, updating a previous list based on number of tweets. Peter Ould has a list based on the number of followers, which updates automatically.

If you're not on any of these, rejoice! The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.

I am a social networking failure

Just got back from a very good New wine leaders conference, to discover that several fellow bloggers and twitterers were there, and I'd missed most of them. I only managed 20 minutes online during the conference, as there were far too many other interesting things going on, and discovered just now on checking messages who I'd missed. Anyway, it was good to realise that Peter Ould and Dave Meldrum are both real people.

After Patrick Dixons encouragement, about half the conference should be on twitter next year, so there will then be too many to have a twits reunion. We'll just all spend the sessions sending messages to each other saying 'did you catch what that American guy just said?' or 'I make it 7 times we've sung that song now'

Peter Ould clearly has no emails to answer on his return, as he's been trawling Twitter for CofE tweeters, with our follower totals. Bizarrely, about 15 people started following me whilst I was away, still haven't worked out why.

Is it worth it?

Had a card today from a friend who was looking forward to this blog restarting for Easter. Is it worth it?

During Lent I had the misfortune to watch this, two of the 'top' (according to Wikio) bloggers in the UK, fighting like 3 year olds in a ball pit, and taking their in-house blogosphere argument into the bemused studios of the BBC. It's embarrassing to be associated with the blogging medium if these are some of our star players.

There'll be a few Easter posts towards the end of the week, then Spring Harvest, then a few posts on a project I'm working on, doing a survey of every Diocesan website in England looking at resources on mission & fresh expressions, and highlighting good resources which could be used in any Diocese. Out of the first 8, Bristol is the star site so far, one or two others are starting to develop good sections where local churches can share good practice with one another.

In the meantime, follow the passion story in real time via Twitter, or have a look at this Facebook passion (Ht Bosco Peters), brilliant.

Where 1 blogger leads, the Church of England follows

The Church of England is following me. Bet Rowan Williams wishes he could say that.


Hi, david keen (davidmkeen).

Church of England (c_of_e) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Church of England's profile here: http://twitter.com/c_of_e
Best,
Twitter

I'm now a Twit

It's official. I think it's set up to update from this blog as well, but you never know with technology. Bishop Alan has a better explanation of Twitter than I could ever give, so blame him. As yet I have no idea whether it's a good thing, or just a colossal waste of time.

And yes, I may have already been a twit for some time now, as no doubt some of you will wish to point out.