benedson

John Paul II and Bill Drummond

Those of you who bought one of Bill Drummond's 20,000 pieces of 'A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind' maybe interested to know that The Vatican have caught onto the idea. They are selling off 100,000 pieces of Pop John Paul II's robe to be made into holy relics. I bet they cost more than a $1 though...

Technorati Tags: Art, Bill Drummond, Vatican

Photos from Greenbelt and Galloway

We've just got back from holiday and I've just got round to uploading my photos of both Greenbelt and the holiday. These two are from Galloway. You can view the full Galloway set here and the GB set here.

Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, Galloway, Greenbelt

Scotland

We're off on holiday for a couple of weeks...so the blog will be quiet.

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Osama as Jesus and Mary in a Burka!

The Blake Prize for religious art has had a couple of entries that have cause a bit of a storm... Here are the entries that have cause the storm:

In the real life version Jeus morphs into Osama, which I'd love to get hold of and use in Sanctus1! I'm really not that offended by it and don't think it's that original. The Churches Adveritsing Network have used both Che Guevara and Chairman Mao in their ads and this is really no different from that. I'm also reminded of the Primal Screen song 'Star' - that has one line that says 'one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist'...any other comments?

Technorati Tags: Art, blake prize

The Ugly Side...

Two negative images of the emerging church have stuck in my mind since Greenbelt. They're not good images and I'd like to be able to say that all the fantastic things that I saw of the emerging church at GB outweighed these two moments...unfortunately they did not. I am a great fan of the emerging church but there is a danger that unless we address these two issues seriously, then we will 'perpetuate the failings of Christendom' (i think that's something John Drane said).

One moment involved the exclusion of a female from a particular conversation by a group of men. No intentionally, probably not even noticed, but there was a genuine exclusion which angered the woman excluded. Everybody that i know within the emerging church has a positive view of women in leadership - why is this not outworked in practice? I was chatting with a friend who was involved with an emerging church and he commented that whenever they were asked to do things they always made sure that a man and woman attended. This modeled partnership but also prevented the cult of personality growing. I think that we can no longer shrug out shoulders and say, 'yes it is a problem, but we don't know why' - that is an inadequate response that we should be ashamed of.

Second moment, I was on contributors patio working on something and within earshot were two guys both in leadership positions within the emerging church talking philosophy. Whilst i have no problem with this on a academic level, it did portray an image of the emerging church as an exclusive self-indulgent academic pretentious clique.

Two rather ugly sides of the emerging church, two missiological failings, two gospel failings...

Technorati Tags: Ben Edson, emerging church, Gender, mission

Greenbelt Liturgy

Here is the liturgy and service sheet that we used for the Sunday morning service at Greenbelt 07.

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