Well almost famous
my first four CD Reviews have appeared on Cross Rhythms
Review 1 – Jars Of Clay – Christmas Songs
Review 2 – Newday Live 2007
Review 3 – The Worship Library Volume 2
Review 4 – By The Tree – beautiful one
Enjoy, however if you buy any of the albums and don’t like them don’t blame me! 
As I commented a couple of days ago on my blog titled ‘Religion Without Rules’ I was wondering whether it was possible to have religion without the rules, ie a Christian faith based on love and a church with an emphasis on love rather than all the naughty things you shouldn’t be doing.
However in response to that I don’t think I was talking drivel however at the same time I think perhaps rather than it being a religion without rules I think it’s more like to be a love-based faith…in fairness whichever phrasing I use for it it’s going to incorporate rules but it’s just the emphasis that changes.
So I don’t think religion can be without rules, I do wonder if those rules can be unspoken rules of love and commitment ie you don’t do something because of love not because it’s been hammered in…however in order for this to work the bible needs to be explored for us to understand what God doesn’t like so one way or another we need to read the characteristics of God and the rules he sets, but rather than taking them as a law take them a a list of things we know hurts God…and when we do that, when we take the emotion of love and put it first in our relationship with God ‘Love the Lord your God’ then I think the rules don’t become rules (i.e. legalistic things we stick to because we’re told to) but the rules become acts of love and devotion, they become things we don’t do because of the love we have for God.
More thoughts on religion without rules may follow…who knows!
As previously mentioned this weekend xxxchurch are in London,I am actually dissappointed that I can’t go
However if you’re in London you should! It’s a church.co.uk which is at waterloo and full details are on the xxxchurch website which is linked above…just click tour.
I’m hoping I can persuade Rach at lunchtime to get me a t-shirt…yay for controversy and friends in London
This blog is what I expect to become a series of blogs as my theory and thoughts either become mode structured or as I realise what I’m talking is complete drivel!
Basically my thoughts at the moment are based on 2 things…
1. Annoying Christians
As regular readers will realise I am a Christian and secondly I get annoyed by Christians (oh the irony), and one thing which has been bugging me recently is Christians making rules up, in particular things like ‘a boy and a girl shouldnt be alone EVER whether they’re a couple or not’, alongside the reasons such as ‘people might think you’re being naughty’ etc. The best activity though that a boy and a girl shouldnt do advised by a Christian was PRAY.
What’s wrong with a boy and a girl being alone? what’s wrong with a boy and a girl being alone and praying?
So the first thing that’s been bugging me is all these random rules Christians make up
2. The Actions Of Jesus
I’ve also been thinking about the way Jesus acts in particular to what he says. One thing I’ve noticed is that his healing isn’t conditional on people becoming Christians and also that we’re not even told what happened to those healed after…so we don’t know if they became missionaries or if they just thought ‘ooh I’m healed, that’s nice, I might be able to pull now!’
Secondly I guess I’ve only caught on that Jesus and the Woman at the well were alone…yes and man and a women alone…not only that, no-one else was likely to go to the well at that time and not only that, she wasn’t a nice middle-class church girl who wouldn’t say boo to a goose (why would you say boo to a goose???) but she was a women who had five husbands and was having sex with another man…perhaps she was a bit of a risky character for Jesus to be alone with.
So My Point…
Perhaps I’m wrong but Jesus seemed to re-vamp every rule that existed and turned the religiousness of the people into a faith, a faith based purely on loving your God and loving your neighbour…a faith based on love.
Part of this is I believe down to the way which the Jewish people were at the time, they didn’t just have to stick to the laws of Leviticus but clever Rabbi’s made up more, these rules got to the extreme where they were dictating what sexual positions and husband and wife could use whilst having sex, I think Jesus came to clear the way of these ridiculous rules and make God accessible, he didn’t come so we could sin unendlessly but so that we could have a relationship with God in spite of.
There seems to however have been the additions of more rules as Paul writes his letters and others write in the new testament which makes me think this…
can you have religion without rules?
The reason I ask this is because I wonder if behaviour comes automatically when you have a loving relationship with God.
For example Joanna doesn’t have to tell me not to cheat on her, she doesn’t have to remind me I shouldn’t lie to her yet I don’t cheat on her and I never lie to her and that I believe is because we have a relationship based on love.
What if Christianity was like that? What if we didn’t hammer on about how what people are doing is wrong? what if we don’t condemn from a pulpit but echo the importance of a loving relationship with God constantly? What if we help people enter into a loving relationship with the creator and let God and the love they have for him stop the “sin”.
What if the church has the wrong emphasis on Christianity? What if we’ve been missing the key focus…that of love…people have a problem with Christianity because they claim it limits freedom but what if we didn’t focus on what you had to give up but if we instead focused on helping people enter into a loving relationship with God and let that love control them, let the love they have for God cause them to address their own issues?
A religion without rules doesn’t mean you can do anything but means the emphasis is shifted away from do’s and don’t and onto having a loving relationship with God…perhaps we don’t always need to be reminded what’s wrong to know it is…perhaps we should let love control us.
To understand this blog fully I advise that you read this magazine article – Link –
warning article contains sexual references.
If you’ve read the article you’ll know that it is about a teen couple who cannot have sex because the girl developed a rare condition called ‘volvodynia’ which basically means that when experiencing anything remotely sexual in ‘that area’ she experiences overwhelming pain…and not just then, the condition can lead to constant pain. The bizarre thing is the condition just started on e way and the couple don’t know why but it does mean they cannot have sex and may not ever be able to.
The reason I highlight this article is not because they cannot have sex, nor to raise awareness of the condition but to highlight something that stood out when I read the article (which I stumbled accross by mistake).
As part the girl (Alison) quotes: ‘I sometimes wonder why Damien doesn’t look elsewhere for sex but he gets angry when I say that. I know he loves me, if he didn’t he would have left a long time ago’.
The thing that gets me about that quote is this. Here we are in a society which has gone sex mad, people think it’s bizarre if a couple are not doing it or at least taking part in sexual activity but here are a young couple who have been forced to learn what love really is.
Martin my tutor at Oasis said in tutor group last week something along the lines of ‘When my wife and I got married we just thought the vowels were nice things, but we’ve learnt over the years what they actually mean. For better or for worse sometimes means for worse’
Now that doesn’t mean he is unhappy, but means sometimes you have to go with the bad things and I think that highlights a point in any relationship. A relationship does grow during good times but when things get bad it’s when a relationship really develops and in the case of the couple in the article not being able to have sex is what’s gone but what they’ve been left with (in my opinion) is an opportunity to develop a closer relationship, a relationship where they learn about each other on different levels to sex.
I think the condition the girl has is really sad and I don’t think that them being able to find other levels of their relationship by any means makes it worthwhile, however I wonder that if there wasn’t so much pressure for sex how much closer couples could get, if there wasn’t tempation how much of each others other qualities could they learn to apreciate…don’t get me wrong, I believe God designed sex to be a good thing…just in the right circumstances, with the right person.
A while ago I blogged on browser wars and I felt it was time I did it again!
Since my last blog I’ve been using Safari a little bit more though not as my main browser and I have to confess that I actually prefer it over firefox…the problem however is a lack of plugins, within firefox I can ftp, I can do facebook and I can skin it….alongside syncing my cookies etc thanks to google browser sync for firefox…in safari I can’t do any of that which means despite safari being sexier (or as sexy as a browser can be) it’s still nothing to compare to firefox…let’s put it this way; both browers are like beautiful women except firefox has a personality to match (like Jo). So although you might think ‘hmm safari is pretty’ it’s nothing on firefox.
Incidently if you wonder where Internet Explorer fits into the analagy it’s the boring girl with no looks or personality…also probably has some form of STD!
Oh how un PC I am! 
Anyway geeky ramble over I have an essay to do!
Before you read the title and think ‘it’s another petrol related rant’ you’re wrong…it is however a rant!
Those who read the blog regually will know that I’ve been dual-booting my laptop with Windows XP and Ubuntu (Linux) and I actually prefer linux…now recently I’ve installed a 500gb hard drive in my Desktop PC to expand my memory and when doing so I created a 5gb partition in the view of putting Ubuntu on that…well last night I did!
The installation went well however I then spent 2 hours trying to get my USB wireless adapter working…I googled, I searched forums, read documentation and eventually it worked…once!
Then decided not to again which was annoying, so I have no wireless on my Desktop linux which I shall spend part of this evening trying to fix and with an essay due next wednesday and an interview to conduct for it (ideally by saturday) it’s not an ideal use of my time…but oh well!
On another note a man has been convicted after being caught having sex with his bike – link here
So today I purchased some petrol for my car for the first time since half term, now that’s under four weeks ago…and the price seems to have gone nuts.
The cheapest I found in Peterborough was at my trusty (& ethical) sainsbury’s store where Unleaded was 99.9…why 2 weeks ago when I was there is was 95.9. The thing that bugs me though is that around 50% of our petrol price is tax…why the hell does 50% of it need to go to the goverment? greedy so and so’s!
I’d imagine money from that goes to maintaining our roads and building speed cameras…so here is my preposition…
Tax on petrol should be halved so that things like speed cameras are no longer paid for by that tax…why should the sensible drivers who don’t speed pay money to the muppets who do?
Yes I think speed cameras are often just a way for the goverment to earn money but by all means let them do that rather than stealing our money when we buy petrol.
Of course another reason for high petrol prices is so that we are encouraged to use public transport…however public transport is so damn expensive it’s still just as cheap to use a car!
Anyway rant of annoyance over…I need to sleep
Monday saw the release of Angels & Airwaves second album ‘I-Empire’. Mr DeLonge has spend plenty of time building up hype for it and giving interviews and so being the crazy blink fan I am I went out on Monday and bought it, and here is my verdict…
It’s awesome! The Angels and Airwaves album ‘We Don’t Need To Whisper’ was good, clever lyrics, awesome music but to an extent was a little samey in places…however I-Empire isn’t that at all. You can tell the tracks apart, the lyrics are better (some very profound lyrics going on) and some lyrics remind me of blink 182 days.
The album is still very much ‘Stadium Rock’ as I’d describe it, and Tom’s sinigng continues to improve from the Blink days and although hearing Tom on an album that isn’t Blink 182 still makes me a little sad this album is awesome…I’m now looking forward to Plus 44′s second album which Mark and Travis have just signed a contract for.
I have took off the mp3 player and added a last played thingy from last.fm, it gets info from my itunes…if you head over to last.fm you can listen to music for free! Rock on!
Sometimes I wonder what the purpose of a worship leader and a worship group is.
Church worship groups can be the most difficult bands to work with, not because everyone thinks things should be done in different ways (although this often is the case) but because often things can be so anal.
In my opinion the role of the worship leader is to lead a congregation in worship to the Holy Trinity, at the same time a worship leader should be worshipping himself and be constantly open to where the spirit wants to lead.
In my opinion churches are too structured, we have the songs planned beforehand (which in itself is fine, God can inspire us before), we can know exactly when chorus’ and bridges appear (once again, God can inspire us before), and we can have an exact order of service (and yes, God can inspire us beforehand). However too often in churches this remains a rigid structure.
Suddenly change a song or an order can make people uneasy, changing the order can panic people. Stopping to put in a time of prayer not scheduled in can cause mayhem because we like our little comfort zones.
God however is a God who by very nature should make us uncomfortable. As Christians we should constantly be made to feel uneasy by God and at the same time secure in the knowledge that he is Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
The fact is we have allowed church to be cosy, we have tried to please everyone, tried to put in something for all. We have tried to make it a place people are comfortable in and by doing that I believe we have put God inside a box.
We have written into our services times when God can move, for example a ‘response time’, but what if God wants a response somewhere else? Do we let him?
It’s easy to try and prepare sermons where we beat around the bush, avoiding the tiniest chance that we might offend someone…not correct me if I’m wrong (and I’m pretty sure I’m not) but Jesus did some serious offending, in fact Jesus offended the people he was meant to be serving so much they had him crucified.
I’m not suggesting a pastor should drive the church to that extreme but I am suggesting that in order to be more like Jesus we need to be more daring, we need to be different, we need to take people out their comfort zone and let God show them the wonder that he is.
xxxchurch.com whose ministry amuses me and at the same time gains admiration for tackling a tricky subject are coming to London – click here for event details