Sharing your Church’s story – the Book

After discovering WordPress a while back, and becoming immersed in the world of blogging, it seems to me that the blog has a lot to offer the church wanting to share its story. And now Brian Bailey has even written a book saying just that! The Blogging Church – Sharing the story of Your Church through blogs.

The Blogging Church is a book which aims to answer the why rather than the how kind of questions.

Velvet Elvis – faith resprayed?

Rob Bell is founding pastor of Mars Hill (–with a web site to go ooooh over of course). This recent book is his angle on what living the Christian story might look like in a post modern world. Admitting that he spent his first year at Mars Hill teaching through the book of Leviticus may not strike you as being most relevant, but Rob puts a lot of emphasis on the Jewish context of Jesus the Rabbi and the Old Testament.

Yancey on Prayer

I went to hear Philip Yancey last week at the Guild Hall in Preston, hosted by the Saltmine Trust. We’ve all read What’s So Amazing about Grace and The Jesus I never knew, but now his latest book deals with the subject we all struggle with – Prayer. I’ve just started reading the book which is an honest pilgrim’s look at prayer taking on questions like “Does it make any difference?”, “Does prayer change God or change me?”.

The evening with Saltmine was excellent, with drama including some of their adaptation of the Screwtape Letters . Yancey was interviewed chat show style with questions from the audience and in the second half he spoke on prayer. It is his honesty and humility that makes his books worth reading.

Mission-Shaped Church for Free!!

Mission-Shaped Church is a report published by the Anglican Church which very neatly summaries the state of church in the UK and surveys some of the emerging movements within and without. This is an essential resource for anyone thinking about the future of church in this country. It is available in paperback for about £10 (actually only £7.20 from link below), but the reason I bring it to your attention is that it is now available as a downloadable file in PDF format for absolutely nothing!

Download Mission Shaped Church

Or purchase the hardcopy:

Books on CSS and PHP

Books to get you started with CSS and PHP (the bread and butter of WordPress themes and plugins).

CSS and PHP in 10 minutes was where I started having worked with vb, ASP and other languages previously. Happy reading…

Church and mission in a strange new world?

What will church look like in 10 years? Can it survive? This books tries to work through these questions and challenges the church to adopt models of church that are simple and sustainable. This book summaries pretty neatly the current position in the UK in a very readable style.