Keen as I am to keep on top of the ever evolving UK Christian blogosphere I am only just catching up with the conversations surrounding an article on a the 'mega-blog' Threads a few weeks back. The piece called "Sunken Ship Recruiting Now" by Alex Willmott was taken down and various people have responded including Liz Clutterbuck.

A quick search of Threads finds other pieces by Alex - all of the same vein. I remember reading his piece on Church & Sex Toys and being bemused that any Christian would find sex toys shocking - after all one of my two commercial ordination cards 10 years ago was from 'whollylove' a Christian sex toy venture, now sadly defunct (the other was from a Christian dating site for clergy). Then we have If You Can't Lead a Church ... which wrestles with the question of how clergy can stay in post whilst their organisations so visibly fails.







Which is kinda how I ended up an Anglican in the first place. To escape a 'strong leadership culture'. To be part of the church that met with my mother on her deathbed, whilst my particular brand of 'radical' Christianity didn't. To escape a bubble of 'churchianity' that was like living inside a branch of Wesley Owen (if you remember them).

To some of us the Holy Scriptures are rather like a huge catalog of treats. We seldom start at one end of the book and work through rather we pick and choose the bits we find appealing - although if you use a daily lectionary you are disciplined into trying a little bit of everything.

For others of us the Bible is more like an instruction manual. Some of us feel the need to read a manual from cover to end before we even began assembling something, others only turn to it when the flat-pick wardrobe of life is looking wonky.

For others of us the Bible is like a long reference work, it is full of verse numbers after all. Perhaps we have a verse for every circumstance in life without ever quite getting a hold of the context.

For others of us the Bible is a short story book, full of mysterious and wondrous tales of faith – we may know the popular ones, but tend to skip the sections without a good narrative or a happy ending.

For some the Scriptures are a book of Worship, Psalms, Songs and canticles, wonderful liturgies, but not often used outside the confines of built sacred space.