Bursting the second .COM bubble

(and how it will affect Christian mission)

Executive Summary

The first .COM bubble was an explosion of commercial activity, which burst at roughly the turn of the century. It had the effect of reducing the number of moneymaking web sites to the useful number we have today. My thesis is that the second .COM bubble is the communication bubble, which is bursting now and reducing the quantity of communication down to community based interaction within the next few years.

The Internet enhanced the ‘flat earth’ globalization where we can communicate with anyone else connected on the planet. The bursting of the second .COM bubble is a ‘balkanization’ of the globalization, such that we communicate less globally and more within small communities to whom we relate at a deeper level.

Over the past few years we have seen a reduction in the quantity of communication (letters, emails etc) in response to broadcasting the Gospel. As a result of this balkanization, over the next couple of years, I believe we will see this reduce significantly further still. I believe people will relate more closely to their friends, however geographically distant they are, and interact less with acquaintances or organisations except on a functional level. People will relate within a ‘virtual village’ rather than a ‘virtual city’.

Since much of our mission approach is based upon interaction with people who have found us (through a web site, radio or TV station) this change must affect our mission strategy. We will need to change to providing tools to followers of Jesus who are in existing networks of non-believers and who will use those tools to aid them in sharing the Gospel. The key to this is ‘existing networks’ and not new networks.

Background information

Global relationships

When I first used email it was prior to the widespread use of the Internet was through an interconnected web of bulletin boards that exchanged email nightly across the UK and wider throughout the world. Each bulletin board system relayed the email till it reached its destination.

In 1993 we lived in the USA for two years and communicated with our friends back in the UK through early Internet connections (to JANET in the UK). We also developed new friends wider afield: My wife got to know another person called Susan in Chicago and when we visited them it was uncanny to pick up a virtual relationship and see how deep it actually was. These worldwide virtual relationships have resulted in positive and negative marriages and abuses in the real world.

The bulletin board system meant that a response to an email could take some days to arrive. With the early Internet it was faster, and I remember coming home to hear that my wife had managed half a dozen emails back and forth with a friend in Aston University that morning. When the Internet changed from ‘store and forward’ email to direct delivery, emails delivered in seconds. Spam reduction systems now slow down some email delivery, but most people still expect it to be instant.

The ability to relate to people worldwide through email was new and exciting. People would sign up to email lists and participate in discussions with people they had never met all over the globe.

That has changed and is changing: About 8 years ago my wife started a website about home-education. Approximately 3-4 people would sign up every month to a newsletter that told them when changes had occurred on the site. The list grew to a few hundred people. At that stage there were about 100 visitors per month to the site. She now gets upwards of 1000 visitors per month, but the signups to the newsletter have all but totally dried up.

Although that is only one example it demonstrates the changing pattern of communication. The Internet allowed you to send an email to anyone who had an email address, wherever they lived so long as you knew their email address. The early bulletin boards were small clusters of people and emailing within the community worked, but communicating with someone outside that network could be difficult.

My youngest son now says he only uses email to ‘oldies’ like his mum and dad; he uses Facebook to his younger friends. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others do not inter-operate; you cannot send a message from a Facebook account to a MySpace account within Facebook using some global addressing scheme. To do so you need a MySpace account. Within Facebook, people interact with their friends, you are prompted for friends-of-friends, but what Facebook and other social networking sites have done is to ‘balkanize’ the Internet.

The term balkanization is used to describe the process of fragmentation or division of a group into smaller parts. What I believe we are seeing is a global balkanization of the Internet. The earth is still flat (see ‘The Earth is Flat’ by Thomas L Friedman) but being torn up into numerous small pieces. Google had observed the subdivision of the Internet into separate enclaves and in September 2008 Financial Times referred to this in an article on about Google’s (then) new browser aims.

Mega and micro – communication and communities

One of the things I address in my book (see ‘In the image… of a creative God’) in the chapter on Communication Theory was about the change from large event evangelism to small group evangelism. When radio started the word was broadcasting – broadly communicating a message to a vast number of people. In the UK this started with national broadcasts; everyone hearing the same news, the same message.

Then came local radio and specialist radio stations. This we tended to call ‘narrowcasting’. The Internet allowed narrowcasting to flourish, with thousands and thousands of stations (there are currently nearly 44,000 stations listed on shoutcast.com) each with a separate audience. Missions are competing in this arena to be heard.

The big stations are still big. I listen to the BBC World Service almost daily and their audience is in the order of 190 million adults per week. Unless there is a change in the content of the BBC World Service I will continue to listen.

But although I like to be one of 190 million listening to the radio, I prefer to be one of a dozen or so people in my Christian fellowship. Those people I want to relate to closely; to be involved in each other’s lives.

Worldwide we have seen the growth of the Mega-church. The church where thousands of people come together each week to sing songs and listen to a talk, what is sometimes called corporate worship. In the UK churches rarely grow more than a couple of hundred people and there are few mega-churches. Many fellowships of Christians worldwide are the same size as my preference, under 20 people.

What we are seeing is a separation into those who like ‘mega’ and those who like ‘micro’. Neither is right or wrong. However, my perception is the trend is more toward the micro than the mega, toward the balkanization rather than the globalization.

In terms of evangelism, in my book I looked at the Billy Graham Crusades as an example of mega-evangelism. I then contrasted it with the change to micro-evangelism based upon small groups, ‘Good News down your Street’ and more recently ‘Alpha’.

Christian media embraced the need for interactivity, with various follow-up programmes. The Global Response Management System is one such structure. It is based upon the concept of people responding to a broadcast (mega-evangelism). The Relationship Development System is a competitor, emphasizing the developing relationship between the person responding and a believer. Though a better concept, it still assumes that the responder is responding to some form of broadcast (mega-evangelism).

The difference between the ‘Billy Graham Crusades’ and ‘Good News down your Street’ was not in the interaction, nor in the size of the event but in the method by which people linked up. In the Billy Graham Crusades people responded to a broadcast, in the small group programme people were linked through existing relationships. Of course, people still often went to a ‘Crusade’ because of an existing relationship.

The way forward

If I am right about the bursting of the second .COM bubble then we need to be looking to these existing relationships, rather than an enhanced interaction of new relationships. This may mean that followers of Jesus need to develop new relationships in order that they can then lead people to Christ, but it will only be when they have earned the right to share through the new relationship.

There is a desire within Christian mission to be good stewards of the resources we are trusted with. This usually drives a good deal of effort into statistics based on the number of people hearing the message, responding to the message and taking some step based upon the message. Even organisations like Alpha encourage you to register. This helps them know how many people are running courses and how many people are therefore hearing the message and (based upon sample figures) how many people responded favourably to the Gospel.

If the move is away from a centralized message centric communication towards a small group relationship based method then the resulting statistics are likely to become meaningless. People quote vast numbers for the growth in the house church movement in China. In reality they are guesses. We can carry on trying to work out statistics as a way of ensuring good stewardship, but my perception is that could well stifle the growth of the Kingdom. Nobody was watching and measuring the Chinese house church and worrying about how effective it was.

The phrase ‘viral distribution’ doesn’t mean a computer virus spread around the Internet, but distribution of a media item in such a way that the ‘audience’ distributes it themselves without central organization. I heard about an example of this where a mission group made two copies of a video, which they gave to a couple of people. Within 48 hours almost everyone within that community had copies. It wasn’t organized, it wasn’t monitored, it just happened.

This will require a greater degree of creativity and a higher level of hitting the needs or desires of the target audience than we currently uphold. It will also require a change to more narrative rather than statistical evaluation of what we do. This will be a problem for many funding agencies and thus the funding of many mission agencies.

In the image... of a creative God

For the last two years I have been writing a book. Well, it hasn't been continuous work but the initial writing and re-writing happened a couple of years back and then it's been the last year doing the layout, proofing, proofing and more proofing. It's now available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/image-creative-God-storytelling-communicate/dp/1449911137

Below is the introduction to the book... to hopefully show you where it's going.

Introduction

For many years I have been involved with trying to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with people: young people through the youth groups at various churches, and others through media in the UK. More recently it has been through media in the Middle East and, of course, directly with the occasional person I might talk to about Jesus: everywhere from a transatlantic air flight to a meeting in the street.

I don’t think I do it well. Looking around, I’m not sure many of us do it very well.

Some people I know are much more open and will talk about Jesus with almost everyone they meet… even with a stray customer coming out of the same restaurant in a same lift or elevator. But it’s not how often we share Jesus that matters so much as whether we really do communicate.

When we try to explain who Jesus is to Muslims, it’s pretty hard. And most of us feel we don’t do that at all well.

I started writing this book as a result of attempting to develop methods for evaluating what we are doing in our media communication of the love of God to Muslims. The following methods were developed by a Muslim Background Believer with whom I shared my thoughts. In the process we became friends.

For some time the group I am involved with had been longing for a set of tools to help us evaluate what we do. Someone from another group worked with us for about six months, trying to get his head around the problem. He wrote, we talked, he thought. He talked with Arabs and he tried different methods, but it just didn’t ‘come together’.

However, something in the chemistry of having this friend from that background in our office every day for six to eight weeks worked, and we ended up with something we have found helpful. One of our aims, as a group, is to act as a catalyst for sharing the Gospel with Muslims through media. My colleague Peter said this should not just stay with us, but be shared further with others trying to do the same thing. So I started to write a book.

As soon as I started I realised that I wanted something out of it myself. Even if it never gets published my desire is that it will accomplish the second aim. That is, to help me think through the issues relating to communicating Christ in a post-modern Muslim context. I added the word post-modern because I think it’s relevant for two reasons.

People have talked about this being a hinge generation, passing through from one established world view to another. Though the implications are very different in East and West I think something similar is happening all over the world.

As I see some post-modern attributes in the youth of the Middle East, I also see examples of pre-modern thought among the older generation there. There are two results of this: Firstly, there is a major culture gap between generations in the Middle East. Indeed, I would see the difference between a young person in the Middle East and their parents as being similar to the difference between a young person in the West and their great-grandparents.

Secondly, there is another significant culture gap when Western modernists attempt to communicate Christ to a simultaneously pre-modern and post-modern Middle East. It is as if people from the West attempt to sail through the gap between the two world views, without really making contact.

Much is written about post-modernism in a Western context, but almost nothing is being written from the point of view of the Middle East. So this book is a journey for me to research, and think through, and see what new things God is doing in the region. God is, as He always has been, creatively dealing with the world.

We need to catch some of that creativity in communicating Jesus. This is a journey that can particularly influence the way we communicate the Good News to people from the Middle East.

There has been talk of an ‘online church’ linking believers from the Middle East together in secret. We have been working towards building online communities who have decided to follow Jesus. However, despite many reservations about the institutionalised church, I am not sure how the body of Christ can be anything other than incarnational. We are commended to meet together, and an online community lacks much that we gain from face-to-face communication and physically shared worship.

There is a third aim in writing this book for me, and that is to re-discover my place in the Body of Christ.
Recently I have become somewhat disillusioned with traditional evangelical church structures and communication techniques, tiring of its output of modernist verbiage. Though I am comfortable sharing the Good News about Jesus, I am not sure that the church is very good news for me, let alone the average Muslim.

Philip Yancey shares a similar path, though his disillusionment and re-finding happened when he was younger. GK Chesterton and CS Lewis were the two authors who he felt helped him along the path.

Although separated from me by a vast expanse of sea and culture, they kindled hope that somewhere Christians existed who loosed rather than restrained their minds, who combined sophisticated taste with a humility that did not demean others, and above all, who experienced life with God as a source of joy and not repression.1

In answer to the question Why did I return? Yancey explains:

My career as a journalist gave me the opportunity to investigate people… who demonstrate that a connection with God can enlarge, rather than shrink, life. I began the lifelong process of separating church from God. Though I emerged from childhood churches badly damaged, as I began to scrutinise Jesus through the critical eyes of a journalist, I saw the qualities that so upset me – self-righteousness, racism, provincialism, hypocrisy – Jesus himself fought against, and that they were probably the very qualities that led to his crucifixion.2

If we are to communicate the love of God to the people of the Middle East, we will need to find ways to separate their preconceived ideas (some of them painfully true) of the ‘Christian message’ we communicate, from the person who is both our and their Messiah.

While you are reading this, you will find that there are areas I leave open to discussion or debate. Sometimes those are in places where I cannot personally see a clear Scriptural direction. Other times, I do see a clear Scriptural direction, but know of other Biblical followers of Jesus who see things differently. One of the major differences between following Jesus and being a Muslim is the acceptance of diversity. We should celebrate this. It’s part of our freedom in Christ. He treats us as people with whom He wants a relationship.

Post-modern Christians frequently object to didactic - formal, structured, unidirectional teaching. They do not talk about a set of doctrines, but about a dialogue. This book, then, is an attempt to start such a dialogue.
Richard J Fairhead
Autumn 2007
1 Soul Survivor – Philip Yancey – page 41
2 Soul Survivor – Philip Yancey – page 42-43

What should we call ourselves?

When I was growing up, people who followed Christ were considered 'religious' and the word 'Christian' was something we called ourselves. Some like to add the phrase 'born-again' to the word Christian. When people asked me 'Are you religious?' I used to say 'No, not at all, I hate religion, but I am a Christian'. And it's true that I don't like the formal structure of religion. I don't like religious services and normally fall asleep in a sermon.

But I was quite honoured to think of myself as a Christian. It was a word that created a warm fuzzy feeling. Recently people who call themselves Christians have done things that I totally disapprove of, like invading a foreign country and killing people. I believe the way of Christ was the way of peace, not the way of the sword. In the Middle East to be a Christian means to be a follower of Bush and Blair, not a follower of Christ.

A friend of mine to the question 'Are you a Christian?' worked out this as his answer: 'My parents were Christians and I honoured them in what they believed. I grew up as a Christian, but now I would call myself a follower of Jesus'. He wanted to express in a Middle Eastern context honouring what his parents believed but separating himself from what people believed to be a 'Christian' culture. Even if they were totally wrong in their perceptions of what a Christian culture is or should be.

So, reading in Scripture that the early disciples called themselves 'followers of the Way' I really liked that phrase. I like the pun, since Jesus called himself the Way, the Truth and the Life. So I started to call myself a follower of the Way.

My son, a theology student, hated it. He had two reasons - firstly all the people he knew who called themselves 'followers of the Way' were fundamentalists Christians who were antagonistic towards other Christians, let alone non-believers. They were separatists. Secondly he found it precocious, implying we were like the early disciples and that other Christians were somehow 'off the rails', that people who called themselves 'followers of the Way' thought of themselves as somehow better and those who merely called themselves 'Christians'.

My other son and I had been chatting online and had coined the phrase 'relational Christians' which we found helpful in expressing our belief in the emphasis on relating to God rather than following a set of rules. But that has the same problem 'born-again Christian' does, separating other normal 'Christians' as not being part of the programme and also not overcoming the basic problem than many of those who don't follow the Lord believe a Christian to be a follower of Bush and Blair!

So what is the answer? Do we need a word or phrase to identify ourselves? In Arabic I can express it as 'Mourideen' or 'Mureed Isa al Massih' or roughly translated as 'a disciple that is totally committed to following Jesus who is the Messiah'. That expresses relationally what I want to say. You can see the relationship between a disciple and his master expressed in Mureed-Sheik in this blog article. It expresses the honesty/truth in the relationship between master/disciple and the interest the master has in the disciple and the disciple in following the master. In English it cannot be correctly expressed.

Personality and perfection

I got a bit irritated today. I hate getting irritated, I want to agree with everyone, but sometimes I feel they are wrong. When I feel that I get irritated with myself... why can't I just let it be? So what was all this about?

Well, it may seem trivial but it was about whether Jesus, since he was perfect, could have given in to temptation. The person I was talking with was asserting that since Jesus was God he could not have given in to the temptation and sinned. He is one of the elders of a local structural church and he was saying he would have to correct one of the other elders of this church who had been 'preaching' this morning and had asserted that Jesus did have choice and could have given in to temptation.

Now this is something that comes to the heart of being on a relational journey. The heart of a relationship is two or more personalities relating to each other. To be a being with a personality you must have choice. It's to communicate face-to-face. It's why God gave us choice so we could relate to each other and to Him. Without giving us choice we would have been like puppets or automata unable to truly relate to Him.

Satan was created perfect, had choice, decided to reject God and fell into sin. Adam and Eve were created perfect, had choice, decided to reject God and fell into sin. To be perfect doesn't imply the impossibility of doing something wrong. To have personality implies choice.

That choice is something God has too, otherwise He would not have a personality and be able to relate to us. Abraham talked with God and changed God's mind. God enjoys us talking with him. That's what it's all about, a two way relationship between God and man. Something enjoyable. Something that pleases our Father's heart. God loves this relationship. It's the most important thing to Him.

So, if God has the ability to chose then Jesus also has the ability to chose. To imply that since He is perfect He had no choice demeans God to being less than He is. He could have chosen to give into those temptations but he chose not to. He has a personality. Since he is perfect, the probability of Him choosing to give in to temptation was so unlikely as to be almost impossible, but we know from the record of the time before and during Gethsemane that he was troubled and wished for the cup to be removed. The scriptures talk of perspiration like blood on His body since He was so troubled. Yet He chose to go forward in His father's will.

To suggest that He could not have given in to temptation because He is perfect reduces God to an automata without personality and choice. It makes Him part of a mechanistic system. Religion. And that's what I believe to be the antithesis to being on a relational journey with our Father. The example this elder gave was like the Forth Bridge which they apparently load tested with way more than would ever be expected to prove it would stand not to test whether it would.

And that's why I got irritated. I don't like it when God's changed from a relational being to a systematized force. He cannot be compared to a structure like a bridge. He has personality and choice. It misleads people back into religion to imply that since we are created in His image, our choice doesn't reflect His choice, our personality doesn't reflect his personality. We are now fallen beings, but created in the image of a perfect God. We are not God or gods, we are created beings with personality and choice. Just as Jesus, our Father and the Spirit are eternal beings with personality and choice.

Another question - accountability relationships

This question came when I was talking to a colleague in another country: 'If you don't go to church aren't you in danger of missing out on accountability relationships?'

There are two parts to my answer to this one: Firstly, being a relational follower of Jesus enhances and strengthens mutual accountability and secondly I am not sure that what 'Evangelicals' call accountability relationships are either Biblically sound or healthy.

Let me unpack those a little. What I see the early followers of Jesus doing through Scripture and a healthy model to follow is sharing their lives with each other. That sharing 'held them accountable' if you like, but in a mutual transparency relationship not a hierarchical accountability relationship.

When I discussed accountability with people who believe in it we always get down to where the rubber hits the road... and that is when the person in an accountability relationship to someone over him/her believes the Lord is leading in a different way to the one their accountability leader believes. Those people who believe in this sort of structure tell me that the person should always do what their leader believes.

I have two problems with this - firstly it is abdicating responsibility ('I'm only doing what I was told to do') and secondly we observe in real life that just doesn't happen. How many people have we known who have left their wives, knowing it is wrong, because 'the Lord told me to' or some such statement? So basically accountability relationships don't work and if they did work they would be wrong.

But back to the core of living life as a relational journey. In that context, we aim to walk alongside Jesus and others on the journey sharing our lives in transparency with Him and with them. This is a much more healthy walk than attending a number of meetings every week. I have a colleague who says that one of the main problems with 'church' is that it focuses on 'sin management'. A relational journey focuses on the Lord.

Why I Don't Go To Church Anymore: Living as a Relational follower of Jesus

For a few years now I have been getting increasingly bothered about 'church'. I started another blog to help me think through the issues. I felt that some of what I was writing there was somewhat negative and just recently came to the conclusion that for a while at least and maybe the rest of my life I will not 'go to church'. This was a positive decision bringing peace to what had been a troubled soul. But I have been getting tired of questions from well meaning believers who don't really understand. Having said that I am finding an increasing number of people who would call themselves 'followers of Jesus' in a similar position.

One person who has walked this path longer than many is Wayne Jacobsen and it was reading his explanation that made me decide two things:

• I would like to try to answer the same questions that he answered but for myself
• I needed to start a new blog that was positive about my walk with the Lord rather than questioning or maybe negative
  

So here goes... answering the same questions...

Where do you go to church?
I have been increasingly convinced that church should be seen as a verb rather than a noun. It's not a place, group or event but something we do together as followers of the Messiah. The Lord said 'Wherever there are two or three gathered together, I am there in their midst.' So whenever we meet as disciples or followers of Jesus we are churching together.

Hence I could answer the question 'Where do you go to church?' with the answer at the office, in a coffee shop, when I am out sailing, at my or someone else's home... and occasionally on a Sunday morning or evening at a building we call a church.

Are you just trying to avoid the question?
There are two parts to my answer to this:

There is an issue with language. Words change over time and are modified by people to mean different things. So the word 'church' would have had an idea behind it to the very first followers of Jesus, which might be very different to the idea that we have today. Because of that I understand that the question 'Where do you go to church?' has come to mean 'Where do you go on a Sunday morning and what do you believe?' It's almost a test question to see if I agree with your theology.

So by answering the question using the word church as a verb not a noun I am avoiding the meaning behind the question. But I chose to be one of a group of people worldwide who are seeing a new meaning to churching together emerging.

The second part of my answer relates to the original meaning of the word church as a noun that I believe we have in many ways lost. When Jesus used the phrase 'I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it' He obviously did not mean a red brick building seen in many English towns and cities. His meaning was related to a gathering of his disciples. What is notable about Jesus use of the word church is that he doesn't define it. We have taken that upon ourselves.

I think that Jesus would probably have answered the question 'Where do you go to church?' in a similar way to the way he answered those accusing the woman caught in the act of adultery. He would have continued drawing in the dirt and come up a clever comment that would have helped us see that church is not about a Sunday club or a structured fellowship event, but about our relationship with Him and with each other.

He might well have added 'Let him who has the perfect church invite you'.

But don't we need regular fellowship?
Absolutely, and in some ways that is the reason that I have ceased going to church. I need fellowship. I do not need to stand in rows singing songs and listen on someone talk about their interpretation of a book.

Fellowship is an essential part of walking the path of a disciple of Jesus. We can only do it in community.

There is also a second part to my answer to this question. If we meet three times a year for fellowship that is regular but infrequent. What I believe we need is not regular fellowship, but frequent fellowship.

Shouldn't we be committed to a local fellowship?
My problem with this question is the word 'a' local fellowship. I believe this causes division between those who follow Jesus. We end up boxing people in the way they answer the question 'Where do you go to church?' rather than seeking to fellowship with them in the locality.

So I strongly believe we should be committed to fellowship, both local and worldwide. My issue is with the institution of the 'church' as a structure being the core of how we fellowship together.

But don't our institutions keep us from error?
I wish that were true but it's not. They can keep us from error or they can lead us into error. Most of the major heresies through the ages have come out of an institution. In the end we are accountable to God, not to man. Man's structures often lead us astray.

So are traditional congregations wrong?
Don't get me wrong, there are many excellent groups of people who are linked together through some sort of structural church and who do share fellowship through that structure. I am linked with some in the UK. But that we must be committed to a single local structure that observably tends to be divisive in places I believe to be an error not seen in Scripture.

So should I stop going to church, too?
No, you are still missing how I see things. 'Going to church' or 'not going to church' is not the issue. The issue is how we relate to others who follow Jesus.

Then meeting in homes is the answer?
This question still looks at the structure rather than the relationship. I meet in homes, coffee shops, offices and many other places to church with people. The location is not the key, the relationship is the key.

Aren't you just reacting out of hurt?
Well, it is true that I have been hurt by structural churches, but I have also been blessed by them. It may be that I am reacting from hurt, but in this walk with Jesus I have, in recent times, changed and hence the change of blog. I am now looking at this as a positive step in my walk with the Messiah rather than a negative reaction.

Are you looking for the perfect church?
No, I am not looking for a structural church at all. I am looking for fellowship and relationships with people that help me to grow in my walk with the Lord. When I looked at my learning styles I did find that they did not match with almost any structural church, and I know there are others like me.

But don't our children need church activities?
The Sunday club we call church can provide excellent activities for children. They also tend to be almost parallels with school - we call them 'Sunday Schools'. I do not believe that school is good for all children.

We home-educated our children and for many families I believe this is better than school. Home-educated children tend to relate better to other children and adults. In the same way church activities for children can be a help or hindrance to our children. The key is that they do not need to know about God, they need to know God and introducing them to Him is better than teaching them about Him. He is, after all, our Father.

What dynamics of body life do you look for?
The question is one that is almost impossible to answer. I am looking to follow Jesus as He called us to. I am looking for authentic relationships with others who are on the journey, what form that will take can be as varied as those on the path.

Years ago I was told by some well meaning people that Heaven was like an eternal church service. It was almost enough to put me off following Jesus for good. Some people find God through them, others are not helped. I am looking for something that I can feel and react positively about.

Aren't you giving people an excuse to sit home and do nothing?
My experience with people who call themselves relational followers of Jesus is that they are more involved with others and with their community than less. Many who are tied into structural church are very involved with the activities of the church rather than with other people.

The aim is not to get people to events or meetings, but to introduce them into a living relationship with God the Father. That can only be done through relationship not sitting at home nor church activities.

Isn't this view of church divisive?
No, I think and see this to be less divisive than structural church. It allows us to relate to people without boxing them according to which place they go to on a Sunday morning!

Where can I find that kind of fellowship?
This question too suggests that the kind of fellowship is geographically located. I find it as I talk and walk with Jesus.

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relationaljourney.blogspot.com may also may use DART cookies for ad serving through Google’s DoubleClick, which places a cookie on your computer when you are browsing the web and visit a site using DoubleClick advertising (including some Google AdSense advertisements). This cookie is used to serve ads specific to you and your interests ('interest based targeting'). The ads served will be targeted based on your previous browsing history (For example, if you have been viewing sites about visiting London, you may see London hotel advertisements when viewing a non-related site, such as on a site about Cyprus).

DART uses 'non personally identifiable information'. It does NOT track personal information about you, such as your name, email address, physical address, telephone number, social security numbers, bank account numbers or credit card numbers. You can opt-out of this ad serving on all sites using this advertising by visiting http://www.doubleclick.com/privacy/dart_adserving.aspx

You can chose to disable or selectively turn off cookies in your browser settings. However, this can affect how you are able to interact with this site as well as other websites. This could include the inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Google Analytics is used to help determine trends and interests of visitors. The Google Analytics site explains the type of data collected. Other site trackers are used, giving similar data; the sidebar of the blog shows which ones are currently being used. You can click the links to find out what kind of data they collect.

All advertisements are from affiliate services, and are contextual: based on the page contents, the location of the visitor, and the cookies already residing on the visitor's computer. Though relationaljourney.blogspot.com is not responsible for their privacy terms, these links are to the privacy statements of the advertising affiliates, for your information:

• Google Adsense

relationaljourney.blogspot.com reserves the right to modify, alter or otherwise update this policy at any time, so visitors are encouraged to review this policy from time to time. Policy last update on 28th April 2009, based on the sample privacy policy provided by http://cypruslife.blogspot.com/.