Two Awesome Adverts

Here's one about being welcoming (or otherwise): (hat tip)

And here's probably the best advert of the year. Acts 20:35.

The Word on the Wind - Alison Morgan

This is the best book I've read to give to members of “sleepy churches that are being woken up”. It starts off at a very general middle-of-the-road Anglicanism, even to the extent of having an introduction by Rowan Williams, and it ends up fairly close to charismatic evangelicalism.

Alison Morgan is a good and clear writer, who has obviously got lots of experience of helping people know God better and seeing him working, both in England and Africa. The only bits that got on my nerves were the bits about science and religion, where Morgan sometimes gets out of her depth. For example, in chapter 2, Morgan says that the scientific revolution was largely due to a recovery of the Greek way of thinking as compared to the Hebrew. That may well be the way things often function today, but it's just plain wrong when thinking about the history of science (for a better view, see e.g. Peter Harrison, The Fall and the Foundations of Natural Science).

But that's being picky. It's not Morgan's main point and in general this is a great book – the kind of book that made me go out and look for other stuff she's written – the kind of book I'd like to work through with folks in a church that needed waking up. She even has a poem with the reflection questions at the end of each chapter, which really isn't my style but I recognise will work well for others.