Coffee Theology

Recently I came to realise that my psychological makeup, specifically my OCD, had probably influenced my theology and indeed my vocation quite profoundly. I'm an evangelist, which is a word which means different things to different people, so I'll tell you what it means to me.  Being an evangelist means that my principal concern as a Christian minister is for people who don't follow Jesus, and that communicating the gospel or 'good news' to people who haven't heard it a thousand times already is the most important thing I do.  My faith has been nurtured in evangelical churches, and it's probably fair to say that evangelicals place a greater emphasis on evangelism than other Christian traditions.  That's partly because we emphasise conversion and making a personal decision to follow Christ.  In Baptist churches we practise believer's baptism, which means that we only baptise people who have made that personal decision for themselves (which is why ...

When preparing to go on holiday earlier this month, I decided to check out some reviews of the best books of 2015 to help me choose my holiday reading.   So you've been publicly shamed by Jon Ronson was one of Mark Lawson's recommendations.  I don't usually read nonfiction for fun, but this book was so engaging I actually finished it before my holiday started.   Ronson explores the recent phenomenon of public shaming, particularly online shaming.  He considers several people's stories.  One of the most well known stories he investigates involves a tasteless racist joke about AIDS, which was apparently intended to be ironic, tweeted by a young unknown PR executive shortly before she boarded an international flight.  I won't mention her name here as I don't want to contribute further to her Google results.  In the course of her eleven-hour flight, during which her phone was switched off, her poorly judged joke was retweeted and retweeted, mostly by peopl...