Category Archives: Blogging

Posts about blogging, fellow bloggers, and blog administration

A revival of Gentle Wisdom

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All this talk of revival and outpouring at Lakeland and Dudley seems to have brought revival to this blog, at least in terms of the number of readers. My daily readership has grown steadily from 218 on 4th May, the day before I posted on speaking in tongues, to 856 and still counting today.

Some other blogs linking to my series on revival and outpouring or discussing the same issues:

Dave Faulkner: Welcome to Todd World

maggi dawn: An Unequal Blessing

the red pill: An outpouring on outpourings

Leaving Münster: Bored of Outpourings!

MetaCatholic: Still a sceptic for Jesus

The Simple Pastor: Revival or Jesus?

42: More on Todd Bentley

It should be obvious that I by no means endorse all the positions taken on these posts. Nevertheless they are all worth reading. I have left comments on most of them giving my reaction.

Michael Reid and his bulldog

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This may well come out as post number 500 on this blog. But it is not really my 500th post – in fact only the 448th published post. I don’t know why there is such a discrepancy. So I won’t mark this in any special way as I have in the past with such milestones.

My rather quickly written post on The fall of Bishop Michael Reid has unexpectedly proved to be one of my most popular, attracting 1365 hits so far and so putting it in third place behind Pope Benedict, Bible scholars, and the Antichrist (6420, almost all in three days) and Why is Easter so early this year? (2798). Many of the Michael Reid hits have come from Google searches. There is obviously a lot of interest, especially here in Essex, in what has happened to this long controversial and now disgraced pastor. But there is not much information available.

The Michael Reid Ministries website is still working under that name but is now just a synonym for the site of Reid’s former church, Peniel in Brentwood. There is now no mention, except in the page header, of Reid or his resignation. Even the Peniel College URL now links to this same page, but the Peniel Academy, Peniel TV and Michael Reid Publishing sites are unavailable. (The last four links were found in a Google cache.)

The Michael Reid Miseries site has not been updated recently. Among the few bloggers to report this story are Chris Lazenby of Midlands Bible College and Divinity School, Richard Bartholomew, and Simon Jones whose post which I mentioned before sparked a long and sometimes vitriolic comment thread. The most recent posts are those of Johli Baptist (John Race), part 1 and part 2.

The most informative site about the situation is the Reachout Trust forum. Most of the discussion is in one long thread, 29 pages, at Reachout Trust. This thread was closed on 1st May, because it was going off topic and allegations were being made about Reid which are, it is said, being investigated by the police. Of course it is right to avoid passing on potentially libellous allegations, but in some ways it is even worse to hint that some are being investigated without giving any details. It is reported that Reid is back in the UK, but also that there is a court order preventing him from returning to church property including his former home. There is some more recent news on this thread at the same site; see also this thread.

The boredom of the long Reachout Trust thread was broken by this charming story from former Peniel member Jacob:

Back when I was a humble student and first visiting Peniel, I remember on one of my first visits when I was just getting to know ‘his nibs’ :lol: (so I got to see his ‘nice’ side…. the bit the security guards need to be wary of). On one of my earliest visits he was in bed sick (at least I assume that’s what he was doing in bed… after recent revelations, who knows!!) :lol:

As I said, my only encounters with Reid at that point had been friendly, I was a visitor – and he didnt know much about me either at that stage. So I suggested to some of the other young people that I had been getting to know that we get him a get-well card, we happened to be in town, and while I was in the card shop in Brentwood high street, I spotted a soft toy – in fact, I think it was spotting the soft toy that inspired me to get it for him as a ‘get well’ present, with a card.

It was a bull dog, wearing a T shirt with the slogan ‘be reasonable, do it my way’. It was interesting the response of the other young people…. they obviously knew the ‘other side’ of Reid, and were a bit nervous about getting something so very cheeky – but I was quite a confident, witty chap back then (nothing’s changed as you can tell from my posts… I’m back to my old self…. Peniel tried to knock it out of me but it survived 19 years!).

So I bought it, and the present was delivered…. and we heard nothing back.

However years later, when I was at Testimony House for some reason, I got to peep into the hallowed bedroom – and was very gratified to see the toy there, complete with T shirt, occupying pride of place beside the bed! Obviously the great man like it…. who doesnt like a bit of a cheeky joke… especially when it’s true!

So for all his faults the man has a human humour-loving side.

Wrong Bishop of Durham

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I thought for a minute that Jim West had a scoop for me, that Bishop NT Wright had started a blog. But it turns out that this blogger is not the Church of England Bishop of Durham, England, but, from his “about” page,

Tom Wrong, the Free Universalist Interfaith Bishop of Durham, North Carolina.

So not to be taken too seriously, I think.

However, he does have a good point about dreams in this post. In the ancient world dreams were taken much more seriously than they are today, and this understanding is reflected in the biblical text. But if Bishop Wrong is intending to suggest that the biblical authors wrote up what they had dreamed as the biblical text, he should offer some evidence for this, for here he may indeed be Wrong.

An e-mail from hell?

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I was surprised to receive this evening an e-mail whose sender is listed as “Satan”. I was even more surprised to discover it appeared to have been written by ElShaddai Edwards, who is certainly not an alter ego of the devil.

In fact the message was a pingback for my post on Satan in Job, generated by ElShaddai’s post Satan, Job and Goethe which quotes and links to my post. The confusion arose because my WordPress installation generated an e-mail for the pingback with the From: address “Satan, Job and Goethe « He is Sufficient <wordpress@qaya.org>”; my mail program Thunderbird parsed this as two senders’ addresses separated by a comma, and only displayed the first sender’s name.

This seems to be a small bug in my WordPress installation, still version 2.3.3 at the moment, in that it is generating sender’s address display names with commas in them. These are not permitted in display names except in quote marks; that is, they are permitted in quoted-strings, but not in atoms, as specified here. There is a further bug, or undesirable feature, in these display names in that they include visible HTML entities like “&raquo;” and “&#8217;”.

Perhaps they have fixed these bugs in the new WordPress 2.5, but in the light of some other bloggers’ comments I am not going to rush into an upgrade.

My most popular posts

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I enabled WordPress Blog Stats on this blog I think in August last year, and since then it has been monitoring how popular my posts are, carefully excluding my own visits to my blog.

Up to about a month ago the most read post had only about 800 hits. That was in fact Do not read Adrian’s blog any more, which was read mainly in the last week of last November. But over the last month the situation has changed radically.

My post from early February Why is Easter so early this year? has become a real hit, with 2675 hits so far, and a peak of 231 views in one day on 20th March. Probably around 2000 of these have been the results of various searches including “easter” and “early”, and that is not surprising because my post comes up number 5 on a Google search for “easter early”. But I expect that from now on this post will be viewed a lot less as this year’s Easter fades into the past.

But this post’s popularity has been dwarfed by the unexpected success of Pope Benedict, Bible scholars, and the Antichrist, which I discussed here. This has attracted 6310 hits, but the vast majority of these were on just two days, 2nd and 3rd March. When this post dropped out of the latest links page at Spirit Daily, it quickly lost its readership. Indeed my statistics show over 6000 referrals from this site.

Meanwhile The Maltese Cross, or the Christian one? has crept up into third place with 951 hits. I think a lot of these are the results of searches for “old bailey”, “blind justice” and similar. This leaves Do not read Adrian’s blog any more back in fourth position among my posts with 840 hits, followed by Augustine’s mistake about original sin with 746 and Mark Driscoll: “I murdered God”, “God hates you” on 618.

What will be my next hit post? Not this one, I’m sure. I could say that it is for you, my readers, to decide. But in fact it is not. The only way a post on this blog can get near to 1000 hits is apparently if it somehow comes to the notice of people who don’t usually read this blog, through a search term or an interesting link on a popular site.

How gentle is my wisdom?

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Lingamish, on his updated links page, has pigeon-holed this blog as “Un-pigeon-hole-able” and described it, or me, as:

Gentle Wisdom: Occasionally gentle. Somewhat wise. A teddy bear with teeth.

It’s a good thing you’re my friend, David, so these teeth will only rend you in a friendly way.

But this description did get me thinking. Am I being presumptuous to call my blog “Gentle Wisdom”? Indeed I am not always as gentle as I might be, as I have confessed before – although I never intended to be gentle in a soft and cuddly teddy bear sort of way. But I hope I am really gentle more than occasionally.

Anyway, right from when I first changed the blog name to “Gentle Wisdom” the wisdom I intended to present has not been my own wisdom, which is not always even “somewhat wise” and not always gentle, but the God-given “wisdom from above [which] is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy” (James 3:17, NRSV). This is what I aim to live up to. If I fail, please rebuke me, gently, in comments here, or by e-mail to peter AT qaya DOT org.

The Archbishops on blogging

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Maggi Dawn, a college chaplain in Cambridge, recently met the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and had the opportunity to discuss blogging with them. Thanks to Dave Walker at the Church Times blog for the tip, and a great cartoon to go with it. Here is the part about blogging of Maggi’s conversation with Archbishops Rowan Williams and John Sentamu:

I began by asking them how much they knew about the blog-world, and what kind of effect – positive or negative – they thought blogging, facebook and similar media are having on Church life and spiritual concerns.

“They are clearly part of the whole knowledge economy”, said Archbishop Rowan. “They have encouraged people not to take in passively what’s produced – it has opened up a more interactive environment for the sharing of knowledge – a democratisation of knowledge. And clearly that is bound to affect the Church at every level.”

Is the democratisation of knowledge always a good thing, though, I asked him? Does it flatten a desirable level of expertise?

“It can certainly flatten expertise,” he replied. “But perhaps the more worrying issue is that in can in some ways encourage unreflective expression – it’s possible simply to think it, and say it, without any thought. When that happens in personal conversation, there is a humanising effect. But on the screen, it’s less human.”

Then the Archbishop of York chipped in: “On the other hand, people have found real friendships through blogs, who would never have otherwise met each other – it’s a worldwide connection, people really do “meet” you on your blog. When I cut up my collar the response online was enormous – that’s when I realised just how many boundaries can be crossed with blogs.”

He thought for a minute, and then added, “But you know, when people write without thinking, it can get very difficult; it can be offensive and troublesome. The best of what’s there on the blogs is from those who take a little time to reflect before they publish. But there is no choice about whether we engage with this new media. It’s the world we are in – the Church has to engage with it!”

Well, considering how negatively the blog world, including myself, reacted to Archbishop Rowan’s comments about sharia law, I might have expected him to have a less positive attitude. It is good that he welcomes, if with some reservations, the democratisation of knowledge, thereby distancing himself from the intellectual arrogance he has been accused of. But both Archbishops are right that there is a tendency for bloggers, including myself, to write without thinking first.

Yes, indeed the Church of England has to engage with these new media, if it is not to fade away into irrelevance, even more than arguably it already has. But, practically, in what ways will it engage? There are some great Christian initiatives in this area, but they tend to be from individuals or small groups rather than being sponsored by the Church of England in any formal way. In some ways this is the nature of these new media. But the central and diocesan authorities need to engage with them as well. And first they need to understand them, in ways that judging by the sharia law controversy they have failed to understand the more traditional media.

Maggi promises more from her chat with the Archbishops tomorrow. I will be watching out for it – although I may not have time to post more for a few days.

Wow! Benedict + Antichrist = Explosion of blog stats

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Welcome to thousands of new readers of this blog!

Perhaps I should have anticipated your arrival. Linking “Pope Benedict” and “Antichrist” in the title of a blog post has brought you here, it seems. Yesterday this post attracted 2143 views, and today already at 6 pm that total has been surpassed with 2267 views. The well over 3000 total visits to the blog on each of these two days dwarfs my regular 200-300 visits per day.

And all this without me making any suggestion that Pope Benedict is the Antichrist, indeed I wrote the opposite! I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have a lot of respect for His Holiness.

Of course one problem with this is that it has attracted a few people commenting with their own theories of which individual the Antichrist might be. That was not the point of my post at all. Rather, I was suggesting that there is not and will not be any single figure called the Antichrist, as suggested by 1 John 2:18.

In fact the great majority of you new visitors reached me from just one site, Spirit Daily, apparently a Roman Catholic news site which linked to my post.

Is the blogger's glass half empty or half full?

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Two contrasting views on having most of one’s friendships online, through blogging or Facebook.

First, Dilbert’s view from a “glass half empty” perspective (follow the link – I can’t easily display an image as wide as this, and anyway I don’t think I am supposed to). I think Dilbert needs to take up blogging, or join Facebook or something, then he might find some real friends who are interested in what he is.

Then, a more positive, “glass half full” outlook from a Facebook greeting card which Sam sent me and which I can echo: