Travelling well with the Jones’s…

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Many of you will already follow the on going adventures of the Jones family- Andrew (aka TSK) Jones blog is after all essential reading for many of us who are interested in what is happening on the edges of the known (and not yet known) Christian world.

A year or so ago, the family were living in Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland, when they bought an old truck, converted it into a living/entertaining space for themselves and all sorts of others. You can read something of their adventures travelling through Europe, Asia and North Africa here.

The point of all this travelling was to connect with all those small beautiful projects, and small and beautiful people who were working out the mission of Jesus in the lesser known places, and to support and encourage them.

It is an adventure that many of us feel a combination of envy, admiration and incredulity in relation to. It seems both bonkers and wonderful at the same time.

Anyway, the point of this post is to give a plug to Andrew’s new book project- you can pre-order it in order to support the next phase of the Jones journey, into Asia.

Details of the book, and how to order are all here.

We need people like the Jones clan to remind us that other ways are possible, and that other lives in far away places might teach us much about our own, so go on- order the book now!

Blogging and spirituality…

I enjoyed an old piece of writing by TSK here recently- concerning how he felt that blogging worked as a spiritual discipline.

TSK felt that it worked something like this-

1. Praise (public acknowledgement) – “publish glad tidings daily”
2. Accountability. (Eph. 5: 21 “Submit yourselves to one another”, quote fromAthanasias)
3. Vulnerability (Daniel’s window)
4, Given-ness (Freely you have received, gift economyProv 11:24)
5. Creative Naming (Adam, Neighbors in Ruth)
6. Repentance (editing/deleting/changing our mind in new media)
7. Fellowship (hypertext linking, Koinonia)
8. Evangelism (storytelling, blogging from our lives)
9. Integrity (writing matches our speaking, design reflects reality)
10. Posterity. (store/guard what has been entrusted, writing history)
There was also another one: Watchfulness (“watch and pray”).

I think I would add a couple more-

11. Creativity- most writers would say that words shape us as we shape them.

12. Discipline and long term commitment- blogging output varies, but it demands mostly daily commitment over a long time to develop a voice.

But I think blogging should come with a little warning to introspective folk like me- it can be addictive, and it is not the only spiritual discipline- and should never become so in our lives.

There is also physical community…