Secret Churchgoers

Earlier this year I read the book, I Sold My Soul on eBay by Hemant Mehta.   It's an interesting insight into how an atheist (a 'friendly' one) viewed Christian church services and what suggestions he had to make about them as far as making them inviting to outsiders, strangers, visitors.

The person who 'bought' Mehta is Jim Henderson, a pastor who'd long since felt that the way most Christians are taught to evangelise is more off-putting than encouraging.  There a recent article on USA Today about Henderson, who has continued to explore news ways of being Jesus-friendly to those who aren't Christians.   Some of his approaches are mentioned in the article but one that I want to mention in particular is his Church Rater website.

On the home page of the site at the moment is a video conversation between Henderson and Matt Caspar which briefly discusses the issues Henderson is concerned with.   Caspar is not a Christian, but he and Henderson did a road trip some time back, producing the book Jim and Casper Go to Church.  Caspar is also Henderson's partner in the ChurchRater.com venture, and says his engaging with Christians is motivated by his desire to get them to question their certitude, and to see that atheists don't have tails and horns.

The Church Rater site does exactly what it says: allows people to anonymously assess a particular church's service.   These reviews are then put up on the site.  At present there are almost a thousand of them.    The site also has an 'endorsements' section where there are links to various comments about the site's modus operandi.   Some are not complimentary, as you'd expect. 

The death of an old person...

"The death of an old person is like the burning of a library." So wrote Alex Haley, the author of Roots, and other stories of African origins. ( Or, if he didn't write it, he 'borrowed' it from his African past, as the words are often thought to be an African proverb. )

It's quoted in an article on caring for old people - I make no apology for this being nine years old (nothing on the Net ever grows old!) - called Aging and Ageism: Can You Have One Without the Other? by Karen Henderson.

The author looks at our attitudes to old people: Everyone gets old. None of us should be surprised or angry; it's a fact of life. But what's also a fact of life is this: we don't treat older people as people. We treat them as a commodity to be used, abused and disposed of as we see fit. We somehow learn to raise our children; we try to give our pets a good life. Why can't we extend the same efforts to our older people?

The article isn't long, but it has plenty of good things to say about older/elderly people (they're always people who are older than me, by the way!) and the way we think about them, and act towards them. It's probably addressed to the inbetween generation - those who have elderly parents and growing children - but it's applicable to anyone, anywhere.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com