(EDIT: Guido says, “It turns out she has been mischeviously misquoted.”)

There is something inherently "offensive" about the gospel – however much you get to grips with the love and forgiveness and comfort of God, if you are engaging with what it means to live out the gospel, there is still the regular jab in the ribs. The gospel is many good things – exciting, challenging, comforting, fulfilling, forgiving, gracious, merciful… and much more – but one thing it will never be is comfortable, in the sense of being mentally settled down on a sofa never to move again.

As I commented to Jon, there is something about being a minister of the gospel (and this is true in the sense that every Christian is a minister, not just the "professional" thing) that means you should anticipate that you will end up offending people. The TV Vicar is nearly always "nice", to the point of being bland; even the Vicar of Dibley, while not bland, was still "nice" on the whole. A true engagement with faith should certainly make us kind, compassionate and forgiving, and I don’t suggest we justify giving unnecessary offence through our own clutziness. But we should never feel obliged to be bland-nice. There’s a pressure (perhaps especially on the professional minister?) to be "nice" to everyone, but it can lead you into woeful passive-aggressive behaviour, it’s fake, and in any case it doesn’t do justice to the fiery, vibrant, exciting character of the Kingdom of God. Goodness and Niceness are not the same thing at all.

Wondrous! Someone has nominated my blog for this. Not sure exactly what it means…   certainly it means nothing much in the great scheme of things, but it’s a bit of fun in blogland. So trot along and pop in a vote for your favourite God-blogs, eh? You never know, I might get a virtual certificate to hang on the  virtual wall!  (But if nothing else, you can join me in waving respectfully at Ruth or Real Live Preacher who will doubtless be among the luminaries on the virtual podium…)

Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian gave one of the better accounts of yesterday’s story about civility in blogland. (It’s interesting to me that the particular blogvillages I tend to visit had this conversation at least 2 years ago, applied some old-fashioned principles of manners, and nowadays mostly conduct a pretty well mannered discourse. But anyone who has ever been bothered by trolls, flames, torches etc., will recognise exactly what Freedland is talking about:

"…That’s the beauty of [the blogosphere], say its defenders; an environment of truly free speech. If your ideas cannot withstand the fierce gale of harsh debate, then they’re probably just too flimsy. In one respect, they’re right. Journalists like me have had to raise our game, knowing that a factual lapse will be pointed out within minutes. But that advantage is surely out- weighed by the risk that the blogo-sphere, which could be a new, revolutionary public space, instead becomes a stale, claustrophobic environment, appealing chiefly to a certain kind of aggressive, point-scoring male – and utterly off-putting to everyone else. This is not just bad news for media outlets like the Guardian, keen to build an audience; it means that this great democratic opportunity is lost.

Read the rest here: Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | The blogosphere risks putting off everyone but point-scoring males.

Dave Cartoon-Church Walker noted a while back that some institutions within the Church of England have placed pretty severe bans on their members blogging. I quite appreciate that bloggers have to have a sense of responsibility towards their employers, colleges, parishes etc., and this should be encouraged in every way. But banning everyone from blogging? Bad idea.

Several people have noticed this week that Bishop Mike (of Bristol) has started blogging. Someone set up a blog for him as a kind of newsletter/prayer request when he and his wife were involved in a car accident. Now that the crisis of that is over (Deo gracias) he has come to apreciate the potential of the blog, and has begun to use the blog as a place to post summaries of sermons, thoughts about Church related stuff (including a category on Emerging Church), mixed in with his own enthusiasm for football. That’s what makes blogging good I think – unilke a website which is purely official information, a blog gives the capacity for the person giveng the sermon and the information also to be able to give you a bit of their humanity – like adding the coffee time chat to the lecture. And of course the comments, which make the whole thing a dialogue, not a sermon.

Anyway, Stefan noted in my comments a blog from Westminster Cathedral, the flagship of English Catholic worship. The writer describes Cathedrals as "text books of the faith" and writes about how the building needs to go about its life and its presentation in order to draw tourists in to become worshippers. Who would have thought that a blogpost about such a humdrum thing as signage could become a theological/missiological reflection?

The fact that some bloggers have been a bit thoughtless about what they tell to the whole wide world shouldn’t stop the church from blogging. It should make us think carefully about what we put on the blog, of course. But the Blog can be a kind of text book of faith in its own way.