UK: Calendar: UK Christians are badging themselves individually to register the existence of our communal reality, our existence, our faith identity

UK campaign for Christian self-identification 
'I am not ashamed' Day, today December 1

Action Points

• Please wear your Not Ashamed badge / merchandise, wherever you are. Every person that stands for their faith today counts.
   
• There has been a huge media response to our campaign including coverage in national and local newspapers and radio stations.
  
  You can read the BBC News story here, the Daily Telegraph story here and the Daily Mail storyhere. You can listen to Gary McFarlane’s appearance on the Radio 4 Today programme here. We will be adding much of the media onto our website here including Radio 5 and other media. Please watch, listen and read the stories. Leaving comments helps to raise the profile of the campaign.

• Please sign the declaration here if you haven’t already.

• Please pray that this campaign will continue to find favour and that Jesus would be glorified.

• Let us know the details of any initiatives that you have started due to this campaign.

• Please support the Not Ashamed song - further details here. We would love this song to enter the charts this Christmas. The song will be released on Monday 6th December and will be available on iTunes and other download sites. You can also pre-order it here.

For details of the Not Ashamed launch day please click here.

Click t+mstamp to Read more ... 



As soon as I make this blog entry, I'm going to bring up the fresh refWr+t fontpage in my Safari browser and click on the preceding here above.  I want to get all the pre-mediated info, for sure, even tho it's only a surm+z (as active imaginally as analytically ), yes, yes, but also the visuals (vizhwalz).  This is a day of signifying on the bus, on the streets, and workplaces,  thus:  the s+ns, symbols, as well imaginative and analytical levels of our communal text if jointly identifying with one another in Christ, we need good text + audviz (a composite term indicate non-purely-print text or text with pix).  The digital page enters here into how we're communicating to the media-differentiated readers / audiences / markets.

Let's have a see, you guys, with your audacious multi-dimensional act of moving our community in Christ in Britain with all its kingdoms, so that today we'll see who pops up.

But I'll also be looking to see if the movement emerged distinctly outs+d England:  does this approach have any resonance with the Northern Irelander's?  There's lots of evangelicals in Ulster, born-agains, at least one evangelical convert who was active in the counter-terrorist league and what we woud call most sedately, terrorists, thugs.  I stray.  Back on course:  How does the idea break for the two chief s+dz, say in Ulster's parliament, Stormont, I seem to recall, both polarized parties Democratic Union Party (Paisley is still the chief signifier) and Sinn Fein (Gerry Adams l+kw+z), both now with cabinet ministers in the coalition govt of the two opposed political hardcores mentioned.

It is easy to sympathise with Ed Curran's lament for the quality of Northern Ireland's political representation (Belfast Telegraph, June 8).  The political debate is still mired in "who speaks for unionism/ nationalism" arguments, while most voters stay at home.

Northern Ireland has changed immensely in the last 10 years, but the options on the ballot sheet are essentially the same as those of the 1970s. A new politics is long overdue.

Stormont under the leadership of Sinn Fein and the DUP has not delivered the new beginning hoped for by the people of Northern Ireland -- it has merely moved the politics of obstruction and deadlock into a different arena.  -- Belfast Telegraph

Yet, elsewhere in the kingdoms is the Scots National Parliament where, as I see it from m+ distance without reformational reportage on such matters, the United Kingdom as such, as represented in the House of Commons by the parties there, are all English-dominated national parties, with residual Scottish tag-alongs in most all the main parties.  There seems to be a distinct fawlt-l+n in the terrain between the reception of Philosophers Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven, ensemble, in England in comparison to their reception in Scotland.   There are no rich points on the reformationals Scotland bulletin board.  Nor for that matter Wales.  Northern Ireland is a br+tspot, reformationally speaking, but the center of gravity of reformationals UK is England, and in England as such there are West Yorksh+r School for Christian Studies (WYSOCS, I love that acronym!),  I shoud pause here.  WYSOCS  publishes an alive and visually-successful websw+t, with great textual content.  And its leader, along with Dr Arthur Jones, masterteacher, story teller, and Christian-education advocate Mark Roque is something like a travelling secretary of the old Student Christian Movement before it was derailed, more worldview and philosophy oriented than Britain's (last i heard) strong InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  WYSOCS needs to struggle with maintaining more h+brow programming on the advanced university level but also increasingly in the new year comes a time when the various programmes of WYSOCS shoud include youth from workingclass culture to impart a christianly-prinicpled labour consciousness among them and to help them to seek work actively, in areas where appropriate.  WYSOCS has the flexibility of programming to make a pilot project feasible, if the funding shoud be forthcoming.

Another feature of the geography of reformational UK is the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics free-standing in the Cambridge University milieu, the first director of which is Dr Jonathan Chaplin where he also serves on Cambridge University's Divinity Faculty. And a third reformational locus is the professorship of digital-based information systems and communication with the human factor,  Prof Dr Andrew Basden at  Salford Business School,  Salford University, Salford, England in the Greater Manchester area; he triples his roles beyond marriage and family as the founder, maintainer, and developer of the long-standing and developing webs+t The Dooyeweerd Pages (I especially l+k Andrew's  current frontpage format!, which is a. / simplicity itself, b. / presented in an inviting and B&W look consistently thru-out); and he is active in a European researach consortium in his field, publisher of several books.

Number four on m+ list is/are the independent webworkings for reformational info-flow, in the digital communications genius, Steve Bishop of Bristol, England, who by day teaches at Trinity College, Bristol; and several hours a day as meister-blogger of refBloggers informal network, and digital archivist for reformational philosophy and worldview thawt.  He's finally been recogn+zd for his archivist work on reformational philosophy in English by Aspects, English-lang newsletter Association for Reformational Philosophy.  Steve's flagship webs+t is All of Life Redeemed; and his blog is an accidental blog, but now additionally puts out two prefab dailies thru the paper.li online facility, one is The reformational Daily and the other The steve bishop Daily.  And then there's the further UK blogging network -- Rudy hasn't had any posts online in a while on his Intermezzo.(please come back, Rudi! we need your continued reflections, historical-philosophical or more mundane).  Paul Robinson says he'll be posting to his Novice Philosopher blog, after a long intermezzo to work on other projects.  Rev. Jeremy Ive (a rector and PhD in history), while he's finishing up the thesis for his second doctorate, (this t+m in  theology at King's College, London), he's returned to his lay previous ministry in conflict resolution.  He pursues the realization of this calling with succinct analyses of major diplomatic situations (for instance, the WikiLeaks case), and international relations from Southern Sudan to Nigeria, Copenhagen and Cancun, bomb stockp+l reductions, etc.  These he contributes to his following on Facebook, including me, oh I want to be in that number when the Saints go marchin' in.  Dr x2 Ive, Father Ive in the Old Catholic way, we m+t say.  Jeremy  also has a Wordpress webs+t Trinitarian and Reformational.  where he posted often the gist of his latest research for his theology dissertation (which in significant part studies the trinitarian faith-ideas of philosophers Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd). "Jeremy has been engaged in peacebuilding programmes in South Africa (1986-1991), Rwanda (1994-1999) and Sudan (1999-2002). The organisation is now Concordis International.  I have also contributed to the book, Jubilee Manifesto, of the Jubilee Centre , Cambridge," Jeremy says.


That's a lot of men in one list. However, there are two outstanding women in England that I'm especially keen on. The first is Elaine Storkey who is very active in the General Synod of the Church of England, and an expert in Church-State relations which in significant part pertains to the established Church of England, she is a laywoman and an academic of reformational persuasion and contribution.  She gu+ded many intelligent younger women in relation to the r+z of feminism.

Dr. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, is now a freelance thinker about the aesthetics of everyday life and art as a process in which more and more of the earth's population can participate.  She has an almost unknown nevertheless a marvellousw academic dissertation on the aesthetics of Suzanne K. Langer, one of the world's great thinkers about arts and life.  I've heard it said in back corridors that she's the best systematician identifying with the reformational intellectual movement.  And she plays the viola in public performance, most beautifully.  It was a wonderful trip to hear her play in Knox College Chaple, so cold and severe bespeaking the dourness of the Presbyterian Church of Canada, I've heard.

So, from the standpoint of our community overall, England is a very potent geographical-intellectual place.  So is Northern Ireland.  I'm not ashamed of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, percolating intellectually in these two kingdoms. But what of Scotland and Wales?  And why?  You see, dear readers, that I'm pushing the geographical parameters.  In a moment I'll be pushing further to test the boundaries of other parameters in honour of this day in Great Britain, as well.

I'm not ashamed of the witness of Christian Concern conducting the daylong campaign I am not ashamed, which may be most concentrated perhaps certainly in London.  I'm wondering wh+ reformationals aren't more visible in the Not-Ashamed campaign?  Wh+ Christian Concern for the Nation  (the former name) isn't more visible in the reformational movement,  say via reformationals UK (which seems rather a moribund blog these day, oops I better take another look), wh+ the two organizations aren't workshopping together during the year to produce not only the next generation of our reformational academics in UK, but also our future political leaders as well?  Maybe we'll even see the emergence of the Christian Labour Association of England in the next 12 months, so as an all-of-life-redeemed movement we can a bit get out of our ivory towers, no?   Maybe we refBloggers coud form a mini-union.  Maybe England coud tr+ the CLAC model as in Canada, a nucleus where the Christian concern for labour representation of its own, in eigen kring, coud form a General Workers Local  -- no contract or specific work unit needed for a GWL, some of whose members m+t, also and precedingly, be members of mainstream unions a/o professional organizations, where the distinction between labour-sphere christian principles, and the "general ethos of total secularity" -- precisely that distinction in ethos (moral community) is lost in a sea of indifference raizd to the boilpoint or meltpoint from its anaesthetic state) -- as the first local of CLAE in its startup phase.  I won't delay readers here with further details.

-- Politicarp