Ben’s Musings

Today is the Due Date for our baby, but alas, it hasn’t come yet. We were hoping it would be early because we just can’t wait to meet our child! The moment I am most looking forward is when the baby is born and Mary-Lou, baby and I are left alone for the first time! Then we can thank Jesus as a family for His gift to us. When our baby is born, I will setup a blog for it so that it’s photo’s and stories can be seen by family and friends who live far away.

I have been thinking about Christian Anarchism recently. I was inspired to findout about Anarchy by Noam Chomsky who has sympathies with some forms on Anarchy. I recently read a book called Imperial Ambitions which is a set of interviews with him about his thoughts on the Amercian Administration and the war in Iraq - it was brilliant, well worth reading, and inspiring. So I started looking into Anarchy as a social model, and quickly found that there was a form called Christian Anarchy, which I then looked into further.

I have downloaded a book called “Anarchy and Christianity” by a guy called Jacques Ellul and have just started reading through it. I find it a fascinating concept and the more I think about it, the more I realise that my own thoughts, particularly about Church, are in-line with Anarchic thinking. I have much more thinking and pondering to do and I certainly have not subscribed to Christian Anarchy, but I am very intrigued.

On another note, the Skate Lobby group is proving a massively popular idea to all the skaters I talk to, so I am very encouraged to continue with the idea.

I haven’t had any opportunity to work on ChurchMCR.com in the last few weeks, but I have continued reading the “Getting Real” book and a new book called “Rails Recipes” which has given me loads of tips and ideas about how to construct the site, so I am still excited about it.

ChurchMCR.com began many months ago when the Seed Bed trust asked if i could do 1 day a week managing a website which would serve the church in Manchester. I said I would think about it, and I imagined all sorts of exciting Social Network, Collaborative, Web 2.0 stuff.

So I tried to fit all these ideas onto 1 side of A4 as a proposal for funding, but it was rejected, so we tried again, and it was rejected again. (So we put through my Skate Networking proposal and it was accepted - Yeah!)

So I put ChurchMCR.com on the back burner for a couple of months. The trustees are still well excited about the idea and are currently looking for different sources of funding for it.

A few days ago I was reading “Getting Real”, a book by 37Signals about starting web applications and their approach. The section about funding a project suggested that outside funding should be plan B! They suggest to simply get on with it within your current means, and if it means scaling back the scope for the application, so be it.

So it got me thinking, and got me excited again. With our baby on the way any moment, I have been declining every offer of freelance work coming my way since I want to have time for Mary-Lou and our baby when it is born. “But”, I thought, “I can develop ChurchMCR.com with any spare time I get, and since it is a personal effort at the moment, I don’t have to meet any deadlines, it can be a leisurely project”.

I have now registed www.churchmcr.com and am developing it in Ruby On Rails on my Computer. When it gets anywhere useful, I will then upload it and ask friends to test and use it, then get feedback and work from there.

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