a short weblog on life, the universe and everything

Will you help me test a website?

I've been redesigning the church.co.uk website - we go live on Thu 12th May. I'm looking for testers over these next two weeks to visit it online and comment on content, functionality, style etc. You'll need to be able to respond to an email from me within 48 hours, either by phone or email.

No technical knowledge required - I'll walk and talk you through the process personally if that helps. The more remote you are (eg abroad) and the older your computer, the better! To be a part of it, email me at this address.

40 DAYS AROUND THE WORLD

Something small I've been working on since Christmas: organising 40 days of non-stop prayer - that's 1000 hours, through 20 prayer rooms, in 9 countries, across 5 continents...

40 DAYS is really an event for those most closely connected with OAS!S, to pray globally like never before, but if you do that praying thing yourself, perhaps you'd like to join in over the web? Click on the pic for our special website built by a team of 3 in London, Mumbai and Sao Paulo. Fun!

Prayerworks: just published!

Hey everybody, it's my first book! Prayerworks, The Manual, is a partnership between Faithworks (of OAS!S origin...) and 24-7prayer. It is a how-to guide to running a prayer room and using it as a launchpad for community engagement. As we like to say, it's designed to promote intimate prayer without navel-gazing and passionate activism without burn-out... To get your copy, either email me and I'll send you one for a fiver (£5 GB), or click through to Amazon (£5.99) and ask them nicely to add a thumbnail image and correct their entry from 'unpublished' to 'published', etc. Published by Spring Harvest / Authentic Media.

JON IS THIRTY... almost

I'll be thirty on May 14th and would *love* as many of you who can to come to my party weekend! Much love, Jon.

Tony Blair: "Church.co.uk is fab"

Tony Blair has just called an election here in the UK for May 5th. However, the real news was two weeks ago when he dropped in on my workplace to say:

"Is it really right that you call this building... church.co.uk? I think that's fabulous!"

The evidence for this is here. To listen to Blair's 30 seconds on Church.co.uk, click through and follow these steps:

1. Select the webcast link in the middle of the page
2. Enter your details in the e-form that appears, then
3. Select 'Faithworks Lecture - Tony Blair MP' and listen to the first couple of minutes.

In his Faithworks Lecture, Blair talked about faith and politics too. The story featured in virtually every daily newspaper, on radio, and on Sky/BBC/ITV news the next day. Even made it into the Baptist Times eventually, hehe... Church.co.uk, meanwhile, featured satirically in the political sketches of The Guardian, The Times and The Independent. (Yes, we were the subject of some mockery.)

All serious fun... but very surreal, I have to say. Very surreal indeed.