Dead Prophets Society

I'm beginning a new venture for Christian bloggers - The Dead Prophets Society . I'll be contacting Christian bloggers I know and inviting them to be co-authors. It's not quite ready to go yet, but I've laid the foundations.

The idea is inspired by the film "Dead Poets Society". In that film, Robin Williams plays a teacher in a 1950's American public school. The pupils are all taught poetry from a text book and taught to value poetry in terms of a formula. Mr. Keating (Williams), teaches the young men to tear that formula out of the poetry book and learn the powerful value of the poetry itself, to seize the day and live life with passion.

For too long, people have treated the Bible in the same way. They have conspired to chop it up into little segments and read it parrot fashion. A lot of churches read the scriptures but do not provide opportunity for their congregations to engage with those scriptures. They have removed the passion.

It is a sad development. Jesus said that he had come that we might have life... and have it to the full. The Bible also said of God:

"He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD."

Imagine that. We have a God that does not wish to withhold life from us... but wishes to feed us with manna, nectar, ambrosia... call it what you will, it is the same thing: the food of God. When you eat a delicacy, you should savour it... when you are a hungry man and you find bread, you should eagerly devour it.

Do we do this with the Bible? Or do we just read it and set it to one side like some mediocre fact sheet?

The Dead Prophets now exist for people who wish suck the marrow from the Word of God. To recite from scripture and to explain to one another why it is so moving. When I was a kid, we never looked at anything other than the "big" stories in the Bible. We never looked at the prophets, or the psalms or the epistles. I think that a lot of people grow up and leave church because all they see in the bible is stories, they don't loom further because they've never been taught to expect anything else. I'd like to redress that balance.

Mahatma Gandhi said of the Bible:

"You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down, and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature."

He wasn't a Christian, but he understood the true power that lay within the bible. It's a power we have denied and that is something the Dead Prophets Society is designed to undo.

If you'd like to sign up, drop me a line in my comments or an email. I'll probably check people's own blogs out before adding them as authors.

If you have recommendations from a design point of view, I'd be interested to hear.... especially if you have the talent to carry it out. I think I'd like a banner picture with the closing shot of Dead Poets Society on it - students standing on desks in defiance.