{"id":975,"date":"2002-06-19T16:41:50","date_gmt":"2002-06-19T20:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=975"},"modified":"2002-06-19T16:41:50","modified_gmt":"2002-06-19T20:41:50","slug":"missionary-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=975","title":{"rendered":"Missionary activity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There was a perfect fundie story in today&#8217;s Guardian,  at the end of the World cup section. Not online, so I shall type in the par I loved.<\/p>\n\n<p>It came from an interview with the 22 missionaries of the Northwest Bible Tabernacle Church, from Dallas, Texas: &#8220;We like to greet people as they come to the gound and talk to them. We also have a lot of free gifts to give away, including some videos and a booklet. <i>The Ultimate Goal <\/i>. The booklet contains quotations from the Bible, and also testimonies about Christ from some of the world&#8217;s greatest soccer players, including Brazilian defender Lucio and Liberian goalkeeper Louis Crayton.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n<!--more--><br \/>\nIn an ecumenical spirit, I offer my rules for enjoying religious services, drawn up over eight years of compulsory christianity in skool, and then too many years writing about God as a journalist. <ul>\n<li>Take notes. Almost anything you write will be more interesting than what you see or hear\n<li>Think about trout. Concentrate very hard on a beautiful stretch of river. How did it smell? How did the fish shift in the light? What were they eating? What did you do wrong?\n<li>Read the hymn books. Try and find the most banal modern hymn. This can take some time.\n<li>Anything surviving from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries will probably be worthwhile poetry. Savour it.\n<li>See! It&#8217;s almost over already.\n<\/ul>\n\n<p>But none of this explains why most Anglican sermons are like hearing the vicar read his blog entries out aloud.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There was a perfect fundie story in today&#8217;s Guardian, at the end of the World cup section. Not online, so I shall type in the par I loved. It came from an interview with the 22 missionaries of the Northwest &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=975\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=975\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}