This paper, presented at Seminar Week in July 2005, explored the theme “mobile theology” through a focus on the theological connotations of the question “Where are you?” which God addresses to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3: 8-10).I re-articulated the question for two different audiences. Firstly, what happens if we ask youth “Where r u?” Secondly, how might those interested in youth ministry respond to the question, “Where r u?”



Where R U?
In 2001 I noticed that young people were no longer using the normal social etiquette for greeting people. When answering a phone, they asked “Where r u?” instead of the traditional “How are you?” Of course one of the reasons for this change was the move from land lines and stationary phones to the use of mobile phones which allowed young people to be located anywhere. Youth in Australia have adopted mobile phones in extraordinary numbers with a McNair Ingenuity Research2 project in January 2003 reporting that:

1. Mobile phones are more commonly used by men (who are 30% heavier users of mobile phones that women) and, in particular, young affluent men.
2. Most people aged from 18 to 29 use a mobile phone daily and 95% of 18 – 29 year-olds have tried one.
3. Approximately 1/3 of Australians are regular users of SMS text messaging, and 1 in 6 sends SMS messages every day.
4. Text messaging is the domain of the young: on an average day in Australia, less than a quarter of Australians will send a text message, and only 3% of people aged over 60 will use SMS, but nearly 2/3 of people aged 18 to 29 will use SMS.

Children’s use of mobile phones is increasing dramatically as they are initiated into their use by parents who want to know “where they are” so they have easy access to them. A McNair Ingenuity Research on children’s use of mobile phones (April 2003) reported that:

1. One in four (25%) aged from 6 to 13 now have a mobile phone.
2. More than 90% of children aged from 6 to 9 have used a mobile phone, usually one belonging to their parents.
3. As children get older more of their friends have mobile phones which the children sometimes use, and over 1/3 of children aged from 10 to 13 have their own mobile phones.
4. Young girls are more likely to use a mobile phone than boys of the same age, and are significantly more likely to have their own mobile phones.

A Commonwealth Consumer Affairs Advisory Council3 in 2002 reported that mobile phones rank as probably the most important product for young people. Mobile phones symbolised freedom, growing up, excitement and having fun and were ‘must haves’ for teenagers wanting to achieve social acceptance. In keeping with their clientele, and for their sake, Youth Workers were some of the first church professionals to adopt the use of mobile phones in their ministry. They must be mobile – connecting to the youth culture and flexible in their working arrangements.

Mobile phones have had a pervasive impact on Australian youth in terms of socializing, mobility and relationships. Since noticing the prevalence of this question of location, I have been eavesdropping on mobile conversations (especially while travelling in England).

“Sorry I’m on a train. The signal’s weak. Can you ring back in an hour?”

“We’re leaving Winchester.”

“We’re stuck at Clapham Junction. The train has some problems.”

“We’re on the train. Can Dad pick us up at Christchurch?”

“5 minutes outside of Parramatta.”

“Hi. …. I don’t know. …….. Yeah we’re at the roundabout ….. The big roundabout at Sopley. … ok bye!”

These quick, one sided train or bus mobile conversations are predicated on existing relationships and require context for the cryptic comments to be deciphered. Usually they are between parent and child, or partners with one waiting to collect the other, to begin the meal, to get ready to change shifts and exchange parental duties. Long conversations are not required on mobile phones that are used mainly for quick connections and emergency, geographic locaters, which according to an Ericsson survey on August 4, 2004, is the top service required by purchasers. Other services of interest were alerts, positioning (mapping), friend locator and video telephony.” Hopefully deeper and more meaningful conversations are held elsewhere to build and maintain these relationships.

“How are you?” is a different kind of question, which, if it is to be asked and answered honestly, requires adequate time. It is a much more personal interrogation. I remember a very difficult period in my life when I hated this routine enquiry of “How are you?” because it was so often used as a pretext for people to slide into their own agendas. When queried, I would have to do a double think. Did they know that my mother had died last week in a horrible accident? If so, they must be interested in my spiritual or psychological welfare. If not, then I would have to decide whether I had the energy to tell them the gruesome details.

Fortunately I rarely shared my personal story because the interval between questions was usually so short as to be embarrassing. One day I did respond to a casual request. As I walked down the corridor of the old Pitt St church office a woman I hardly knew asked “How are you?” Suddenly, I was annoyed by this paltry question and replied, “Not very well. My mother died last week.” She had reached the end of the long corridor before I finished speaking and had to walk back to offer some semblance of care. I felt a little guilty that I had selected her to carry my anger but as a stranger she seemed a safer person upon whom I could download some of my grief and pain.

In this busy world, there is so little time for or interest in asking how people are because their responses too often would interfere with what we want to achieve and use up our valuable time. “Where are you?” seems to be an easier question to ask and answer. Young people can make nippy connections and locate themselves quickly in time and space before moving on to their next party or activity.

Continue reading the essay “Mobile Theology” by Christine Gapes by downloading the pdf file below.

Download the lecture as a mp3 file (8MB) from here: Mobile Theology – Where R U?

Download:  Mobile Theology – Where R U by Dr Christine Gapes (pdf)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Christine Gapes has served on the faculties of United Theological College, Australian Catholic University, Charles Sturt University, NSW; and Trinity Theological College, Qld. She has presented papers at academic conferences around the world. She has been a major planner of and speaker at national youth conventions in Australia and other places. Her research interests over the last twenty years have focused on adolescent bereavement and the theology of youth ministry.

A number of people have asked for a copy of the final service at the National Youth Worker’s Inservice this year (2005) that I decided that I’d have to spend some time writing up the “liturgy” for the service. I was even surprised to see that the service was mentioned on the front page of the Victorian Synod’s “newspaper” including space for a brief review of the training event.

It probably needs to be said that this was a contextual service, ie it was set up as the closing service for a conference of youth workers that had been discussing the theme of “Mobile Theology,” we used a bible reading that had become a central piece to the conference and as such it wouldn’t really work elsewhere, however I think we created a new way of closing conferences in worship that was rather powerful.

I’d only really been asked to pick the service up in the week leading up to the conference, so prior to the gig hadn’t really thought about it much before we gathered, it’s my belief that we close in worship to reflect, praise, thank god and be sent out into the world, so if reflection’s a primary role writing the service prior to the gig would be an almost useless exercise. During the week Adrian Greenwood and I had had a number of conversations of liturgies including texting people directions around the campsite, conducting blessings at the swimming pool, prayers down by the creek and communion on the road outside the conference centre. Most of these ideas were disregarded after 4 days of torrential rainfall looked like it would become 5 days and we decided that we’d been wet enough already during the gig.

In hindsight this was a good thing, because it made me sit down and think about how we could say goodbye to one another and thank God for the space and the words that God had shared with us over the week together.

I decided to continue reflecting on the reading that Kenda Creasy Dean used in a few of her lectures with us, 1 King 19 and to type it onto our phones and sms it to people to read out during the service. In hindsight typing the entire chapter into my mobile phone was probably not the most time-conservative way of doing a reading, but it managed to fill in a good hour or so on the final night. I’d chatted to some people and made sure that they’d be ok with 2 lines each, I’d type the lines in and then sms it to them the night before, and during the service I’d sms them with “you’re up” to let them know when to continue the reading. This is probably a saner, (yet more expensive) way to do this as the owner of the phone would have time to read the text first, while giving the illusion of the bible verse being texted live. The abbreviations and txt language I used reading could have become a problem without practice.

One of the more amusing things was that a number of mates of mine had decided that throughout the service they would continue the beeping by continually smsing each other, and myself and anyone else they had the numbers of in the room. This created a continual “liturgical sound/rhythm” that sounded God’s presence in the space, for in each beep people had become used to expecting something, a reading, a prayer… something, a space for God to speak to us.

The mobile phone had become a sacred item, could the act of sending an sms be sacramental?

Liturgy for closing a conference on “mobile theology”:

Call to Worship: The service started with a proclamation, an invitation for people to re-claim their mobile phones as sacred items, to turn them on rather than turn them off. In an act of sacramental solidarity everyone turned on their phones and were greeted by an amusing musical arrangement of beeps and ring tones. I’d like to think that the musical arrangement of beeps was God-given, this was our call to worship, a mix of beeps and vibrations echoing through the worship space.

Visual Reflection: We hit play on the dvd of “One Perfect Day” where the main characters share a phone conversation. The male phones his girlfriend and as she answers he plays the piano for her, their tune, their melody that he’d written for her a while ago and she would one day write the lyrics to sit alongside the music. A conversation happens over the phone, from the UK to Australia he asks to hear her simple melody, she hesitates and then holds the phone to her heart, we hear the heart beating, he sighs and after a while she hangs the phone up. This is probably one of my favorite films of all time, little known but some scenes that just add years to your life.

Bible Reading 1: I texted someone with “you’re up” the phones beeped, everyone looked about, they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Bible Reading 2: About half the way through the reading I smsed someone else with “you’re up” and when the verse had finished they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Reflection – Remembering each other: We invited people to pack up the chairs that we were sitting on, and in the process to think of those people that they have sat next to, in meal or in lecture or in play. People were to remember their new friends and brothers in Christ. We then proceeded to stand and stack all of our chairs away, like one would when we were cleaning.

We were now sitting on the floor.

Bible Reading 3: I texted someone with “you’re up” the phones beeped, everyone looked about, they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Bible Reading 4: About half the way through the reading I smsed someone else with “you’re up” and when the verse had finished they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Reflection – Remebering Images: We now invited people to remember, to reflect on the things that they had seen, the powerpoints, the movies, the presentations, the rain… And as we reflected we packed up the data projectors, the screens, the cables and put them each away in their space.

Bible Reading 5: I texted someone with “you’re up” the phones beeped, everyone looked about, they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Bible Reading 6: About half the way through the reading I smsed someone else with “you’re up” and when the verse had finished they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Reflection – Remembering the Words: We then invited people to pack up the sound system, the speakers, the cables, the microphones and stands, the pulpit. As they were being packed away we reflected in silence of those things that we’d heard over the space of the week together, the lectures, the words of kindness and encouragement, the readings…

Bible Reading 7: I texted someone with “you’re up” the phones beeped, everyone looked about, they stood up and read a couple of verses.

Reflection – What Do We Take With Us? By now we were sitting in a fairly baron space, fairly empty, no chairs to sit on, no data projector to play with, no music streaming from the speakers. We were leaving the space soon, we can’t take a data projector with us, they need power cables, we could only take what’s in our pockets. We invited people to empty their pockets and to reflect on what they were taking with them into the mission field, back home and to work.

Bible Reading 8: I texted someone with “you’re up” the phones beeped, everyone looked about, they stood up and read the final verses of the chapter.

Reflection – Sustenance: So, what sustains us now that we’re leaving? Now that we’ve packed everything away, now that our pockets are emptied and chairs are packed what do we take to sustain us on the journey? In the middle of the space the only item that was left was a table with the elements of bread and wine on it.

Communion: We entered into communion by passing the peace with each other, by getting people’s mobile numbers that we hadn’t got yet and promising to contact them after the gig to see how they were going.

Rev Niall McKay from Bathurst presided over the communion liturgy.

After communion we were sent out and blessed (from memory I think Niall sent us out and then someone else decided to bless us again… I think I’ll refrain from saying more about that)

So yeah, that’s the service from the Inservice, in hindsight I’d have liked to include Duncan’s idea of using our mobile phones as an act of intercessory prayer, but it was still a good way for us to reflect on the journey, pray, be sustained and encouraged and be sent out into the world from the conference.

And to this day when I hear a mobile phone beep I wonder what God has to say, I still expect something to happen. For me, the mobile phone has become a sacred item, it’s beeps a liturgical rhythm, it’s ring tones hymns, it’s pxt’s icons.

Marcus has also written his own liturgy over at His Blog

A while ago Fuzz Kitto told a story about a cattle farmer from overseas who visited a farm in Australia. After being there for a while the farmer noticed that, to his surprise this farm didn’t have any fences.

When the farmer asked why there were no fences to hold the cattle within the boundary of the farm the owner told him that they didn’t need fences, all they need are waterholes and bores. The land was so harsh and dry that the cattle would always come back to a place where they could get fresh water.

He drew a parallel between this kind of farming and youth ministry in Australia, that we’d often assumed that we needed fences to hold young people in our grasps when, instead what we needed were bores and warterholes for young people to come to when they need refreshment. That by the creation of spiritual waterholes we’d be creating spaces for young people to return to in times where they need to.

I’d like to offer a different image than that of waterholes and bores…

It’s another mobile-theology-inspired image that might challenge the waterhole and bore metaphor and might challenge our present youth and young adult ministry practices and understandings.

I’d like us to think about mobile phone towers…

In Australia our mobile phones use two different networks, the normal GSM network and the increasingly popular CDMA network.

Both networks rely on mobile towers to be in a particular distance for the mobile phones to work, CDMA allows for clearer transmission and their towers are able to be at a farther distance from the phone, the GSM towers need to be closer for the phone to receive it’s signals. My basic understanding is that CDMA allows for about 40kms while the GSM allows for only 4 or so kms, (don’t quote me on that though).

If young people in Australia are increasingly using their mobile phones to connect with one another and the rest of society then they’re moving, or have moved to a place and time where waterholes and bores become increasingly insignificant. Mobile phone towers exist to allow people to travel from one spot to another across the city, state, country of even overseas (last night I was able to phone Steve Collins on his mobile phone… he lives in the UK and was in Sydney at the time) no longer are people needing to come together, instead they can move further apart and still be in instant connection.

I wonder if in my youth ministry I’m being called to build more mobile phone towers than I am being called to build waterholes and bores, understanding that young people will be connected to each other, to myself and the church via sms wherever they are in the world.

Understanding that youth ministry is no longer about the gathering but the connecting, that my ministry is about sending people out rather than bringing them back to my space…

I wonder what our youth ministry would look like with more mobile phone towers and less waterholes, it’d possibly be a lot more chaotic but instead of being concerned about young people coming back, it’d be about connecting them where they are, wherever they are at the time, even if they’re drinking at someone elses waterhole…

I’m torn in writing this post, partially because I’m not too sure about the title and partially because this particular idea is a tad more difficult than what I’d originally planned on writing.

Mobile phone accessories are everywhere, if you want a new cover, screensaver, personalised ring tone, piece of material to stick to the cover, coloured lights that glow when your phone is ringing, ear pieces, mp3 players, portable keyboards and one of the many varied phone covers then all you have to do is wander online or to the shops and buy one!

And phone covers are changable, if my mood swings, or if I change clothes, or if I’m in love I can change it… and I can change it quickly too back and forth until the cover breaks…

Late night tv is now publicising personalised information, just text the name of yourself and of your lover and the company will text you back a love rating, or a romantic poem or even a prediction of the future.

One of the personalised phone rings that the companies have been selling here to users remarkably has just hit the top 10 in the UK, amazing that an image of a half naked frog-like creature wearing biker goggles and making an annoying noise can make the top 10…

Then again, if Hillary Duff can do it…

We’re being told to accessorise everything, from our nail colours to our cd racks and our car’s rear view mirror…

Everything is up for grabs, we’re being told to make everything suit “me” make my phone an extension of my personality, make my rings express my musical taste, make the covers express my sub-culture’s dress sense, make the texture of my phone feel like me…

And to a degree, we do the same with our youth ministry and with the bible and with our faith.

Show the world how I feel and who I am by what I wear and what colour my phone is, and as youth workers do we need to be able to see these accessories and build meaning from them? Yet, is this what we should be encouraging? When is a phone “just” a phone?

On one hand I think we’ve made it possible to accessorise everything about our faith, so much so that one can hardly recognise it as “faith” because it looks a lot like the clothes i wear or sounds like the music I listen to. The WWJD Bracelets, Christian Rock, Vegetales, Purpose Driven Life and bumper stickers are ways in which we’ve tried to domesicate our faith, ways in which we’e tried to accessorise it.

And, our youth ministry has encouraged it, “accessorise your faith” we cry out and since everyone else is doing it with everything else young people jump to the task…

Yet, Jesus’ message was not about making our faith accessorised, to be christian wasn’t really about being cool, wasnt really about yourself…

So…

And…

But…

On the other hand we’re trying to encourage a faith that is authentic, something that is owned by the young people who we minister with. How do we provide the tools for people to accessorise their faith, yet not make it into the latest fad, how do we move from a cool phone cover to a personalised, authentic faith?

For me I think theres a difference between changing covers and changing service providers. There’s a difference between changing ring tones and changing how we speak to people on the phone. Accessorising our lives isnt what we’re supposed to be promoting, our lives are much more than a mobile phone, in youth ministry our role is to remind people that they’re known to others and to God not from their accessories, but by the way they live.

Accessorise your life by befriending a stranger.

Perhaps I’m babbling again…

Pamela Writes in her article “Mobile Marketing: Look Before You Leap“…

When I got the e-mail announcing a BMW mobile marketing campaign to promote the 3 series, I was pretty excited. I’ve been keeping an eye on mobile marketing for years, and see a lot of potential for the medium.

Then, I actually looked at the BMW campaign. Here’s how it works. You phone a number (703-286-BMW3) on your Internet-enabled mobile phone, and hear a recorded message. Then, you receive a text message on the phone (presumably, caller ID technology allows the company to harvest your phone number). If your phone is capable (my late model, $400 Nokia phone apparently isn’t), you can click the link in the text message to visit the mobile Web site. What I finally had to do was type the fairly lengthy URL into my phone’s Web browser.

What I saw was overwhelmingly underwhelming: several pages of text and a few images. What was missing? Meaningful interactivity, a trivia quiz, for example. Or wireless-specific features, like ring tones and wallpaper. In short, it lacked anything that would have made it appropriate for the medium.

One of the interesting phrases in Pamela’s piece was “meaningful interactivity.”

In an email the other day a few youth workers and leaders were talking about the use of sms as a tool to pass on information. The idea’s nothing new, just one look at my mobile bill while I was in a church setting would be a testament to that, but sms’ is more impulsive than interactive, I send sms – sms is read – sms may be responded to.

I’ll have to refer back to the impulsiveness of text messaging in a later post…

One look over at the Big Brother Australia website would show you a number of ways that interactivity has been approached.

Viewers / Members / Participants are invited to download images of the housemates, the ring tone of the TV show, games to play, each of these are ways for people to interact with the site and with each other.

Viewers are also asked to participate in the site by viewing the day’s activities from their video phones, by uploading images taken on their phones to the Big Brother Mblog (Mobile blogging) space and also by texting in their votes as to who they would like to vote out of the house.

Uploading / downloading / playing / photographing /sharing / voting / listening / watching / participating / voyering…

Steve Taylor in his book “The Out of Bounds Church” writes:

“In our contemporary world, individuals are now choosing to come together for the purpose of finding meaning in their lives; the community has become a tool for the individual.” (pp28)

Is interactivity just another way in which we all connect? Are we resorting to connecting using these resources? Is all the mobile phone / pda / wireless / digital camera culture about being connected?

So, after all of these concepts have been thrown up in the air and land, how do we make sense of the mess?

1. In our youth ministry how much priority have we given to being interactive?

Seriously, how interactive are our youth ministries, our churches, our youth groups? How much interactivity do we allow for? Does too much interactivity leave us with very little control? How much of our interactivity is “meaningful” and how much of it is “superficial”?

2. In our worship how much priority have we given to being interactive?

Are we prepared to allow for live images to be stuck up on the screen during worship, during sermons and songs? Are we really prepared for “meaningful interactivity” in our worship? Are we ready to allow for young people to be involved in the uploading and downloading of our services? Are we prepared to play games, hold quizzes, have fun?

3. In our spirituality how much priority is given to being interactive?

Is our spirituality something that we keep to ourselves, or is it something that we allow the young people and others around us to interact with? How do we open ourselves to being spiritually interactive? Do you pray with others? Do you play with others? Do you learn with others? How do we allow others to affect, encourage, view and experience our spirituality?

4. How much of our theology is based around interactivity?

The theological question…

For me the entire Bible is about interactivity, it’s about God’s willingness to be interactive in our lives , it’s about how we are called to be interactive with each other and how the earth and humans are charged with the role of being interactive…

Isn’t the incarnation all about interactivity? What about the story of Adam and Eve? Isn’t the great commission all about being interactive? Are we called to be voyers or to be participants? Isn’t the entire bible about interactivity? Filled with quizzes, stories, games, people’s lives, images and songs for people to dance to?

Here’s an idea…

Send people out from your community with the task of sending you via email or via picture messaging 3 images that speak to them of God during the week. Upload each image to the website as the week progresses, use the images during worship on Sunday, swap the images as free wallpapers for people’s phones. The next week ask them to do the same thing, but with a different theme, what makes them happy, images that make them sad, images of friends, images of meals eaten…

If people don’t have a digital camera or a camera phone hand them out disposable cameras, get them to take three then to pass the camera to someone else until the roll is taken up, then you can have the photos processed before the next gathering…

Article by: Darren Wright

There’s a fantastic scene in the incredibly bad comedy movie “I Spy” where Owen Wilson picks up his spy camera and says something like “this is a spy camera? people want to say look how sleek and tiny this is, not lot how ginormous it is”

Mobile technology is allowing us to carry almost everything with us, the ipod allows us to carry almost all of the music that we own in our pocket, the PDA allows us to carry entire books, laptops allow us to move our office from the desktop to the cafe and to the home and mobile phones allow us to carry our phone connections with us wherever we go.

Faith however has, by the Christian Church been seen as something that is only experienced within the walls of the Church, carrying around a Church with you could lead to serious back problems.

Sure, cell groups and bible study groups and camps exist, but once again they are too big to carry around with you, how do you carry 12 people with you? How do you carry a campsite with you?

Is the Trinitarian God of Father, Son, Holy Spirit too heavy for us to carry around with us?

Kenda Creasy Dean’s book “Godbearing Life” challenges us to think about how we create and allow for spiritual practices for young people to carry with them throughout their daily life. Books like “Soul Tending” and “Tune In, Chill Out” provide young people with tools to carry their faith, their spirtuality with them.

Spiritual practices allow our faith to be portable, allows God to reveal God’s self to us in ways that is out side the four walls of the sacred spaces of our churches. By providing people with the tools to engage with God in these “portable” ways we open people’s lives up to the revelation of a relational God who’s grace is found in music, writing, silence, noice, coffee, dinner, the bus, school, art, life and in nature reserves.

Recently I’ve been reading a book by Elizabeth Vercoe and Kerry Abramowski titled “The Grief Book.” The book is a bag of tricks, a book full of ideas, rituals, practices, stories, ideas, suggestions, excercises and anecdotes for young people to read through and put into practice that may assist them with recognising and dealing with grief.

This is a portable spirituality…

This is something that I can carry with me every day…

Article by: Darren Wright

This year, Big Brother in Australia has embraced the concept of “mobile marketing”. The range of mobile phone options including ring tones, web access, wallpaper images, games, moblogging, live video feed, texting the Uplate TV show, voting, entering competitions, entering mobile phone auctions and receiving text updates…

And I’m sure there’s more…

One thing that the Big Brother phenomenon has picked up on is the need for it’s viewers to connect with their new BB “friends”, it’s almost like owning a tamagotchi, or a portable sims character. The daily doses, the web access, the 7pm, 7.30pm, 11.30pm television shows are not enough, we need to be able to know whats going on in the ever-changing world that BB has created.

Another thing is that it’s difficult to tell where the Big Brother advertising stops and the 3 Mobile network advertising starts, can one tell the difference, if so, how?

Anyhow, here’s a list of themes I’ll address in the next couple of weeks in regards to Big Brother, Mobile Marketing and Mobile Theology…

1. Make it Interactive
2. Make it Portable
3. Make it Fun
4. Make it Available 24/7
5. Make it About Me
6. Make it Multi-Sensory

There will be some crossovers for sure, and it’s possible that I’ll change a few of these as I continue to think about my posts, but for now this will be a good start.

Article by: Darren Wright
Date: 25th June 2005

I have my mobile back today, I feel clothed now…

Download Media File from the BBC Religions and Ethics Website: Mobile phones and spirituality (Real Media File)

“Phones not only become a platform in what you receive information in the traditional sense but also becomes a platform for religious and spiritual domains too.”

“I saw some young women in Southern China having their mobile phones being blessed by Buddhist monks, and their explanation was that they hung the phones around their neck, they were on their bodies every day and they didn’t want them to be bad for them.”

Steve Taylor’s been doing some cool stuff with spiritual practices in his church, inspired by people like Kenda Creasy Dean he’s not only been using practices that have long been a part of the Christian story but he’s also been creating his own. This month’s practice for his community is to sms a blessing, he’s given an example of one on his blog:

U r nt a accident
U r unique
U were creatd 4 a purpose
God loves u

Made me start thinking of some other suggestions, perhaps altering some celtic blessings in the process…

Grce of the lv of the Sky B Yrs
Grce of the lv of the strs B Yrs
Grce of the lv of the moon B Yrs
Grce of the lv of the sun B Yrs
Grce of the lv and the crwn of hvn B Yrse

or

May thre alwys b wk 5 yr hnds 2 do
May yr purse alwys hld a coin or 2
May the sun alwys shin on yr wndwpne
May a rnbow b certn 2 follw each rain
May the hnd of a frnd alwys b near u
May Gd fill yr (h) with gldnss 2 cheer u

Of course if one had issues with translating blessings or using txt abbreviations one could always check out wikipedia

Cheers Steve, you’ve got me thinking that it’s about time I put more time and effort into my “mobile theology” and “subwoofer theology” writings…

I’ve been watching the new U2 Live in Chicago dvd tonight, just prior to singing “One” Bono goes into a small sermon about how he’d like the world to tell President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that there are people out here who care, who will say that it’s not ok for a child to die in 2005 for the lack of a 20cent immunization, it’s not ok for a child to die for the lack of food in its belly, that’s not ok anymore… He asks people to tell the politicians:

“We’re asking them to do something extraordinary… we’re not asking them to put a man on the moon, but more like put mankind back on the earth. We have the technology, we have the resources, we have the know how to end the extreme poverty, if we have the will, and I believe that we have the will…”

He goes on to say

“And I know you know that, but I’d like you to tell President Bush that, Prime Minister Blair that and any other politician that you see, and you can do that quite easily, just take out your cell phone… Anyone have a cell phone here? You can get yourself into a lot of trouble with cell phones… Cell phones, dangerous little devices… Turn my lights off Bruce… so we’re looking for a million Americans to email us, to join the one campaign, we’re not looking for your money, we’re looking for your voice…”

And as he’s speaking he pulls out his cell phone and holds it high, and the audience follows, when he gets Bruce to turn off the lights the entire stadium was filled with the light of thousands of mobile phones…

Imagine if every single mobile phone in that building emailed and joined the One campaign right then and there, as the band played on.

Mobile phones as a sign of action, of hope?