Current Programme

"The absolute key thing which God needs from the Church is a commitment to the Word of God."—Rev Phill Sacre

We are joined once again by Rev Phill Sacre—an ordained minister (Church of England), housechurch leader, and blogger on Substack—for a conversation on "Plausibility Structures and the Church."

Our conversation grows out of a podcast series that Phill produced late last year called "How the church was sabotaged", in which he reflected upon a 1980s book by the famous Christian thinker and writer Os Guinness. Though published over 40 years ago, Guinness's "The Gravedigger File: Papers on the Subversion of the Modern Church" caught Phill's attention because of its apparent prescience on a number of important cultural issues facing the church today. So, please join us as I "get in on the conversation", and we discuss what's happened to so many modern churches, and think about ways in which we might "push back" in the culture to reveal the Gospel's "plausibility structure" to church and world alike.

(Phill is a Christian minister. Ordained in the Church of England, he formerly served in a parish on the Essex coast, but now leads an independent housechurch. He also runs the online ministries "Understand the Bible" and "Sacred Musings : Thinking Christianly about the World" on Substack.)

Possible Future Programmes

I am working on, or considering, the following projects (in no particular order):

• A follow-up interview with Jacob Hornberger on the Zapruder Film Mystery

• An interview in the area of "A Christian approach to health and medicine" with a recently qualified Cambridge University PhD graduate

• A possible follow-up interview with Dr Gary Sidley on his research into the effectiveness (or otherwise) of masks with respect to the spread of respiratory viruses

• An interview in the area of The Philosophy of Miracle

• TMR Roundtables on the following films: (a) One by One (2014) starring Rik Mayall; (b) Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) starring Richard Burton and John Hurt; (c) Journey to the Far Side of the Sun or Doppelgänger (1969) by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, starring Roy Thinnes and Patrick Wymark; (d) Minority Report (2001) starring Tom Cruise; (e) Fahrenheit 451 (1966) directed by François Truffaut; (f) The Sound of Music (1965) starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer; (g) The Parallax View (1974) starring Warren Beatty.
  

• A (possible) series of interviews with Dr Martin Erdmann on his book The Spiritualisation of Technology.

Results from TMR survey

Format: Everyone who responded said that they particularly appreciate the interviews (and other types of one-to-one conversation) and asked that these remain at the core of TMR's programming. They also generally prefer in-depth conversations.

Subjects: The majority of respondents are happy with the types of subjects covered on the podcast. (Some aren't keen on subjects that are specifically Christian, while others aren't keen on subjects that are not specifically Christian. Given that this mix is central to TMR's philosophy, such difference of opinion is only to be expected.)

Frequency: Very few asked for the podcasts to be posted at any regular interval (such as weekly or fortnightly), but instead stressed the importance of quality over quantity.

Conclusion: I shall therefore continue in much the same way, but prioritise the in-depth conversations, even though that may impact the frequency with which I post podcasts.

Many thanks to those who contributed.

Julian.