Echeesiology: Our Help Fromages Past

Stinking Bishop, anyone?

Here at stephenmcalpine.com we’re not all furrowed brows and missional angst.  No, we want to live a little – especially on Fridays.  So we’ve decided to make Friday a free dress day (sooo passe – Ed).  It’s Friday, but Sunday’s acomin’ – and there’ll be time enough for rosters/sermons/minutes/hijacking the senior pastor over coffee/carpark meetings.  So while it’s Friday, let’s let our hair down (yours let you down! – hirsute Ed).

Anyway, I was in Christian Kmart this morning and I happened to notice the shelf literally creaking with books about church.  Not just about church, but with the word “church” in the title.  And if you can put a single word in front of the word “church” in a funky font, then you’re really onto something.  In fact there are so many books about church these days that you’d almost be forgiven for thinking we’re starting to worry about it, as if something were wrong with it, or as if Jesus might not be able to keep it going (surely not! – Ed). The days of processed cheese -mono-flavoured, same in every place, sliced up in a hymn sandwich – are over, gone the way of the church’s trusty 35 kg tin of Blend 43 bought way back when Graham Kendrick’s mullet was all the rage.

So I decided to make it interesting – it being free dress day and all.  What if every time I saw the word “church” in a book title, I replaced it with the word “cheese”.  How would it read then?  Glad you asked.  Here’s a less than exhaustive list:

Your Cheese Can Grow

The Cheese on the Other Side

Total Cheese

Vintage Cheese (aged 12 months)

Simple Cheese

Dangerous Cheese

Purpose Driven Cheese

Deep Cheese

Essential Cheese (Cheddar surely – it covers all the bases)

Liquid Cheese (for Missional Community fondue nights)

They Like Jesus, but Not The Cheese (What a friend we have in Cheeses)

Your Cheese is too Safe (room temperature is acceptable after all)

Why We Love the Cheese

Will the Real Cheese Stand Up

Cheese 3:0

Organic Cheese (perfect for emergent churches on the West Coast of the USA)

2 Wheys to Live (getting desperate now)

Any other contenders let me know.