Submerging Church: sunk without a trace

One of the blogs I used to visit occasionally was Emerging Africa, which three or four years ago used to have some quite interesting discussions. But I hadn't visited it for a while and saw that it had dropped off the radar, or at least below the top 25 on the Amatomu religion section.

I dug a bit deeper, and found it had dropped to number 50 on the list, and no doubt will continue to fall, because if you go to the site this is all you'll see: Site off-line:

Current Status Emergence: this is what the universe does, so if you think it is going away, please reconsider your point of view. Africa: Relatively stable, sitting as it does on only one or two continental plates. Emerging Africa : submerged for a long time, now being let loose to sink to the bottom of the ocean. But don't let that fool you: emergence is what the universe does, so if you think it is going away, please reconsider your point of view. Regards and Blessings The Sunken Emergent Dictatorship Inc.

I suppose the blog owner got tired of all the spam postings that were the only things available to read there lately.

But it does describe what's happening.

Forty years ago a radical Christian magazine, the Catonsville Roadrunner announced that "The submarine church is surfacing". That was probably the first reference to the Emerging Church. But those who felt threatened by it don't need to worry — it's submerged again, to suffer sea change.

Not that Amatomu is the best indicator. It still shows Dion Forster's old blog, Dion's Random Ramblings, abandoned more than a year ago, as more popular than his current one, An uncommon path. Perhaps he ought to go back to the old one!

Or perhaps it's a sign of entropy in the blogosphere, and perhaps even the whole internet. Information is becoming more concise, more incoherent and less connected. We're in a whirlpool of flotsam and jetsam going down a black plug hole into oblivion. I long for the old days of Fido technology netowrks. It was text only, it was slow, it was dial-up, but at least people had something to communicate.