Categories: uncategorized
Date: 30 June 2007 14:21:20
If you go down to your local specialist bookshop looking for those slightly unusual magazines you will find that there has been some activity taking place in the market. The changes will be particularly relevant for broadly, progressive, sort of emergent, (post), kinda fuzzy, basically liberal (but we rarely admit that), thinking evangelicals.
Firstly the leader column in Third Way informs us that "this Summer Third Way becomes part of the GJ Palmer & Sons stable, alongside the Church Times ". I actually think this makes sense because I remember at Greenbelt last year there were serious worries about whether Third Way would manage to survive, financially. Personally I think it is important it does survive and florish because it is an intelligent magazine which goes beyond the usual Christian sub-culture and actually engages with culture and politics in the real world.
The second change is that a new title has entered the marketplace this month. Faithworks Magazine. It is, according to the leader in that one a joint initiative between Faithworks and Christian Communications Partnership and is tended to provide "a resource filled national magazine to celebrate and specificaaly equip the thousands of Christians and churches serving their local communities across the UK".
In many ways the two magazines, which both seek to focus on politics and social action from a Christian perspective are likely to attract a similar audience. They are however, two very different publications which are coming from slightly different directions and I do hope there is room in the market place for both, but I am not convinced.
I think there are two possible ways in which they could both prosper together:
1. If Faithworks manages to develop a new market rather than elbowing in on the existing one by picking up the more "smiley but caring sheep like" element of the evangelical sector of the market who are so embedded into a particular evangelical sub-culture that they either have no knowledge of Third Way or have dismissed it as too liberal without ever picking it up to read.
or
2. If Faithworks stops dumbing down and becomes a proper professional journal for practitioners. This does not mean becoming an academic journal but it would mean exploring the real and practical issues involved for people working within the voluntary sector. I'll take as an example an article in the first issue which looked at the way an art project was being used with offenders. Rather than giving a few soundbites in a rather interesting coffee table article they could have looked at the practical issues involved and within this even perhaps moved outside the explicitly Christian part of the sector. This would enable them to look at examples of good practice from both inside and outside the Christian part the sector in order to encourage the sharing of that good practice, and help people become better providers in their own, different, areas by giving them not only ideas which may be transferrable but also a clearer understanding of the actual issues involved.
As for me and my house, I'll carry on with Third Way as my regular but possibly splash out on Faithworks if I see something specifically relevent within it.