Well Done, Caroline!

One of my favourite sports is tennis, probably even more so after watching a couple of Australian Open matches first-hand back in 2006. The sport has even more appeal now with – for the first time in decades – a Danish player with potential. Caroline Wozniacki, just 17 years old, who won the junior championship at Wimbledon in 2006, made it to the fourth round at this year’s Australian Open, quite a remarkable feat.

At this morning’s match, 4^th seeded Ana Ivanovic proved too much of a challenge. Ivanovic took the first set easily 6-1, but Wozniacki managed to get back in the game in the second set, getting two set points and forcing Ivanovic into her first tiebreak of the tournament. Eventually, Ivanovic won the match, but Wozniacki did a decent and impressive performance.

Caroline has been climbing the world ranking lately, and we should expect too see more from her. I will look forward to cheering for her in the upcoming grand slams of this year.

On another note, watching the match was a delicate matter – I have no television and even if I did, I wouldn’t have a channel that carries these tournaments. I found a great online service however: a peer-to-peer network called SopCast, which lets you watch live streams of a wide array of TV channels, mostly Asian. So my carrier last night was the Hong Kong-based (but English language) Star Sports, an ESPN-subsidy. Service was fine, no glitches or anything. Whether this is completely legal or not though, I don’t really now.

Religious But Not Spiritual?

A new Facebook group caught my attention recently. It’s called “I am religious but not spiritual” and its description reads: “The most important thing in life is to have an institutional relationship with God.”

I didn’t join the group, but something about the idea resonated in me. Obviously, it’s a reaction towards the more established, opposite movement; that faith should be all about individual expressions of spirituality, and not about institutions and structures and history.

As postmoderns we are supposed to distrust institutions. Does that make me modern if I find myself actually liking them? Brian McLaren says the divide between conservative and liberal is outdated; now it’s about modern and postmodern. It’s still a divide. What if there’s no divide and never was? (Intensive reading of Bruno Latour the last few weeks has almost persuaded me this might be the case.)

But back to church. A post and published article by Tvesok (in Danish) has some interesting observations about the target group and purpose of new churches. But a comment on this was: what about those people who like and need the security and structure that institutions can give?

It’s all about community, we’re told to believe. And I believe community is important. An institutionalized church without community would not be the same, sure. But is it the most important thing? What about corporate worship? What about the Word? What about the ‘sacraments’ (insert theology here)?

Upon, for instance, moving to a new city, finding a church can be a difficult task. Personally, I’d prefer one that suited me on both religion and community. A church whose activities and institutions inspired and challenged my Christian life – but also one in which I felt a sense of community with the other people. But if you can’t have both, the choice is not that easy.

What is church, anyway?