I’ve known about podcasting and have downloaded a few, but the thing that tipped it for me was meeting Tim Pynes who let me sit in on his interview with Andrew Jones about the connections between the emerging church conversation and the house church network. Tim had a great setup (2 mics and a recorder) and watching him do it made me think, “Hey, I can do that!”

Then Dawid Venter (and ex-South African living in Washington State who runs Emerging Connexion) got hold of me asked if he could interview me for a podcast he was putting together on the emerging church in South Africa. We did it over Skype (which dropped our connection a few times) and it was good fun (should be up in the next few months). Next was finding out that an iPod can record quite decently (using a Griffin iTalk and running Linux) and since my Dad is making a trip to Hong Kong I asked him to pick me up one.

What influenced me even more was spending some time this last week with Brian and Grace McLaren. I asked Brian a specific question: “What stories do you think people in the rest of the world want to hear told out of South Africa?” His response was threefold:

• How we’ve rethought our theology since the demise of Apartheid (and what theology was used to propogate it).
• How we deal with HIV/Aids.
• Talk about racial integration.

It is to these things which I dedicate this podcast. There are many stories which can be told and many which I’m sure will surprise me, so this is as much a journey of discovery for me as it will be for any listeners. I hope to chat to 2 of my white friends who’ve just adopted black babies, an Afrikaans pastor who’s taken a lot of flack from his congregation because they don’t like black people coming to their church as well as people from a variety of traditions talking about the future of the church in South Africa.

Firstly, though, will be the Brian McLaren tapes. He’s been here for the last few weeks and I flew from Joburg to East London to spend last week with him. My friend Sean Tucker lent me his minidisc recorder and so just about all our time with Brian was recorded. Hooray!