What hipster coffee shops and young churches have in common
Finding your local barista is becoming increasingly snobby? What about your local church? A warning against elitism and exclusivism (written from the American context, of both coffee, and hipster churches). Here.

How we put the Apostles Creed to music – Behind the Scenes at Hillsong Conference 2014
You might recall a while back, John Dickson put a call out to Hillsong encouraging them to put the Apostles’ Creed to music. This year at Hillsong Conference (which took place in Sydney this week), the church’s latest album No Other Name was released, including the song ‘This I Believe’. In the video below, the song writer explains the process of writing such an important song.

And here is the song they’re speaking about, if you’ve not heard it yet, called This I Believe (The Creed)

Happy Birthday Salvos!
This week marked 149 years since the founding of the Salvation Army. It was on July 2 1865 that William Booth began open air preaching in a tent in the slums of east London. It was noted at the time that “the breath of  any reeked with the fumes of gin or beer which drove from the already heavy air within those canvas walls the last vestige of wholesomeness.” By 1969 his ministry was called The Christian Mission, and had expanded to providing cheap meals for the poor. In 1878, its name changed to The Salvation Army. You can read more about the beginnings of the Salvos on their dedicated heritage website.

Ramadan begins
This week also marked the start of Ramadan, the ninth month in the Islamic calendar and a period of prayer, fasting, charity-giving and self-accountability for Muslims. This thought-provoking piece on the ABC’s Religion and Ethics site asks what is appealing about Islam, what it is we are missing in our western, individualised version of Christianity. “If we want to understand the attraction of Islam, we must first acknowledge our own shadow side. For the attraction of Islam can most often be traced to the palpable sense of community in the umma, an attraction not unlike what the early Christian communities exerted in the Roman Empire.” Read more here.