As a smug Mac user for the last decade, memories of needing to defrag Windows PC hard drives are, thankfully, well in the past. For the uninitiated, PCs don’t always store data on hard drives in the tidiest way, and over time this can cause the computer to slow down and not run efficiently. ‘Defragging’ the hard drive attempts to tidy it up so the PC runs more smoothly and quickly.

Leonard Sweet, in his foreword to Alan Hirsch’s book ‘The Forgotten Ways,’ opines that the Church is in serious need of ‘defragging’:

Christianity has undergone untold crashes and clashes in the past two thousand years. In the last five hundred years its original hard drive has wiped out so many times, especially in the West, that it has almost ground to a halt.

The computer geek in me gets the analogy. Sometimes the untidy mess of our church structures, programmes, roots, buildings, finances etc slows us down to the extent that we struggle to do the most basic functions. Sweet goes on to suggest that, as a computer being ‘defragged’ means it can’t be used for any other purpose, so the church may need to stop doing things whilst the mess is sorted out.

I like that concept, and am interested to discover whether this book “has provided twenty-first-century Christianity with the best defragger available”.

Image: © Everett
Reproduced under Creative Commons licence