The most effective way of understanding Open Source Theology is as a collaborative metaphorical narrative. This is rather like Jesus teaching in parables in order to confuse and irritate the Pharisees. The metaphor is explored in The Sir Toby Chronicles. A similar exploration of OST is made in Crossways - Journeyings into the Emergent with Open Source Theology - and an explanation is given in the Preface, which can be read as a preview on the same link.

Open Source Theology is also a place where experimental ideas can be aired, debated and held up to inspection without the threat of death or instant excommunication. It is a place where diverse characters across continents can encounter each other in ways which would not otherwise have been possible. It’s a place where I can promote The Sir Toby Chronicles and carry on a covert campaign for their promotion to be posted on the OST mainpage (did I really say that?). It is also a forum for displaying the vanity of its contributors.

OST is an important displacement activity for those in the workplace or when they should have been getting on with college theses (I notice almost nobody contributes over weekends). It’s a place for chronic insomniacs and those delayed at airports. But for me, it’s a place where I have honed my theological debating skills and the way I think theologically, aided in no small part by the site owner. And I have also grieved into my Guinness and grumbled about the world with John Doyle in dark corners of Sir Toby’s, the backpacker’s hostel in Prague whose existence is a welcome retreat from the rarefied world of contemporary academic theology and Christian belief.

In short, it’s a place of cyber-encounter and cyber-solace, a happy spin-off of which is to annoy and confuse the religious right. It is a vision for the possibility of a new kind of community. And where else could regular cyber-convocations be held in medieval hostelries, pan-European escapades be launched, cloak and dagger chicanery be insinuated, and the only non-virtual, real-time conference be convened, as it was three or four years ago in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall, London?