11th September 2024

Sorting through my bookshelves the other day I came across a relic of the past: the Baptist Union Directory for 2007, containing lists of all ministers and their contact details, together with the information about churches, church secretaries and associations, the colleges and much else. But the annual Directory ceased publication some time ago. Now, in the digital age, everything is online, yes? No. Thanks to data protection rules and fears about misuse of personal data there is no longer a central, readily accessible source of all the information we used to have. Some churches (like Tyndale) have websites. But these don’t always give the details needed for making contact. So, oddly, with the coming of the digital technology that was supposed to speed up communication, communicating has actually in some ways become harder.

Concerns about protection of privacy and misuse of information are understandable. But surely things have gone too far. Someone working in one of our colleges told me recently they were phoned by a friend saying, ‘Sorry, but can you give me so-and so’s email address or phone number?’ In desperation, they had no other way of getting in touch with the family of a minister who’d just died. This is not how it should be for churches. We are – or should be – out in the public square. And we ministers are not called to be wholly privatised individuals, skulking in our dugouts, but servants of other people, available to all as was Jesus. How can we resist being driven by the pressures of our age into a secret corner, isolated from each other and the world?

Keith Clements