Living Open Source

No, this is not a tutorial on CSS or page design. Centring the Margins was the theme for this year’s Baptist Assembly in Brighton. I’ve just got back and was wondering whether the assembly really ever touched this theme at all, and actually whether the title itself is the wrong way round.

I’m not sure the assembly, in its worship, content and conversation went anywhere near the margins. Musically, the worship was rather uniform - the band playing the usual contemporary songs in the usual kind of church worship band way. They were good, but… And Krystal were great, but… Where were the margins? Where was Taize, where was rap?. Where was silence? And yes where did all those old hymns go? Missing too were those things that had appeared in previous assemblies - drama, art, creative liturgy. It was all very uniform, trying to create a TV chatshow style event. A seperate stream ran this year called Prism which was intended to be the more ‘alternative’ style worship. This was more informal and creative, but even that seemed rather too near the centre and seemed to result in the main session being emptied of creativity and variety.

Maybe all this goes to form my general feeling that actually, as one guy in the PRISM session remarked, the title is the wrong way round.

We shouldn’t be trying the bring the margins into the centre, the centre should be moving to the margins. Jesus spent his time in the margins, not in the centre. So after hearing people on stage trying to show us how to centre the margins, I went home feeling like we had been asking the wrong questions all weekend.

May be next time the theme will be obliterate the margins or marginalising the centre.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how to centre margins in CSS it goes something like this:

centred
{
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
width: 50em;
}


to obliterate the margins you would probably code:

centred
{
@~<><