On Saturday morning, our church Leadership Team had breakfast with our children and youth workers. 30 or so came and another dozen couldn’t make it. It was our way of saying “thank you” to them for their amazing work over the past year. Later we prayed for them individually, asking God to equip them in their [...]
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I’ve just come across this fascinating illustration about Diet Coke from Slavoj Zizek in The Fragile Absolute. Zizek sees all social reality as ‘empty’ driven by antagonisms and contradictions as opposed to something real that we aspire to. He points out how coca-cola was originally invented as a medicine – a nerve tonic, stimulant and headache cure. [...] My good friend Simon Jones writes some challenging words on his blog about the need to “bless everyone and save many”: It means that we have to work at being good news on two fronts simultaneously. The first is the obvious one of what we do to reach out and embrace people of all kinds, offer to [...] I’ve started following 2churchmice.wordpress.com where I read this fascinating insight: One of the characteristics of post-modernity is that everything is in flux, and the old certainties (and enmities) of the past no longer make sense. The rise of the emerging church is only one manifestation of that, and is a key reason why some people dislike it [...] It’s rather to easy to point a finger at American Christianity, without first acknowledging the paucity in the spiritual life of many UK Christians. However, I was fascinated by this data from the esteemed George Barna about the changing views of Americans. In a recent survey, his organisation found that: • One-third of all adults (34%) believe [...] I’ve been thinking a bit about the mission of a local church. So I’ve jotted down these three ways that churches relate to culture: ‘Attractional’ churches adopt a ‘you come to us’ approach. Their activities are designed to encourage people to journey into God’s love by joining the existing inherited church. If they are involved in the [...] One of the most exciting things about returning to a local church pastorate, has been the renewed opportunity I’ve had to engage with more recent Christian literature. And I’m really enjoying that. One of the things I especially notice is the change in the style of book titles. They used to be called “Knowing God” and “I [...]
I’ve been reading Floyd McClung on the subject of “Belonging before Believing before Behaving”. He says that, wrongly, we expect people to believe in something before they can belong to it. Jesus, on the other hand, asked his followers to belong to his movement before he asked them to believe. He understood that belief is not [...] This is a challenging section of Stuart Murray-Williams book on being church in a post Christian culture: Church after Christendom. And especially on the theme we are thinking a lot about at GBC, what is “the church” in a multi-congregational/cell structure? In [emerging] churches where belonging, believing and behaving are in flux, is there any room for [...] Recently, Karen and I led a seminar for the parents of young people in our church. These are our notes:
In small groups, we thought about what a successful Young Person looks like?
Then we thought about what makes a good parent. We used a list of characteristics chosen by young people. You could use the same [...] |
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