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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 [...] I’m rather challenged at present by what Bunyan had to say about church. Bunyan spent about a third of his life in prison for his faith. Writing from prison in 1662, he says of prayer and worship: There is no subject of more solemn importance to human happiness than prayer. It is the only medium of intercourse [...] At GBC we have begun to try and use a variant of Gray’s Matrix as a basis for our commitment to: Love God | Love each other | Make disciples (see image below). Frank Gray developed the Engels scale (which is essentially a knowledge based understanding of the gospel) to include a second axis. This defines the hearer’s [...] I came across “Create | Engage | Participate | Risk” as a brief explanation of worship in the emerging church, Grace based in west London (www.freshworship.org). Grace is a Christian alternative worship community/network. It has varying degrees of importance/significance/levels of commitment for the people involved. Some are involved in other churches and Grace is a supplement, [...] My friend, Simon Jones, gave me a copy of Alan Roxburgh’s book Leadership and Liminality. My first task was to work out what on earth liminality is. I may blog some more on this excellent book – but here’s what I’ve discovered about the title! Liminality is a state of being on the “threshold” of or [...] |
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