word | spirit | world | church
In my church tradition—the conservative end of the British new church movement or ‘reformed charismatic’—it’s normal that we engage in what we call ‘contributory worship.’ Essentially this means that at the same point in our worship when we’re singing songs, members of the church will pray, read from the Bible, and use spiritual gifts. Lots… Continue reading On Microphones
I’ve come across some churches I know teaching something like this in relation to what we’ve all started calling ‘diversity.’ I think it’s nonsense. By ‘diversity’ we mean specifically racial diversity, which is one of those funny quirks of language which I think I’ve noticed stops people from seeing other kinds of diversity. Which, particularly… Continue reading “You can only be what you can see”
Glen Scrivener likes to say that pastoral care is evangelism for Christians, and evangelism is pastoral care for those who aren’t Christians. There’s a lot of insight in that aphorism, but one angle is to notice that you’re doing the same thing when you talk to your friends in church to your friends outside: you’re… Continue reading Church is Our Evangelism Strategy
The ‘slippery slope’ is considered a logical fallacy. If I argue against your desire to do one thing because it will inevitably lead to another then I’m engaging in this fallacy. If you go and read a definition of the fallacy it might identify it as an ‘informal’ fallacy because the error lies not in… Continue reading Doctrinal drift
Why is our Faith Shallow III How does the average new Christian in your church learn the faith? I’m sure you have some sort of membership process and maybe run some different programmes but I wonder how many churches have a rigorous way to do this? I suspect most would answer with, “the same way… Continue reading We Stopped Catechising
Why is our faith shallow part I I’ve argued that we have a discipleship crisis, and outlined some of what I mean by that. I intend to take a few posts exploring why that might be. There are, I think, five causes: what our gathered worship is like, the loss of thick community, the loss… Continue reading Our Sundays are Shallow
Is the Church a 'Family?' An obvious yes, right? Except, where does it say that? You’re about to have a harder time than you expected. You might point to the use of genos in 1 Peter 2, though that’s usually translated ‘race’ and if we translated it family we would mean in the very broad sense that… Continue reading Stop Calling the Church a ‘Family’
What does our discipleship crisis look like? Our lives look the same as our neighbours and they shouldn’t. We don’t all have to be radical, but we do need a small number of radicals among us to help us see that our lives could be different. I do think ordinary faithfulness is the goal for… Continue reading We can’t think or live Christianly
To be a disciple is to be a learner or an apprentice. Discipleship isn’t a ‘thing’ that we sometimes do. Discipleship—or ‘followership’—is life. I've claimed the UK church is in a discipleship crisis, taking in our lives, our communities, and our minds. What does the first one of those look like? When you stick ‘-ship’… Continue reading ‘Discipleship’ is life
We are in a discipleship crisis. Caused, perhaps, by the many other crises in the air, but here in the UK our faith is shallow. To be more precise: our churches are not forming us into deep and rich faith. I’ve been writing around this for a while, but I don’t think we’re talking about… Continue reading The Discipleship Crisis
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