In regards to this morning’s Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, yes I got a few mentions. Thanks Rick. Glad to see David Nicholas honored. He was a great man. He often turned up at our Young Leader events on the search for potential church planters. 2 memories of David stand out. At an…
Read More
The Emerging Church Term Makes a Comeback
After being dormant for ten years, the term “Emerging Church” is being used to describe the strategic efforts of the Church of England. “The Emerging Church of England is the name for four strands of work which together will help leaders in every diocese to discern the shape, life and activity of the Church of…
Read More
The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church
Mike Cosper at Christianity Today has been dropping an amazing weekly podcast on the history of Mars Hill Church in Seattle (1996 – 2014) and what we can learn from it. Quality is superb and it includes a lot of voices from the church and from observers. If I can add a little correction the…
Read More
The Prodigal Project: Journey into the Emerging Church
In 2000AD an amazing book was published. All three authors just came on to my Facebook post to offer some thoughts. I thought I might bring that conversation over here before it gets lost inside FB. The book ‘Prodigal Project: Journey into the Emerging Church’ was published in 2000. It was written by Kiwi alt.…
Read MoreMission among subcultures and the emerging church
Tomorrow I am teaching two sessions on missions at Praxis. The first will be a more practical and interactive look at Luke 10, some church planting movements overseas that are doing well, a few controversial issues related to that. For those that cannot be there, I recommend reading 11 Practices of a new Jesus movement (Lausanne)…
Read MoreInsider movements, Wycliffe’s translation and missiological controversies
There is a kerfuffle on the internet that might be worthy of some exploration. The controversy around Wycliffe’s Bible translation, currently on the back burner and under the WEA spotlight, has created a lot of talk about insider movements, contextualization, dynamic equivalence, postmodernism, and the connection between the emergent church and insider movements among Muslims. …
Read MoreLiverpool: Fresh Expressions Over One Third
New emerging church research on the Diocese of Liverpool just released by Church Army: “The proportion of fresh expressions of Church compared to parishes is 38.6%. If compared to the number of churches, which might be a closer comparison, that proportion is 30.4%. Either way, about a third of the ecclesial bodies in the diocesan…
Read MoreVideo: Bishop Justin Duckworth starts wearing purple
Here is my short video of Justin Duckworth getting installed as Bishop of Wellington last weekend. There’s some footage of the breakfast we all had with him in the morning, the ceremony at the Cathedral, some thoughts from Jenny Duckworth on the symbols, and some fun stuff. All in 5 minutes!! For the video of…
Read MoreBlog banter on church leadership and fresh expressions
Up at 4am this morning. Interesting blog banter going on from 3 Brits: 1. Richard Passmore on Fresh Expressions “I think FE may actually hinder change in the longer term because of the gravitational pull of the institution and accompanying orthodoxy. I think we are already seeing dissenting voices being marginalised as FE spreads and…
Read MoreGlobal emerging church gathering in Brazil
Update: I am reposting this because Encontro Global Tribal Generation 2012 happens next month. They had over 4000 in attendance when they did this event 2 years ago. A teaser for this year: Olgalvaro Bastos Jr who is hosting the gathering is the guy who kicked off our “new wineskins for new wine” discussion on the…
Read MoreVideos from Underground Ministries Roundtable
I just uploaded some videos I took at the Global Roundtable of Underground Ministries which we held at Cornerstone Festival in Illinois last year. Sorry it took so long to get the videos up. Hope you enjoy them. Attendance was a little spotty in places because most of us were also involved in Cornerstone Festival…
Read MoreNO we are NOT living in a secluded commune!
How embarrassing! After all the news coverage we got last week, my friends and family now think I live in a COMMUNE! Yes, a flipping’ “commune”! When I was a kid in school at Orewa, one of our teachers was a bushy-bearded hippie who lived in a Puhoi commune. We thought that was weird. It…
Read MoreThe Dreadlocked Barefooted Bishop of Wellington
Update: Watch the news on TV and read May 5 NZ Herald interview. Original: Some very exciting news. The papers are ablaze this weekend with the announcement that Justin Duckworth has been elected Bishop of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital city. “The Anglican Church needs to be ”dusted off” and it believes a dreadlocked, barefooted priest is the man to do…
Read MoreBlue Like Jazz. Now see the movie.
I haven’t read Don Miller’s best-selling book by that name but that’s not because I was waiting for the movie. I just never got around to reading it. But Steve Taylor’s movie Blue Like Jazz is released today and since I will be in San Francisco in a few weeks, so . . . I…
Read MoreArchbishop Rowan Williams stepping down
Archbishop Rowan WIllams has announced that he will step down from his position by the end of December 2012 and that he has accepted the position of Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge. As I mentioned last September, Rowan Williams has been a huge source of encouragement and balanced wisdom for the fresh expressions movement,…
Read More2012 Report: Emerging churches in deprived communities
Somebody say H.O.S.P.I.T.A.L.I.T.Y . . . “There were two messages about how the groups understood mission. First, mission meant an incarnational presence in the everyday life of the community. Second, mission meant engaging with residents to restore their capacity to act, to articulate needs and to seek to have those needs met. Hospitality was the…
Read MoreWorship in a minor key
It’s been about ten years since AlternativeWorship.org emerged. This is one of the projects we helped to fund and support and its great to see how it has been a resource to the alt. worship movement over the past decade. Although its pretty impossible to keep up with all the churches, or blogs, it’s still…
Read MoreGrowing Cafe Churches Singapore Style
Tim Wong flew home to Singapore yesterday but we are still talking about his cafe-churches or “missional cafe communities” as he calls them. “It costs $20 million to buy land and build a church in Singapore. For that much money, we could buy 100 coffee shops.” Tim Wong What’s interesting to me is that Tim’s…
Read MoreMinistry Real Estate: Buy or rent?
Real estate investment for churches and ministries can be a curse or a blessing. It’s one area you can’t afford to get wrong. Learn from the new church movements around the world that are RENTING URBAN and BUYING RURAL. RENT URBAN: Urban real estate is expensive. And if you buy too early, your ministry gets…
Read MoreThe Emerging Church: Movement or Conversation?
It’s great to see so much conversation on the emerging church. Roger Olsen is pumping out some provocative content. His post yesterday is on the topic of emerging church as a movement [or not]. It’s a movement, dammit! 6 years ago, I was helping 2 other guys to write the Wikipedia stub on “emerging church”…
Read More