david nicholas

David Nicholas and Acts 29

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…

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general synod 2021

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…

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rise and fall of mars hill podcast

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…

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Mission 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)…

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Insider 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. …

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Liverpool: 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…

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Blog 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…

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Global 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…

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Videos 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…

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NO 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…

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The 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…

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Blue 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…

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Archbishop 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,…

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2012 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…

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Worship 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…

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Ministry 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…

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The 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”…

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