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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Jim from OldTruth Passes

Blogger and Reformer Jim Bublitz passed away, after a long bout with illness – we prayed for him a while ago. Jim ran the OldTruth blog and launched many bloggers into their calling. Jim and I found ourselves on different sides of the argument concerning the Reformation and the emerging church but I found Jim very likable,…

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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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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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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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Prophets of the New Order

Ngatiawa Community, a contemplative monastery of Urban Vision was featured last month in the Anglican publication Taonga. Justin Duckworth [pictured below] has a Youth For Christ past as well as a Baptist background but felt that the Baptists already had lots of good works going. The Anglicans, however, needed some encouragement. Thus the decision to…

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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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Prayers for Chuck Smith

HUGE BUMMER: Pastor Chuck Smith announced to his congregation yesterday that he has lung cancer. HT: Phoenix Preacher. My Californian wife used to attend the CC youth events on Saturday nights in Costa Mesa. Great times! Chuck Smith is well known for being one of the key leaders behind the Jesus Movement in the 60’s.…

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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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Don Carson and a wrong-headed appeal to Matthew 18

I just read something Dr Don Carson wrote this year about the emerging church and a “wrong-headed” appeal to Matthew 18. “Several years ago i wrote a fairly restrained critique of the emerging church movement as it then existed, before it morphed into its present diverse configurations.That little book earned me some of the angriest,…

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Fresh Expressions Gathering in UK

  There was once a movement in the churches in UK back in the 1980’s and 90’s. It was called “alt. worship”. Then the movement discovered some colleagues on the other side of the pond and the movement was renamed “emerging church”. Then some bishops waved their hand and rechristened it “Fresh Expressions”. It was…

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When we protested against ourselves

“We had become banal to ourselves and felt complicit with a culture of banality in worship. It was a protest against the sing-along ‘concert’ model of worship, in which a new breed of ‘worship leaders’ had become a new ‘performing clergy’ and we their audience-congregation.” Doug Gay, Remixing the Church. I love that quote. I have…

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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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Perriman on Emerging Church

The evangelical mind has become a closed loop. It has evolved into a ‘Second Life’, a vivid, exotic alternative reality, with its own intrinsic plausibility and coherence but only an approximate and in many respects spurious relationship to the real world. The emerging church, therefore, stands for a deconstruction of this alternative virtual reality and…

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What would you do with the Crystal Cathedral?

The Crystal Cathedral is up for sale and I just heard that someone bought it for $46 million. Dang! Maybe some emerging church out there should have bought the 40 acre campus and recycled it into something useful. Although if Randall Balmer is correct in saying that passing on a huge unsustainable megachurch is a…

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Mission in Digital Frontiers: Learning Day in Adelaide

Next week I am doing a learning day at Uniting College, Adelaide, South Australia. Thanks to Dr Steve Taylor, Director of Missiology, for inviting me over. You might remember Steve for his EmergentKiwi blog or his excellent book The Out of Bounds Church?: Learning to Create a Community of Faith in a Culture of Change.…

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