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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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 More2012: Muslims, Marijuana, Mormons and other things that make you go mmmmmmm
I kept a pretty low profile in 2012 with some pathetic sporadic blogging and only the occasional dip into blog controversies surrounding the church. But despite my silence, I was doing my best to keep up on the conversation. Here are my big M’s of the Christian blogosphere in 2012, all of them stemming from…
Read MoreJim 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,…
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 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 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 MoreProphets 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…
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 MorePrayers 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.…
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 MoreDon 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,…
Read MoreFresh 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…
Read MoreWhen 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…
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 MorePerriman 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…
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreI need books on emerging blogging nomadic couch surfing apostles
I need you to recommend some books for me. The creative people at Cornerstone Festival have taken my three seminars and given them a single title. THANKS! I have asked them to change the “emergent” word, which I try to avoid, but that’s fine if they want to use it. Here’s how the seminar looks on their website: Emergent…
Read MoreMission 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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