Book review – Evaluating the church growth movement : 5 views

This is an important book for me to have read. Throughout the book, several references are made to common misunderstandings of the church growth movement. The problem is that people like me associate it with megachurches and seeker-sensitive services and don’t know the historical roots.
This book starts with a good historical sketch to correct such [...]

The no-adjective church

Chuck Warnock’s written a great post pleading for a ‘no-adjective church’ - or really, for church to mean what it should mean again:
But, in the Book of Acts, they didn’t need adjectives.  Church was a community, a refuge, a place of healing, a gathering of God’s people, open to others, driven by fellowship and mission, obedient to God, gathered [...]

Strange encounters with mainstream evangelicalism 3: the Word Catalogue and the Houstons

I was flicking through the Word Bookstore catalogue and I came to a page devoted to Hillsong stuff. There were two books which interested me, one depressing and one encouraging.

 Bobby Houston has written a book called ‘I’ll have what she’s having’. The description makes it sound like as a minister’s wife you need to ensure you [...]

Hiddenness of God

One of the subject headings theological libraries use is the beautiful phrase ‘the hiddenness of God’. For me, it sums up something important about my experience of God in the last while.  

Strange encounters with mainstream evangelicalism 2: Rick Warren

I was aware of the Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven phenomenon sweeping through churches, and I was sceptical. But maybe I shouldn’t have been.  I’m meeting a whole lot of evangelicals who have started serving in the community through doing the course. One group for, example, went and did a busy bee for the local government high [...]

Strange encounters with mainstream evangelicalism

The CEO-Pastor stuff won’t go away.
I heard John Kaiser talk yesterday. He’s written a book called Winning On Purpose and he has a lot to say about church governance. As I understand it, he thinks that it’s important that church structures be leader-centred, in the sense of giving a lot of authority and power to [...]

Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety

‘Status anxiety’ is a condition we all suffer from to different degrees. It’s about comparing yourselves to others, wishing to have more attention or more fame or more money or more power. De Botton doesn’t think things were always quite like this. He sees a lot of it brought on by the competitive, socially mobile [...]

Body life #4: The open meeting

This is the fourth in a series of six articles first published in Oikos in 2007. They are a simplification of John Yoder’s Body Politics Simplified – this time with a specifically house church audience in mind.
Paul told us how to conduct our worship meetings. We just haven’t listened.

 
Let two or three prophets speak, and let [...]

Body life #3: Everyone has a gift for the church – Priests are out of work!

This is the third in a series of six articles first published in Oikos in 2007. They are a further simplification of my ‘John Yoder’s Body Politics Simplified’ – this time with a specifically house church audience in mind. 
Baptism brings people who were enemies into one body. Eating together as the church shares food, money and [...]