Churches of Reconciliation: the Diverse Church as Good News for the World

Here’s the paper I gave at the TEAR conference yesterday:
Churches of reconciliation
I shall tell you more about it later in the week, but I told people it would be up here, so I thought I’d better make good on that.

Yoder on church growth, the Great Commission and mission

I knew that Anabaptist theologian John Howard Yoder’s “Baptism and the new humanity” chapter of Body Politics had key things to say about my previous post concerning the shape of the church and anabaptist versus emerging church ecclesiology – but I forgot how many related issues this chapter speaks to. I went back and read [...]

Why the church must be attractional: an Anabaptist critique of the emerging missional church via Milbank

A few weeks ago, Hamo wrote an interesting post called ‘Why the missional incarnational church is screwed’. He quoted at length from the postliberal theologian John Milbank:
The church cannot be found amongst the merely like-minded, who associate in order to share a particular taste, hobby or perversion. It can only be found where many [...]

Tom Sine stirs things up in Perth

Anabaptistish-futurologist-populariser of kingdom ideas Tom Sine was in Perth last week, and Chris Summerfield has written a thoughtful and interesting post thinking through the consequences.
In Tom talking up the new conspirators (emerging, missional, multicultural, monastic communities), it brought up for me a struggle over the last few months against feeling left behind. For me, I [...]

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 [...]