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'These fragments I have shored against my ruins' (TS Eliot, The Waste Land)
Browsing All posts tagged under »Ecclesiology«
Another myth about gender and church leadership
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the regularly-heard assertion that embracing the ministry of women led to a slide into liberalism, and pointed out that there was simply no evidence to back this up. Today someone told me that a certain well-known pastor from Seattle had spoken at a church leaders conference in […]
Church Growth in Britain 5: analysis
July 19, 2012
Goodhew offers both an introduction and conclusion to the book, which are valuable. In the introduction, he identifies the classical secularisation thesis as a ‘dominant narrative’ assumed by much of the academy, and by essentially all of the media. He suggests that the book serves to ‘subvert’ that narrative. This might be ambitious: the secularisation […]
Church Growth in Britain 4: The Nations
July 13, 2012
Three final chapters look at Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, offering some helpful different perspectives on church growth. Ken Roxburgh notes that the recent narrative of decline in Scotland is even more catastrophic than in the UK in general, before looking at five congregations in Edinburgh that have nonetheless grown to some extent. The case-studies […]
Church Growth in Britain 3: New Churches
July 2, 2012
Six chapters of the book focus on new churches, three looking specifically at Black Majority Churches, and three more widely. Hugh Osgood gives an excellent overview of the growth of BMCs; Richard Burgess offers an account of one denomination, The Redeemed Christian Church of God; and Amy Duffuor offers an account of a single congregation, […]
Church growth in Britain 2: Mainstream churches
June 24, 2012
The section on mainstream churches contains chapters on the London diocese (of the Church of England) (by John Wolffe and Bob Jackson); Catholicism in London’s East End (Alana Harris); Baptist growth in England (Ian Randall); growth in (Anglican) cathedral congregations (Lynda Barley); and reverse mission (Rebecca Catto). For me, the study of London Anglicanism is […]
Church Growth in Britain?
June 24, 2012
David Goodhew (ed.) Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present (Ashgate, 2012) I suppose most of us in academia have a list in our heads of books that ought to be written: there are positions that you know to be true, but that have not yet been demonstrated to be so to the satisfaction […]
Further musings on ministerial formation
March 20, 2012
My previous post attracted a number of comments about the importance of the college community in ministerial formation. My first quick reply, that community formation might happen in an intentional dispersed community, and perhaps should be happening in the local church, seemed not to satisfy anyone. Musing on this on a train, a further thought […]
Translocal ecclesial identities
March 13, 2012
The theme of the recent – and excellent – Evangelical Alliance Council meeting was ‘It takes a whole church to raise a child’. Amongst the points made, two seem to me to connect interestingly. First, there was emphasis on the increasingly post-Christian, and so alien, nature of our society, which means that churches must become […]
Baptist Theology
March 12, 2012
My book on Baptist Theology is now out, or at least I have been sent the preview copies. If you are interested, you can read the first few pages here. Amazon have it available for pre-order. In the introduction I describe the thesis of the book thus: …I begin by suggesting that there are two foci […]
Catholic Bishops, Baptist pastors, and same-sex marriage
December 13, 2011
It seems fairly likely that we in Scotland will see the extension of marriage to same-sex couples before the rest of the UK, probably in the next 2-3 years. The government has proposed this, and a consultation on the proposal has just closed. How should a Christian commentator respond to this idea? The theology here […]
Shored Fragments 
September 21, 2012
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