Categories
Church: UK Church: World

Reasons To Be Changing (part 3)

To my mind, there are three reasons why the Western missionary movement needs to be transformed. Most obviously: because of the growth of the Church in what used to be called mission fields. Most importantly; because our theology and practice of mission have often been based on a few proof texts, rather than on a […]

Categories
Mission

A Guide to Mission Terminology

A couple of years ago, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I wrote the definitive guide to Bible translation terms. In the same spirit, I feel that I should write a guide to terms used in discussion about mission, so here goes: Missional: my church is more exciting than your church. Missiology: the study […]

Categories
Church: UK Church: World

Why People are Leaving Church: A Look at Context

Rachel Held Evens recently wrote a piece on the CNN blog entitled Why Millenials Are Leaving the Church which gained huge readership (I lost count of how many of my Facebook contacts mentioned it) and has sparked a fair bit of debate. There have been a number of responses to Rachel’s paper including this thoughtful […]

Categories
Church: World Mission Reviews

Books I have Read: The Meeting Of The Waters

 OK, let’s get the important stuff out of the way. Currently, The Meeting of the Waters: 7 Global Currents That Will Propel the Future Church is available for Kindle for £1.99 (it was free until yesterday). At that price it is an absolute steal and if you are involved in Church or mission leadership you should buy […]

Categories
Bible & Mission Mission Observations

Hokey-Cokey Contextualisation

You put your right arm in, you put your right arm out… Most people are aware of the concept of contextualisation. The notion that missionaries should present the Gospel in a way which speaks into the culture to which it is being addressed. The result is that the expression of Christianity in the UK today […]

Categories
Observations

Why I’m Not Quoting John 3:16

Over the last few days, I’ve noticed that lots of people have posted the words of John 3:16 on Twitter or on Facebook. Without wishing to sound heretical, I do find myself wondering what the point of this is. I’m more than happy to acknowledge that John 3:16 is a wonderful verse of Scripture and […]

Categories
Bible & Mission Reviews

Books I’ve Read: Not So Secret

IVP recently asked me to write a commendation for Graham Orr’s excellent new book Not so secret. I was more than happy to do so, and this is what I came up with. If you buy the book, you will discover that the publishers only used one fragment of a sentence from my carefully crafted prose […]

Categories
Bible & Mission

Theology of Mission or Missionary Theology

At the same time, the traditional Western approach to theological education has been widely rejected elsewhere in the world. By now we are all familiar with the critiques developed in South America, but elsewhere around the globe voices are raised against an approach to theology that is perceived to be too academic, too abstract and […]

Categories
Reviews

The Forgotten Jesus…

Let’s start with the negatives: at around £15 for 240 pages, this book is overpriced. This is probably because it has been published by a rather specialist house (Wipf and Stock) rather than one of the more popular and mass-market Christian publishers, but it is frustrating. That being said, I reckon you should get your […]

Categories
Bible & Mission

The Future of Theology?

First, let us recall that within the last century there has been a massive southward shift of the centre of gravity of the Christian world, so that the representative Christianlands now appear to be in Latin America,Sub-Saharan Africa, and othe rparts of the southern continents.This means that Third World theology is now likely to be the representative Christian […]