Life & Ministry

How to Write

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Nigel Roberts has made a video, principally for the Grove Youth Series, on how to write. On it a number of published writers exploring different dimensions of writing, including: • what inspires you to write? • how do you write? • how should you use the Bible in your writing? • how to get started My contributions are … Continue Reading

Children and the internet

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Vicky Beeching has written on children and the internet this week in the Church Times. The main point of her argument is that Christian parents shouldn’t see the internet as a dangerous thing to be avoided, but a tool to be used, and that we should encourage children to use it responsibly. She hits her … Continue Reading

Mission, democracy and flourishing

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Nineteenth-century missionaries were culturally insensitive colonials, colluding with the colonial powers to oppress local culture and impose their own values, to the detriment of those they were proselytising. Right? Wrong, according to some remarkable research reported in this month’s Christianity Today. For many of our contemporaries, no one sums up missionaries of an earlier era … Continue Reading

Encouraging younger ordinands

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My previous two posts, reflecting on the findings on church growth, and then the particular issue of the age of selection of leaders, has provoked quite a discussion on Facebook. To put this in context, I include here some paragraphs from Bob Jackson’s book The Road to Growth which was published nearly 10 years ago in … Continue Reading

When should leaders be trained?

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In my previous post on church growth research, I hinted at a number of issues in relation to training and deployment of full-time leaders. One particular issue surfaced in the comments, and I expand on it here: at what age should future church leaders be commissioned and trained? At one level, of course, this question … Continue Reading

How to Grow the Church

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A number of years ago, a friend of mine was leaving theological education to go back into parish ministry. ‘I’ll just go and grow the church for a few years’, he said blithely. I thought he was a fool to be so presumptuous. Yes, growing a church is easy: all you need to do is … Continue Reading

(When) should we retire?

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The questions around an ageing population and retirement are perhaps the biggest social and financial challenges to Western democracies. To realise this you just need to know some basic statistics on UK Government spending in the current year. Defence        £46.6 bn       6% Education     £49.5 bn     … Continue Reading

ASB Baptism liturgy

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I have reproduced here the baptism liturgy from the Alternative Service Book (1980). It is not currently authorised for use without specific permission. It is not without its problems, and there were questions asked when it was introduced. But it is interesting to note its directness and simplicity compared with Common Worship, and its extensive … Continue Reading

Experimental Baptism

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The Church of England has just published ‘additional’ texts in accessible language as an alternative to the current text of Common Worship Initiation Services. These have been produced in response to a motion brought by Liverpool Diocesan Synod to General Synod in 2011. But the new texts have not, so far, gone down very well. … Continue Reading