Scholarship • Serving • Ministry – Ian Paul
David Walker, Bishop of Manchester, has done some research on the distinctive needs of occasional attenders who might come to Christmas services, but don’t attend the rest of the year. This appears to be an important group; I have noticed this year how many people are reporting increased attendances at carol services, and we saw …
Dr Jon Coutts is a Canadian who recently joined the faculty at Trinity College, Bristol; he blogs at http://thissideofsunday.blogspot.ca. I conducted a virtual interview with him exploring issues around ministry and ministry training, and I think his answers are truly fascinating. We have things to offer other contexts—but we also have important things to learn …
There are some compelling arguments for the (relatively new) pattern of ‘contextual training’ for ordination. Steven Sherman, in his snappily titled Revitalizing theological epistemology (2008), argues that the historic separation of the seminary from the local church has created major problems for our whole concept of how we grow in the knowledge of God. His primary target …
Over the summer I enjoyed reading Graham Tomlin’s recent book The Widening Circle: priesthood as God’s way of blessing the world. Graham has just moved from being Principal of St Mellitus College in London, which has been seen as the pioneer of the new pattern of ‘contextual’ ordination training, to become Bishop of Kensington. I had …
When we lived in Poole, and the kids were small, we loved to ride on the Swanage Railway. Its steam and diesel locomotives, run by volunteers, gently haul visitors from the busyness of the seafront to the drama of Corfe Castle, still standing defiant against the destruction wrought by Cromwell after the Civil War. But …
Following my discussion about Synod elections and gender (sex) representation, I came across an article in Harvard Business Review on why women find it hard to break into secular leadership. (A friend tagged me in a link to it on Facebook—but in fact I heard it mentioned on Radio 4 a few days previously.) Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic …
One of the slightly odd things about the Christian church is that there is no agreed pattern to what we should do when we meet together. In the Western (and probably the global) church, there seem to me to be three different strands of emphasis: We meet to experience an affective encounter with God (charismatic/Pentecostal) …
There has been some very interesting discussion on Facebook and the blog following my previous post ‘When will the C of E be extinct?’. Out of this, two issues stay with me. The first comes from John Hayward’s comment in his original article on reasons for decline that the three episcopal churches he compares with the …
This month’s news from British Religion in Numbers carries a link to an interesting mathematical study on church attendance and membership. John Hayward is a mathematician who applies statistical methods to analysing issues of church growth. As we shall see, he is well aware of the limitations of such methods, but is also convinced that they can …
With Jeremy Corbyn likely to be elected as the next Labour leader, there is a good chance that we will all be faced with a much clearer choice at the next election. For Christians, this will raise more acutely the question of how important care for the poor is in their voting decisions. (Whatever else …
I have spent more than 30 years giving feedback and encouraging others to do so in a range of professional, personal and ministerial contexts. These have included being a personnel professional in an FMCG multi-national, being an ordained leader working with lay and ordained colleagues, and in the context of theological education. As a result …
