Author Archives: Alan Roxburgh
Looking for Hope … all over the place
Anniversaries are moments of pause looking back at the expectations with which one began a journey and checking out the realities of the present. This month is the anniversary of the 1968 May workers and student uprisings in Paris that spread across Europe and the Atlantic, creating for some governments the fear of revolution. These events were driven by a faith that...
The End of Liberalism? What the Euro-tribal churches are missing.
The books mentioned propose that the modern, liberal Western imagination is at the root of our current crises and malaise. Liberalism isn’t something that needs to be fixed or adjusted; it is the problem. The challenge isn’t fixing but the construction of a fundamentally different imagination rooted in the Christian and Classic understandings of virtue and the Good. Liberalism is an ideology...
Editorial: Questions of Place
We are witnessing a resurgence of interest in questions of place. This is quite a significant shift in which many of us are trying to sort out what it means to have our lives shaped by the notion of neighborhood. It’s a tricky question because since the early 60s modern western life has been characterized by mobility and an expectation of progress. All of this is changing... What, therefore, is the meaning of place for Christian life in the modern West? I’m discovering this is not as easy a question...
Books in conversation: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy and the book of Acts
It's a serendipitous experience to read books across different genres and make connections that stretch you. Two books by Edward Luce have done this for me recently: Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012) and The Retreat of Western Liberalism (Little, Brown Book Group, 2017). These books articulate a concern about the crisis of Western democracy apparent in many books and articles. While reading these I was also reading C Kavin Rowe’s’ The World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (OUP, 2009) which made some connections which go beyond the familiar frameworks of the twentieth century.
Outside the Walls and Beyond the Billboard
Of greatest encouragement is appreciating the extent to which, while often in less celebrated settings, outside of formal structures and among unlikely people, God is at work. The most compelling picture that came to my mind at the 2017 Think Tank was that of a dilapidated billboard with a beautiful view beyond...
A Disruptive Spirit and a Strange Encounter
The story is familiar. A man of Macedonia called Paul and his companions to come over to Europe and help them. Paul had set off on what should have been a fairly straightforward journey, revisiting small communities of Christians. The purpose was to encourage, teach, establish common structures and, where appropriate, to continue to form new communities across Asia. With no explanation Luke tells his readers that the Spirit (of Jesus) prevented them from carrying out these plans. Nothing worked according their expectations...
Editorial: Hopeful Stories, Anxious Cultures.
Since Issue 7 of the Journal those of us living in the UK and NA have been overtaken by a series of events that have accelerated, beyond our expectations, the levels of fear, crisis and anxiety among citizens. It is becoming clear that trust in the structures of state and economics to address current challenges is tumbling. It is now apparent that elites and thought leaders...
Book review: ‘The Wages of Rebellion’ by Chris Hedges.
The Wages of Rebellion is shaped initially by an analysis of Western revolutionary theory from the 19th century forward. Revolutions, Hedges proposes, are not fermented by ideas promulgated by elites. They occur when intolerable gaps develop between ordinary people and the reigning narratives of the state, its economics and its elites.
Alan Roxburgh reviews this book and introduces a number of other books on a similar theme.
Response to Michael Volland’s Reflections
Michael Volland’s reflections[1] on the Bonny Downs story[2] are a helpful framing of important issues we’re all seeking to engage in our current contexts. He rightly teases out the tensions between how we are God’s ‘sent’ people for whom the...
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Editorial: The New Commons
In the last issue the journal proposed that we 'change the conversation' from its preoccupation with church into a readiness to participate with God's activity within neighbourhoods. In the current issue we wrestle with some implications of this journey. There is an invitation to seek the common good of neighbourhood communities: 'Seek the welfare of the city to which I am sending you' (Jeremiah 29:7). We will explore what seeking the common good might mean, why it is so important in terms of Christian life and how it intersects with such things as mission and evangelism.