Featured Articles
Book Review: ‘Inventing the Individual’ by Larry Siedentop
Review of Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Milton Keynes; UK: Penguin Random House, 2015)
First published in 2014 this is a must read for anyone committed to addressing Newbigin’s question about a missionary engagement with the late, modern West, especially its North Atlantic form. True confession - this book reads like a good thriller...
Community Building as Spiritual Practice
When I arrived as vicar of Hodge Hill four and a half years ago, again and again congregation members asked me, ‘why on earth do you want to come here? We haven't even got a building!’...
Rapid Response
Joshua T. Searle - A Rapid Response to 'Community Building as Spiritual Practice'
Faith in the Public Square
Abstract Lord Glasman begins by organizing his thoughts around three key TMN concepts. Discerning our common good takes relationship and time. It has to be located in and with in our local communities. Forming happens inside a shared imaginative space that has been shaped...
Read moreTogether at God’s Table: How Practicing Hospitality Shapes Our Imagination
In the missional conversation, there has been a lot of talk about the need for a new imagination in the church but less attention to how imagination is actually formed and how we might get there. This paper will examine the bodily formation of imagination and will suggest that Jesus was on to something vital when he sent his disciples two by two to be hosted by Samaritans...
Rapid Response
Leaving Eden
It was early September 1997, and as Britain was mourning the loss of its favourite Princess, I was moving into a far-from-palatial council house on a rather unsavoury street in south Manchester. At 24 years old I was actually one...
Read morePriests in the Borderlands
She came into the room carefully moving her pram, her very movements betraying her unfamiliarity with this new phase of life and its accoutrements. Her baby was asleep, tiny amidst the blankets, surely the youngest child here, and she the...
Read morePractices of a Missional People
Alan begins his keynote by affirming God’s creative engagement in our world of destructive social patterns, brokenness and oppression...
Rapid Response
Kyle Small – Rapid Response to Practices of a Missional People by Alan J Roxburgh
The Community of the Cross
The Missional Network places a high value on discerning God in our neighbourhood contexts. But how do we rediscover our place within that context and why has that rediscovery become necessary? Martin traces the story of a lost connection. He suggests resources to protect the health of a renewed engagement that reside deep within our identity as the people of God...
Rapid Response
Jason Clark - A Rapid Response to “Community of the Cross”, a keynote article by Martin Robinson
Practices of Christian Life – Forming and Performing a Culture
Introduction The Missional Network’s convictions are formed out of an ongoing engagement with a question posited by Lesslie Newbigin over thirty years ago: What is the nature of a missionary encounter with the late modern culture that shapes the West?[1]...
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