Monthly Archives: January 2015
Responding to the New West
Lesslie Newbigin’s sharp critique of western culture, offered in a relatively brief but incisively penetrating publication, The Other Side of 1984, came as a shock to many who read it for the first time in the middle of the 1980’s....
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Lesslie Newbigin: Looking Forward in Retrospect
Sixteen years after the death of missionary bishop Lesslie Newbigin, Paul Weston offers a retrospective of his contribution to missionary theology and assesses his continuing relevance for the church’s mission to Western culture. He backs the view that Newbigin’s work...
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Core capacities for the minister as missional leader in the formation of a missional congregational culture. Part 1: Role of a minister.
This article describes the journey of a congregational minister in his or her search for the essence of missional leadership. The journey led to a research project for a PhD at the University of Pretoria under supervision of Prof Nelus...
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Inhabit United Kingdom: Practice, Presence, Place
Four of the stories included here were first shared at the Inhabit UK [1] conference in Birmingham UK, in October 2014. This conference has become an annual event in Seattle, the result of a partnership between the Parish Collective and the Seattle School...
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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'
A Rapid Response to ‘Community Building as Spiritual Practice’
One of the basic premises of the missioDei paradigm is that God’s activity in the world cannot be confined to the explicit mission activities of the church. The kingdom vision inspires us with the hope that God is at work...
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An African Missionary on Tyneside. An interview with Pastor Joseph Omoragbon by Mary Publicover.
I met Joseph over a meal at a Springdale College Summer School. I was immediately gripped by his stories from Tyneside- how could such an ‘outsider’ find connection in that challenging environment. Martin Robinson interviewed Pastor Joseph during Inhabit UK, and...
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Rebuilding the Ruins on Weoley Castle Estate
Nearly 13 years ago our family moved onto Weoley Castle, a large council estate in South Birmingham. It’s a struggling estate- falling into the lowest 10% for deprivation. Our milkman refused to deliver there. We had lived nearby for a...
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Penycae Neighbourhood Church of the Nazarene: Earning the Name
Croeso I eglwys Penycae gymdogaeth y Nasaread….Welcome to Penycae Church of the Nazarene – everything has to be bi-lingual in Wales. We are in Penycae, a North Wales village just over the border from Chester in England. Our nearest town...
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Book Review: The Vanishing Neighbor – The Transformation of American Community Culture by Marc J. Dunkelman
Wherever I speak, or people ask about my writing, [2] about the call of churches to join with the God who is out ahead of us in our neighborhoods and communities the same basic question is inevitably asked: Why bother with neighborhoods these...
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