Over the last few days, I have been re-reading Lesslie Newbigin’s book, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship. The book has prompted a memory of Newbigin’s lectures decades ago, when I heard these huge themes opened up...

It all began with a food bank – the Halifax Food and Support Drop In. However, the aspiration was not only to give out food but also to build relationships that would draw people to Jesus. After a year of...

I visited Evesham in 2009 for the Northumbria Community Easter Workshop. Easter Workshop is an annual event, but normally centred on the Community’s mother house in Northumberland. But this year I, with around fifty other Community people, dined in church...

The pastors of the Norwegian Mission Covenant Church gather once a year for a four day retreat. We have a long history of meeting at Christian resorts, but for the last two years we have for various reasons met at...

Viv Presott is an officer in the Salvation Army. This is the story of her church plant at her home in the Forest of Dean. The Forest of Dean is an unusual place in many ways.  It is located on...

This chapter, the first in the book The New Parish, explains how we lost our capacity to be the “local church” – a body of Christians learning to share life faithfully together in, with and for a particular place...

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Rapid Response

Mike Pears - A Rapid response to ‘Dislocated’, Chapter 1 from The New Parish

Martin Robinson - A Rapid response to ‘Dislocated’, Chapter 1 from The New Parish

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...

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...

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Rapid Response

Carolyn Kelly - A Rapid Response to 'Together at God's Table: How Practicing Hospitality Shapes Our Imagination'

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...

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...

Terry Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God is a dense tour-de-force that launches one through the ways modernity, in its multiple forms, has sought to frame all of life without reference to God. More than a decade ago the...

The church tribe I belong to, the Baptist Union of Victoria in Australia, will be exploring in 2014 how we can be ‘Better Together’. Like many churches in the Western world, we desperately want to re-orientate ourselves around mission. We...

As a pastor I’ve served Auburn for a little over 4 years. It still feels like early days but this is the longest I have been in ministry in one place, and the longest time since leaving school I have...