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The ‘E’ word. In our needed journey away from sales pitch evangelism, maybe many of us have lost confidence in evangelism. Just the word gives us a post-fundamentalist shiver, and post traumatic flashbacks.
So whilst evangelism has been a big subject of the modern church, it has fallen into neglect during our detoxing. How can we recover confidence in the gospel, and engage in evangelism in positive ways, and move beyond our fear of what we know didn’t work and we didn’t enjoy doing?
Well a good place to start might be to read this book. It is an expansion and follow on from the Church of England’s Mission Shaped Church.
I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it has moved to my must read in full shelf of new books. Have any of you read it, or any of you come across other books on evangelism that have been helpful?
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Thanks to Easy Jet, that I live in London, and am so close to the rest of Europe, I am flying to Bilbao in spain with a friend, mid morning today, and spending the day at the Guggenheim, then coming home same day in the evening. I’ll put some photos up on Flickr when I get back. From what I have heard and seen online, there are not only superb permanent and temporary exhibitions, but the building itself to see, which looks amazing.
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Over the years there has been deep seated suspicion of priests and church pastors/ministers, and much of it warranted I’m sure. Anti Clericalism is not new, and it is alive and well today. Many from previous church formations are ideologically opposed to paid pastors/clerics and you can find plenty today from emerging church streams.
I want to suggest that continued anti-clericalism, will not produce better leadership for our churches, old and emerging. Within the framework and values of Deep Ecclessiology and Generous Orthodoxy, a view that the Emerging Church is a context all churches are facing together, something more constructive than the axiomatic of geting rid of paid staff, is needed.
I’m not keen on the word cleric, but I will use it in it’s broadest sense, to represent church community leaders, paid and unpaid, and sketch out what a ‘Deep Clericalism’ might include for our emerging context.
Attitudes:
1. Functional: Leadership should be functional and contextual in formation rather than simplistically ideological. Some contexts warrant paid staff, some bi-vocational, some mono vocational, and those will change as communities grow and change over time. What does the current missional context we are in require? Continue reading »
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I’m trying out Evoca for recordings podcasts. This is the first in a trial of a weekly summaries of key posts. I’ll be adding a podcast feed to my sidebar as soon as I get it set up.
In other words you can click the evoca player image in this post and hear an audio summary of the previous weeks postings on my blog, and in the next few days, you’ll be able to subscribe to them via iTunes as a podcast.
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Fono are trying to create the largest wifi community in the world. When you sign up you get a ‘Social Router’ (wireless router) to set up a wifi network for €5, and then you share your wifi with other community users and you get access to other users hotspots. So far they have grown from 2,000 users early this year to 60,000 and hope to be at 1 million by end of next year.A great map interface lets you zoom into any country in the world to see other users hotspots. I’ve found a couple of people near me. I wanted a wireless router, but didn’t want to pay £50 for one, so I’m going to give this a whirl.
The BBC have an article on them today, here (thanks to Dave for heads up)
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The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: By Shane Hipps
UK – £9.28
US – $12.34I just got this book, and I think it’s the best book I have read to date on providing an overview of and understanding of media and culture in the context of church and mission.
A couple of reasons for why it’s worth and read and buy:
1. Understanding Marshall McLuhan: This book draws heavily from one the most prominent experts on media and culture, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan is often quoted for his many dictums in particular ‘The Medium is the Message’. If you want to understand McLuhan (he is hard to read), then this book is a good primer on him, and you can avoid using his dictum without understanding what he really meant.
2. Navigation: This book gets down and dirty rather being theoretical and academic on the popular media that we use and face as we try to do mission and church in a post-modern world. If you are shy of modern media this book will be a big help in finding ways to engage. Also if you are the kind of person to submerge yourself uncritically into new media, this book will be a helpful to avoid become faddish and superficial.
Question for you:
What books and resources have you found helpful for understanding media and culture?
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I saw this on the front a store that is opening soon at Blue Water shopping centre. It reminded me of how demanding church shoppers can be moving from to another, as we consume and try to find the ‘right’ church, with our list of impossible demands of what church should do and be. And then maybe we move on from church, become post-church, and keep consuming, forming church around our impossible notions.
After seeing this I came across a post by Purple Pastor linking to an article by Real Live Preacher, titled “How to find a church?”. It’s a great article about how you’ll never find the church you are looking for and what you can do in the meantime.
I remember George Barna several years ago surveying non christians, unchurched people, asking them what would church have to do and be for you to ever consider being involved with one. They gave him a long list of things. He then followed it up by going back to people saying, ‘good news!’ their are some churches that have lots of those things you wanted, are you interested. And guess what they almost all said no thanks. Continue reading »
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You might notice the Time Capsule, on the bottom right hand side of my blog/site. It pulls through posts from one year ago, to help new people to the site pick up on previous posts. It’s also useful for me in reviewing what I wrote in the prehistoric past of my blog :-)You can get the Time Capsule plug in and install instructions here
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John O’Keef from Gink World invited me to this networking initiative. I connected to it and found Len Sweet and Spencer Burke.Some of you will love this, as a way to social network. It takes some effort to repsond to people, but then like any social network it’s what you make of it.
Leave a comment with your e-mail and I’ll send you a invite.
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When I asked, ‘Is Global Warming Really Happening’ you said:
Yes – 62%
Unsure – 21%
No – 17%
