Wikiklesia: Volume Two will re-examine and re-imagine the roles of women of faith. The purpose of "Taking Flight" is four fold:

Looks like some wonderful writing and work here, and you can read the detailed abstract here, and order the book from via here.

The Evangelical Alliance UK, have contacted UK churches encouraging them to make the most of this possible initiative.  I've just asked to meet my local MP to explore what this might mean for our church and its community projects.

How do churches navigate this initiative and think through some of the issues of what working in partnership with local government entails? Churches are the largest national group of volunteers in the UK, able to bring to every community, the most important important resources for community...people.

But how do churches avoid naively being swallowed up and hijacked by the dominant UK secular anti christian political agenda, and at the same time not miss out on what could be the most amazing time and space for engagement with community?

A great place to start is with the book by Luke Bretherton, 'Christianity and Contemporary Politics'.  I wish this book have been around when our church plant started it's community projects and partnerships.  But I think this work is almost prophetic for helping churches navigate this new possibility.

Churches need to do the hard work of reflecting carefully how they understand their role and place in society as they approach this project.  Luke maps out how churches are usually 1) Co-opted:  one self interest group in civic society, working with others 2) Competitive:  Using the language of 'rights' and 'freedoms' to express themselves publicly and 3) Commodified:  a private lifestyle choice, in the market place of clubs and societies.

Of course Luke argues that all these are unhelpful and that there is better way to understand church in relationship with society.  Luke shows how if Churches don't think through this role and relationship that when they get involved in local politics and government partnerships, several problems ensue.

1)  Co-ercive:  Churches are forced to stop religious practices and identity to enter into partnerships, losing their focus on people as whole and spiritual being, and losing integrity in the process

2) Mimetic:  Becoming like the state and other professional bodies, seeking to be 'effective'

3) Normative:  The people in churches who take the lead in these partnership become professionalised, and distant from the church communities that enable their partnership in the first place (this was the most painful example with a project in our own church, that broke away from the church once established)

In summary partnerships by the state with churches can cause social conflict rather than achieve a common good, with the aims and values of churches being undermined by them.

ViralHope available at Amazon and the Ecclesia Press.

Aaron Nee of the Brothers NEE made this related video. 

and form practices around belief.  It was...well life changing.

From the review of the book:

"Serious and thoughtful Christians today find themselves in a quandary about knowledge, on the one hand, and religious belief and practice, on the other. It is a socially imposed quandary. In the context of modern life and thought, they are urged to treat their central beliefs as something other than knowledge - something, in fact, far short of knowledge. Those beliefs are to be relegated to the categories of sincere opinion, emotion, blind commitment or behaviour traditional for their social group. And yet they cannot escape the awareness that those beliefs do most certainly come into conflict with what is regarded as knowledge in educational and professional circles of public life. This conflict has profound effects upon how they hold and practise religious beliefs and how they present them to others. Those effects are most clearly seen, on the public stage, in the repositioning of Christian teachers and leaders during the last century. They have been left to preside over the rituals of one or another cultural sub-group that, from the viewpoint of received knowledge, is nothing more than a sociological phenomenon - an 'opiate' of certain people - having nothing to do with knowledge of a reality with which all human beings must come to terms."

 

At the end of the session, Anna asked if I could email her my top 10 book suggestions including the ones I had already mentioned during the conversation.  Now I've sat in my office early this morning pondering how on earth to come up with a list of 10 books and instead landed on 22.

 

So here are the 22 most influential books in my life, some that are popular level, some slightly academic, some academic, some Christian, some not.  As I looked at my book shelves I asked myself, which books had shaped and inspired my thinking and practice of church, as it relates to issues of church and culture.

 

So here they are.  What would your top 10 be?

(download)

 

Firstly, Seth Godin's, 'The Dip'.  Less than 100 pages, and I read it on a morning off, in one sitting over two cups of coffee.  One simple idea, that we quit when we should't and don't quit when we should and how to know the difference.

 

A book so simple, that is seemed bizarre no-one else had written it, or for me to have realised the obvious contained within it.  But then all great and simple books seem that way.

 

It left me thinking about some of the dips I am in currently and want to persist through:

 

1.  Exercise and Weight: After 3 years, losing 50lbs in weight, and training regularly I'm much healthier, but stuck in a 'set point' that I can't seem to get through.  I'm in a dip through which I must continue.

 

2.  PhD: Three years into a 6 year track, overwhelmed with workload, a child with special needs, teenagers who I want to be around more for, and I am in a huge dip.  Wondering if this will ever end.  But Mr Godin helped me see that this is a normal dip, and reasons for keeping on, keeping on.  

 

3.  Church:  Church planting has so many lows and highs, and plenty of dips.  The tidal wave of consumer life that demands attention for everything like a black hole, seems to make the idea of building a community who do life together almost impossible.  I'm in a dip (more than the church), and realising that prayer, and faith, and persistence are what's needed.

 

Thank you Mr Godin.

 

Contrast that with another book I have just read, 'A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783-1846', by Boyd Hilton.  760 pages, a life's work that is so dense and profoundly perspicacious that is sits mockingly next to The Dip.  Impossible to write, not a times best seller, and probably read by a handful of people.  Yet a book that helped me see my life in the context of the history of my own country and my faith.

 

 

 

The dust jacket commendations read like a 'whose who' from the Christian world, and there is little I can add to those luminary accolades.

Rather than a quick soundbite to recommend the book, I thought I would read it and provide a more detailed response.  

Len Sweet was the inspiration and lead teacher for my Doctor of Ministry Course whilst Frank Viola I don't know.  I have always been less than taken with Frank's previous writing seeing it as being historically and methodologically fatally flawed (for example see this critique).  And I write that not to be personal just honest about some of my interactions with these authors, before I crack the book open.