So what is church? Part 1 Church, a simple but powerful idea…
We kicked off this short series on the church by looking at the relatively new but rapidly growing phenomena of churchless faith. I wanted to start with that post because the word church increasingly has a lot of emotional baggage attached to it. For many it smacks of control, abuse of power, manipulation, politics and thought control – a rather alarming set of associations. For others it conjures up images of boring Sundays, or of irrelevance or perhaps of sectarian squabbling. Much more positively, for large numbers the images are of spiritual growth, close community, God encounters,...
Read MoreChurchless Faith
I am about to embark on a short series on the church – and what it might mean to be church in the third millennium. This opening post looks at the increasing phenomena of what is being called ‘churchless faith’. I briefly touched on the topic in a post which proved popular, Churched, Unchurched and Dechurched, and I’d like to explore it a little more today, as very close to the surface it raises a multitude of questions of what it means to be church (and part of the capital C universal Church). So what is churchless faith? It is usually understood to mean that someone...
Read MoreAnd every step an arrival… On the gift of the present moment
I am presently reading Eugene Peterson’s wonderful biography The Pastor which has on its front cover Rilke’s memorable line ‘every step an arrival’. It reflects Peterson’s own conviction that when all is said and done, the work of a pastor is not primarily to get things done or to be surrounded by a flurry of activity, but to pay attention and call attention “to ‘what is going on right now’ between men and women, with each other and with God.” What is going on right now. Spotting God in the present moment. It is not the same as...
Read MoreSome great posts…
From time to time I like to refer our readers to some great posts on other sites… though always hoping that they will still keep looking at this site. So what are some recent posts that I have enjoyed? Scot McKnight’s Jesus Creed blog recently ranked this post on being on the wrong side of history as their post of the year. Now there are some great posts on that site, and I wouldn’t necessarily have rated this as number 1, but it is an intriguing read and argues back strongly against the emotional manipulation present in ‘you will be on the wrong side of...
Read MoreBlog Reflections: Most and least successful posts and all that…
With the new year moving along steadily, I thought it as well to write up some reflections on the life of this blog in 2015. For most of the year it lay dormant – an idea brewing and developing. Starting it was on my list of goals for 2015, and with the help of Ben O’Reilly, a domain name and basic site had been built early in the year. True, the domain name was not my initial choice – but the trouble with a name as common as Brian Harris is that more obvious choices like brianharris.com and brianharrisblog.com were already taken. So brianharrisauthor.com it is – a...
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