Managing Monday: Some quotes from Augustine
Most people find Monday the most difficult day of the week. Weekend over, and with five work days looming, managing Monday can be a challenge. So I thought I would try to help by starting a regular ‘Managing Monday’ post. The format will be really simple – just 3 quotes from a notable person. Some weeks, all from the same person, other weeks, a mixture. Quotes will be brief (this is, after all, Monday) – but hopefully they will give a thoughtful start to the work week. For the academics amongst us – I have not tracked down each source carefully… and...
Read MoreI’m part of a church because…
We started this short series on the church by looking at the growing phenomena of churchless faith, where people who still hold to the Christian faith choose to continue in the faith whilst not being actively involved in any Christian church. In spite of the growth of churchless faith, overall church attendances are not faring too badly. The haemorrhaging of church membership in the so called Western world appears to have past the peak it reached in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, and while still worrying, might be levelling. So let’s balance the post on churchless faith by...
Read MoreOf tall poppies, mateship and pragmatism: Spirituality in the Australasian Context
Australians today celebrate Australia Day. To mark the day I thought I would reproduce a paper on Spirituality in the Australasian Context (I focus on Australia and New Zealand) which I initially presented at a workshop of the Baptist World Alliance, held in Mexico City in July 2006. It was later published in Stimulus – a New Zealand Journal (vol 16, issue 3, 2008). Though a decade has past, I think the insights are essentially valid, and are hopefully helpful. See what you think… 1) By way of an introduction In some ways it feels strange for me to write on Spirituality in the...
Read MoreChurch: A messy, risky but still powerful ideal (Part 2 of So what is church?)
Part 1 of this post set about answering the question, ‘So what is church?’ suggesting that church is a simple, but powerful idea. It did so in response to the earlier post on churchless faith – a growing phenomena that often sees people, in spite of their faith commitment, simply shrug and say, ‘Church – too difficult, too painful, too boring, too political, too time consuming, too compromised, too controlling, too irrelevant’ – or something comparable. They then quietly (or not so quietly) withdraw from active involvement from any local church. As...
Read MoreSo 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,...
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