Evangelicals and the Bible
Rosemary and I set off for Auckland tonight, where I will be teaching a graduate course in Evangelical Theology at Laidlaw College. It will be good to be back on our old home territory. I have often said to people that we feel enormously privileged to consider 3 countries as home, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, and whenever we have not been able to get to one for a while, it feels as though something is wrong. It has been a couple of years since we were last in New Zealand, so a visit is overdue. While we will do our best to catch up with friends whilst there, the chief purpose of...
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 MoreSo what is an evangelical, and should we care?
This is a lightly edited version of an article I published in Perth’s The Advocate, in 2012. It in turn was a more radically summarized version of a much longer article on the topic which I published in Churchman in Autumn 2008. With around 2 billion people claiming allegiance to Christianity, it is not surprising to discover that it comes in a wide range of flavours. Those in the know point to the Great Schism of 1054 when the church divided into the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic Church. The latter divided again after the Protestant Reformation of 1517, which in time birthed...
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