Posts Tagged "ecclesiology"

Is there a place for denominations?

Posted by on Sep 6, 2016 in Blog | 2 comments

It has become common to declare that we live in a post-denominational era. Increasingly church attenders are indifferent to the label a particular congregation might carry… Presbyterian, Baptist, Vineyard, Church of Christ… whatever. Indeed, many churches declare to the public that they are simply the local community church, sometimes using a verb to describe their ministry (Impact Church, Encounter Church, Dreambuilders Church…). Often these churches have a denominational allegiance, but prefer to downplay this, mentioning it only in the small print, if at all. Knowing...

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What does a healthy church look like?

Posted by on May 3, 2016 in Blog | 6 comments

We’ve had a few posts on churchless faith and the journey towards becoming de-churched. Underneath has been the assumption that the church has in some way disappointed and failed to be what she should be. And in most cases if you ask those who have given up on the church ‘why?’ they would cite a litany of errors and flaws. Perhaps we should ask what it would take for people to give an approving nod, and to say, ‘well if church is like that, count me in’. Or to put it differently, what does a healthy church look like? I’ll list a dozen signs that I think indicate health, but would be...

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So what is church? Part 1 Church, a simple but powerful idea…

Posted by on Jan 19, 2016 in Blog | 1 comment

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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