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You may have seen on Steve McAlpine’s blog that he and I went on the radio last week.
We had a great time and very interesting conversations (read Steve’s blog for more comments).
Above is the file of the radio show (click and it will download a powerpoint file…) enjoy!
OR 
On Friday we had a meeting of (most) the people who are going to be in the new church plant which gets planted next Sunday.
During the evening Steve Timmis went through what house-hold church is about, our responsibilities to each other and the realities of doing church in this way. We also used the Belbin test to see what people’s ‘preferred’ way of working was. It was encouraging to see we had quite a range of gifts and personalities, and also it was good to be reminded that the gospel changes and shapes those negative attributes that come with different personality types!
The thing that struck me most, though, was what Steve said about the church as family.
We often talk about marriage being a picture of the true marriage between Christ and his church. Our marriages reflect that marriage and not the other way around.
However we don’t often talk about church as family in that way, or at least not in my experience. We call each other brother and sister, but tend to see the family of the church as a reflection of our earthly families. Read the rest of this entry »
I have heard the critique of ‘the emerging church’ that it is theologically shallow and pragmatically driven – that is the decision to do church in various forms is driven by the culture and not the Bible.
I have no doubt that this is a fair criticism of some in the emerging church. But I want to turn that around on some of those in the ‘conservative evangelical’ world that prides itself on being theologically rigorous. Read the rest of this entry »
In a couple of weeks time we’re going to be ‘going household’ – we’re going to be planting a household church.
This is of course very exciting and so I’ve been telling people about it. The question asked in response is ‘where is it going to be’. Before I don’t think I’d have had any problems with that question. It would have been quite natural to ask where the church plant is going to be. But for some reason as people have asked that over the past few days I’ve found myself feeling slightly uneasy about it. It no longer seems a natural question to ask. In fact it feels an almost odd question to ask.
Yesterday I think I hit upon why. I no longer think of church in terms of a specific place. When people talk about my church I don’t think in terms of a building. My church come from all over the city. We meet at various places around the city. My church is the people, and so to ask ‘where is my church’ is a difficult question to answer at any given time! I’m not trying to be deliberatly provocative, and so I normally answer the question in terms of the area we’ll be doing most things in, and this seems to satisfy.
So where is your church?
