On a recent road trip from Sydney to Melbourne we pulled off the motorway to have a break on what is a very long drive. The place we stopped at was a small, quite undistinguished village with a number of houses, a community centre and a café. There was however one more significant building. This … Continue reading Has God Left the Building? An Hypothesis
This is an article that I originally posted last Easter and , although it has been amended a little, I thought it might be useful to re-post it in case others might want to use the idea this time around. ****** For centuries the traditional Hot Cross Bun was originally limited in its … Continue reading Hot Fish Buns – What Easter is Really About
As churches sleepily emerge from the Covid-induced shutdown it seems nearly all are happily climbing back onto the down escalator they had been on for decades pre Pandemic. This longstanding downward trajectory has most certainly generally been given a Covid-induced fresh impetus in terms of loss of service attendees and income. The opportunity provided by … Continue reading Vain Hope Or ‘The Irish Way’
‘It’s not the strongest of species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change’ Charles Darwin ****** This is the fifth in a series of posts on the topic of what I call the ‘Biggest Elephant’ in the ‘Mission Operations Room’, namely Church Leadership. In this series I have mentioned … Continue reading The Biggest Elephant 5 – Formulaic or Flexative
We are now one month into the new year. I wonder how we have gone with those New year resolutions, all those good intentions. I suspect that for most, they have already gone the way of the ones we made last year, i.e. crashed! As churches in Australia focus their energies on getting back onto … Continue reading New Kingdom Resolutions
‘As much we may be convinced that a particular new form of structure will remedy existing deficiencies, there can be no guarantee that it will still be appropriate for the further changes in society yet to come. And such changes, no doubt beyond the range of present thinking, will most certainly occur.’ ****** There is … Continue reading When the Answer is Not a Square
‘It’s more missionaries we need, without more missionaries we will lose’ (A paraphrase of Air Chief Marshall Dowding’s comment on Pilots during the Battle of Britain) ****** I was having a coffee recently with a very successful businessman friend, also a committed Christian who has invested a great deal of his financial resources in his … Continue reading The Biggest Elephant – 4 – The Fatal Assumption
“It’s more missionaries we need, without more missionaries we will lose” ****** In posts on this site over the last few years I have suggested a number of characteristics of the Australian church which are to various degrees causative factors in the Church’s chronic lack of missional fruit. They can be characterised as the … Continue reading The Biggest Elephant
Around the world governments have been faced with the challenge of protecting their citizens from becoming infected with the new Corona Virus known as Covid19. With few exceptions they have settled on variations of the same strategy which basically amounts to locking down the population as much as possible in their homes. There are exceptions, … Continue reading Virus Shedding – A (New Normal) Way of Life
When my wife and I take holidays that usually means we do some travelling. As we do so we usually take the opportunity to visit a local church or two wherever we might be staying. On a recent trip we ended up visiting a church (disguised in this post) where some friends are regular attenders. … Continue reading An Inconvenient Question!
unbounded church 