Saturday, March 01, 2008

CONGREGATING FOR A CHANGE

In pursuing the "what kind of church?" question for a bit, I will split the honours with my workblog on Ekklesia - which I keep in play from time-to-time, but receives less attention than it should. Doing church differently links to the online version of James Hopewell's innovative Congregation: Stories and Structures (1987), and sets it in context. When I was at Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (1996-2005) I commissioned and foreworded a series of books on shifting patterns of ecclesial life: Changing Churches (Jeanne Hinton and Bishop Peter Price), Changing Communities (Jeanne again), Changing Mission (Stuart Murray of the Anabaptist Network UK and Urban Expression) and Changing Evangelisation (Philip Knights, writing from a Catholic perspective). The idea was to create a dialogue around fresh expressions of church - a bandwagon the Church of England has now jumped on, though without an explicit ecumenical commitment. The series was part of the Building Bridges of Hope process, which was looking at ways in which congregations could transition into new situations and possibilities, taking the best of their inheritance with them.

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