Reading fiction for pleasure and profit
A professor and writer shares his summer reading list
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Good Idea!
How Disciples are Made Today
“Discipleship” is rapidly becoming one of those irritating buzz-words, like missional, inclusive, and green, guaranteed to get people asking with a certain edge in their voice, “But what exactly do you mean by that?”
In the case of discipleship, at least we can blame Jesus. His Great Commission is often cited as justification for our interest in the topic. And as you might expect, Jesus sheds some light on what we mean by the word. After all
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Online and On Message: one way to write a church website with impact
This summer, my wife and I spent some time in the UK. One day, we checked online for churches to visit that Sunday, and found one that seemed very lively. I clicked on the “staff” page. There I found an impressive number of staff, both full and part-time, but I confess I was baffled by
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Liturgical and Missional: Do I Have to Choose?
I don\’t know if you have ever had the experience of knowing what you should have said — only when the opportunity to say it has long past. It seems to happen to me frequently — and perhaps more often as I get older. On this occasion it was during lunch. My friend and I
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Will They Come Back Next Week? – The Challenge of Preaching at Christmas
Apparently, it’s just one of those long-standing Christmas traditions. More people will come to services this Christmas than at any other time of year. And the majority of those people will not come back for another 12 months. Is this inevitable? Do we simply shrug and accept it as a sad reality? Or is there
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C.S.Lewis\’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader – Coming to a Cinema near You on December 10
I have an actor friend, Joe Abbey-Colborne, who worked with me in campus evangelism nearly twenty years ago. When I first suggested a collaboration to him, he was nervous. He had had too many experiences of doing dramatic sketches, then having a preacher stand up and say, “Now, I hope you understand that this character
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What’s Happening to our Young People? – Highlights from John Bowen\’s Book
Some highlights from John Bowen’s book, Growing up Christian: Why Young People Stay in Church, Leave Church and (Sometimes) Come Back to Church You have seen them and so have I: bright, enthusiastic young people leading worship, heading out on short term mission trips, collecting food for the food bank. And we think, “Ah,
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Fresh Expressions training begins to take root in Canada
What exactly is Fresh Expressions? More than anything, it seems to be a spontaneous initiative of the Holy Spirit—if that doesn’t sound too presumptuous. One thing it is not, however, is a program. There is no Fresh Expressions manual with a one-two-three handy-dandy guide to setting up a wonderful fresh expression of church. In some ways,
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Fresh Expressions of Church among the Maasai?
Vincent Donovan was a Catholic missionary to the Maasai in Tanzania in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His book Christianity Rediscovered (Orbis 1978) has been a best-seller ever since, and I am not the only teacher who has used it in classes on mission and evangelism to help students think through issues of Gospel and culture.
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Is Fresh Expressions just the latest \”Flavour of the Month\”?
Interest in Fresh Expressions seems to be everywhere. Bishops are talking about it. Students are talking about it. Every church doing something new-even a coffee hour after the main service-seems to be boasting that it is doing a \”fresh expression.\” And, of course, Canada now has its very own Team Leader for Fresh Expressions Canada-Nick
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