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Re-imagining church: publications
I never thought I would write anything so it is another surprise to be writing this web page!
Regular writing
The quarterly Encounters on the Edge booklet series is our best known contribution. Now in its 11th year is has been widely commended. I love the words of a reader from the pews who contacted us:
"I find it a riveting read. I have to read some parts twice to get my head round the newness of the thinking! But I am just as convinced that unless the Church is radical it will be unable to make contact with the greater part of the population and become an anachronism."
Mrs Ceri Tector "I am just an ordinary Christian, a parishioner in an Anglican Church"
One offs
From 2006-2008 Stuart Murray-Williams and I worked on a concept we called the Five Tribes of UK Church Planters, with consultation across the UK. The idea was to be sympathetic to all the tribes; we are most interested in fruitful dialogue between them as the mission before us will need all our contributions. It is not the last word on the subject and boundaries between groups are often porous, with groups bridging them.
To download a table summarising our research, please click on this link - Five Tribes of UK Church Planters
Mission-shaped Church is not a second Bible, but it does mark the culmination of the gathering of stories and the start of a deliberate policy from the centre advocating the need for this change. I am glad that many of the ideas we formulated, because we saw those patterns working in practice, got turned into that report. It has then been the spring board from which a whole host of titles have sprung, written by our friends in this loose movement.
I have also written on fresh expressions maturing. Both in the 2006 No 1 International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, tackling the DNA of Church, and in Steven Croft (ed.) The future of the Parish System, (London, CHP; 2006)
I assessed our mission climate and characterized the variety of fresh expressions in Mark Mills Powell, Setting the Church of England Free (Alresford, John Hunt:2003)
Other articles have appeared over the years in the Church Press.
