Saturday, 12 August 2006
The coat of many colours
I am reading Mission Shaped Church. It is a report from the C of E about what others might call emerging church. It talks a lot about church planting and fresh expressions.
I am only 4 chapters in, but something positive that comes through is the authors idea of what it means to be a national church. They explicitly state the church has to seek to be church to everyone. It cannot accept the demographics that it has, it has to seek out the people that are not represented in the pews. Whatever your opinion of the merits of having an established (official) national church the same principle can be applied to any church that claims to be catholic.
At the same time the authors also accept that many different expression of church are going to be needed to achieve this. What will a large church made up of infinitely-varying components look like?
I am only 4 chapters in, but something positive that comes through is the authors idea of what it means to be a national church. They explicitly state the church has to seek to be church to everyone. It cannot accept the demographics that it has, it has to seek out the people that are not represented in the pews. Whatever your opinion of the merits of having an established (official) national church the same principle can be applied to any church that claims to be catholic.
At the same time the authors also accept that many different expression of church are going to be needed to achieve this. What will a large church made up of infinitely-varying components look like?
# posted by Gareth Bezett @ 12:14 AM 
