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Missional Reflections on the Emerging Church

Missional Reflections on the Emerging Church. Dr Stephen Skuce Academic Dean, Cliff College. 2005 English Church Survey. Numerical growth mostly involves: Pentecostal churches RC/Orthodox – from eastern Europe Mono-cultural churches Where youth work is stressed. Sep 2010

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Missional Reflections on the Emerging Church

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  1. Missional Reflections on the Emerging Church Dr Stephen Skuce Academic Dean, Cliff College

  2. 2005 English Church Survey Numerical growth mostly involves: • Pentecostal churches • RC/Orthodox – from eastern Europe • Mono-cultural churches • Where youth work is stressed

  3. Sep 2010 • CoE and RC attendance stable • Baptist numbers up

  4. For 2009 Methodist stats follow: http://www.methodist.org.uk/index.cfm?fuseaction=opentoyou.content&cmid=3036 Published 6 Sep 2010

  5. Fresh Expressions Methodist Church Statistics for Mission 2009 The Methodist Fresh Expressions team have already worked to summarize the 2009 returns. They suggest that some local reports have overstated the number of Fresh Expressions. The data have been adjusted according to the assumption that the number of people attending was entered in place of the number of “Expressions”. Every District except the Channel Islands was represented, with 893 Fresh Expressions altogether. They have identified four major types as Café Church, Messy Church, Third Place and Cell Group.

  6. cont Messy Church and Café Church existed in the majority of Districts, whereas Cell Churches were missing from some populous Districts such as London and the South East, and there were no 3rd Place expressions in several Districts in northern England. When comparisons over time are made as part of the triennial report, the Fresh Expressions data will be valuable in determining what initiatives have made and can make the greatest contribution to mission.

  7. Philip Jenkins Christianity in Britain is becoming increasingly: • Southern • Pentecostal • Conservative

  8. WCC: CWME Athens 2005 Document • http://www.oikoumene.org/uploads/media/PLEN_14_doc_4_FINAL_A_letter_from_Athens.doc Edinburgh 2010: http://www.edinburgh2010.org/ Missional Movements beyond west: • Conservative • Pentecostal • Confrontational • Traditional

  9. Homogeneous Unit Principle ‘People like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or lass barriers’ Don McGavran Donald McGavran's definition of a HU is "a section of society in which all members have some characteristic in common." Used in this way, the term is broad and elastic. To be more precise, the common bond may be geographical, ethnic, linguistic, social, educational, vocational, or economic, or a combination of several of these and other factors. Whether or not members of the group can readily articulate it, the common characteristic makes them feel at home with each other and aware of their identity as "we" in distinction to "they.“ LOP I

  10. Does Emerging Church reach the ‘unchurched’ or ‘ dechurched’? If it is a survivors’ group what does that mean missionally?

  11. What about the poor? • emerging church or Pentecostalism? Lessons from Base Christian Communities? • ‘The Christian base community is a form of Church lived in a communitarian manner among the poor. It is an experience of community, a group of 15 or 20 people who struggle to overcome their individualism and mutual distrust in order to know, love and trust each other as brothers and sisters. The Christian base community is also a faith community. Its identity is not primarily social or political, but Christian, and it tries to experience all that it means to be Church.’

  12. Ecclesiology Henry Venn (1796-1873) CMS • Self propagating • Self sustaining • Self-governing William Temple (1881-1944) Archbishop • ‘The Church is the only group that exists for the benefit of its non-members’

  13. Personnel • Finance • Too tied to a specific culture • Theological/social liberalism • Post-evangelical (post-protestant) • Decline of emphasis on charismatic gifts • Denial of objective truth • Denial of metanarrative • Family/children • Fresh Expressions

  14. Critical Works • DA Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005) • Croft et al (eds) Evaluating Fresh Expressions (Norwich: Canterbury, 2008) • S Croft (ed) Mission Shaped Questions (London: CHP, 2008) • JM Hull, Mission-Shaped Church: A Theological Response (London: SCM, 2006) • DeYoung & Kluck Why We’re Not Emergent (Chicago, IL: Moody, 2008) • David Meredith (UK Reformed perspective) http://www.banneroftruth.org/pages/articles/article_detail.php?739 • http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/tallskinnykiwi/2005/05/horton_on_emerg.html • http://www.synagogue3000.org/ (Jewish ‘emerging’ movement)

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