Is our culture redeemable and should the church be engaged in this so-called cultural redemption?
Is our culture redeemable and should the church be engaged in this so-called cultural redemption?
Mez McConnell talks with Andy Constable about the devastating unemployment rates in the schemes, outlining what we at 20schemes hope to do about it.
About six months ago, a couple of American church planters visited our Sunday service at Niddrie. They claimed to have ‘provable methods’ to grow any church in any context. They’d heard about Niddrie through contacts in their network and wanted to come along and experience it for themselves. Warning them that our Sunday service did […]
In my 14 years of pastoral ministry, I have stumbled through cases of bestiality, incest, rape, complicated ‘family’ structures, multiple addictions, chronic mental illnesses, murder, and suicide. It has been a struggle trying to work through the mess of sinful humanity in a way that is biblically faithful—both to the injured party, their loved ones, […]
Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church can Become a Missionary in Your Community, is written by Ed Stetzer & David Putman, and is aimed at the North American market. This requires some hard thinking in order to extract principles that could apply to the UK. Despite the weird sounding title, I really enjoyed the book. […]
I first got introduced to the scariest moustache in the world about two years ago through the work of CCEF. So, I thought I would take the time to review one of Paul Tripp’s most popular books, seeing as it is standard reading for those working within Niddrie and for 20schemes. I have to say […]
One of the fundamental errors of many church-planting movements is to assume that the greatest need in terms of poverty is found only within inner cities. Whilst it is true that there is often a greater concentration of deprived people in urban contexts, rural areas suffer disproportionately too. The Highlands of Scotland, often (rightly) thought […]
Part IV: War, Princeton, Death & Other Stuff All the drama of Edwards’ life was being played out amid the backdrop of worldwide upheaval. In 1754, the international scene was becoming very unstable. On the home front, Benjamin Franklin met with leaders from seven other colonies to discuss the French intentions in the frontiers. The […]
Part III: Sacked, Yet More Opposition, Indians & Other Stuff In the public arena, at least, the ‘Northampton Controversy’ of 1749 was concerned with Edward’s supposedly ‘new’ view on Communion and Baptism (he denied the charge that it was new). Edwards wanted to restrict communion to believing members only and restrict infant baptism to full […]
Part II: Snappy Book Titles, More Revival, Opposition & Other Stuff What I particularly like about this biography is that it never seeks to paint Edwards in a sinless light. His weaknesses are laid bare, not least his tendency for hyperbole in some of his writings, but also his penchant for ‘editing’ the opinions of […]
A sizeable 615 pages (the last 100 or so being footnotes and appendices), this is the sort of book that strikes fear into all but the most avid of readers. It looks unwieldy and intimidating, but I think that it is so good that it merits a long review over 4 parts. . . . […]
So, the critique of 20schemes gathers apace in some parts of the Scottish church. “Over reliant on American money”,“going to swamp our country with ghastly Americans”, “an unnecessary organisation given that every scheme has a Parish church”,“they suppress women”, “they're going to ride roughshod over existing church initiatives”. When we launched 20schemes last November, nobody […]