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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

So my Assistant Pastor bought this for me last week with the quip: “Saw this and immediately thought of you.” He wasn’t laughing so much as I pushed him out of the nearest window when he wasn’t looking. So, the book. First off, great title or what! I immediately liked the look of it just from […]

Long-time followers of this blog will be only too aware of my opinion(s) on the reason we have such a shortage of healthy gospel churches and trained, indigenous leadership in the poorer areas of the UK. Pretty much all of the internships, training pathways, and leadership development initiatives are aimed at, and packaged for, the […]

By and large, Christians like to speak. They have got something of eternal significance to say, after all. Yet, how many of us are poor listeners? So poor, in fact, that far too many Christians don’t have any non-Christian friends. They think they do. But they don’t. If you have been a believer for any […]

This book has contributions from a number of authors, including such luminaries such as: Michael Horton, Brian Vos, & Kim Riddlebarger, to name a few. The book is split into four parts: 1. The foundation of planting churches 2. The methods of planting churches 3. The work of planting churches 4. The context of planting […]

This week we have been looking at the problem of the lack of churches and indigenous leadership training in council estates and housing schemes across the UK. This is the final part of a short series looking at some practical ways we can seek to redress some of the current issues involved with church revitalisation […]

This week we are looking at the problem of the lack of churches and indigenous leadership training in council estates and housing schemes across the UK. This is the penultimate part of a short series looking at some practical ways we can seek to redress some of the current issues involved with church revitalisation and […]