Ministry
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“Surprise Theme!”: Canadian Christian Congregational Research
As I analyzed the interview transcripts, I soon realized that an unexpected theme was emerging. Most of the data collected fit nicely into the nodes that I had pre-determined by the semi-structured interview questions and the overall framework of the research project. However, something I wasn’t asking about repeatedly came up throughout the interviews. A surprise theme! The aim of the Divine Pulse Research Project is to “take the pulse” of the Canadian church. While other researchers look at church decline and new congregations, my calling is to explore “greatness” in Canadian Christian congregations. This is a qualitative research study exploring church growth through the lens of Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”…
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The potential impact of closure of Churches in the metaverse
In March 2023 Microsoft ‘sunset’ its metaverse AltspaceVR platform to move its resources to support developing other immersive experiences. This may appear irrelevant to readers, unless you are involved in church mission in the metaverse.[1] Welcome to the metaverse! The term ‘metaverse’ first appears in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash describing a virtual environment where lifelike avatars engage with each other.[2] Thirty years later, it is a vision Silicon Valley are heavily investing in and a few churches (predominantly American) have grasped the vision of the metaverse mission field. However, churches in the metaverse are different, in August 2021 Facebook changed its name to Meta to focus…
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Crisis and Calling: Discipleship after Desolation
I learned what feels like to be called growing up in the Texas hill country. We lived in a small town that was just country enough where kids could roam, but just close enough to the city where we couldn’t get into any real trouble. We would wander, climb trees, play in a creek, run over to a friend’s house down the hill, but we knew we always had to listen for mom’s call. She would walk outside, put two fingers in her mouth, and perform that miracle it seems only mothers can do: whistle. She would call us home. I learned early on this is what it means to…
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Minifigures and Ministers: Formation in the Church of England
There was a time when a Lego figure was as simple as the plastic person you put in the house you’d built or sat in the car you’d made out of oblong and sloping bricks. There was a time when the great Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s description of a minister in the Church of England as a distinctively full time Christian, ‘the beacon of the church’s pastoral, prophetic and priestly concern’[1] was a fully adequate description. Today however, like Lego minifigures, ministers have evolved to be more diverse than Ramsey’s image. If Ramsey were to comment on ministers today, he would see much that he would recognise; some ministers are that…
