Leadership
-
When Christian Fasting Turns into Child Abuse
Introduction In late April and until end of May 2023, national and international media reported at least two hundred and twenty-seven bodies of children and adults discovered in shallow graves in a forest near Shakahola village of Magarini Constituency, Kenya.[1] The victims died from the religious directions given by Pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a taxi driver-turned-founder of the Good News International Church, that they must fast to death in order to meet Jesus. Those rescued were beyond recognition because of their emaciated conditions. Fundamental questions remain regarding the classification of religious movements. The issue now arises whether Makenzie’s organisation is a Neo-Pentecostal church or cult group, as it has now…
-
Curating Spaces of Hope: Embodying Leadership in Uncertain Times
The Queen is dead, long live the King! A post-Elizabethan era begins, and with it an existential shift unlike anything experienced, certainly since World War Two, maybe in our history. When the pandemic hit, Her Majesty said that ‘we will meet again’ and so it was, but in so doing we note the depths of uncertainty surrounding us. Something has changed; deep, intangible, fundamental. Life is more fragile than it was. The cost of living crisis bites, catalysed by Brexit. The Climate Crisis continues, exemplified by catastrophic floods in Pakistan and temperatures in the UK over 40 degrees for the first time. The war in Ukraine rages, displacing millions and…
-
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…
