You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
A study of the relations between the Church and industrial society. The author was a senior chaplain of the Sheffield Industrial Mission, and is now Director of Avec, a consultancy agency for church and community work. He has also written Light in the City.
None
The ‘Anarchy in the UK Tour’ should have just been a collection of twenty gigs like any other, spanning venues across the UK… It was December 1976, and a coach drove off down a London street like any other. On board were the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Heartbreakers, while The Damned, who were also on the bill, followed behind. However, two days earlier on the Today Show, tour, the Sex Pistols’ had lit a fire in the popular consciousness. What should have been an inconsequential three-minute interview descended into farce when the show’s host goaded Sex Pistols’ guitarist Steve Jones into saying ‘something outrageous’. Local councils began to ban the tour and agreed “Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death”. Author Mick O Shea dissects the whirlwind that followed these punk-rock heavyweights and the sheer force of their rebellion against popular culture. He has interviewed band members, managers, roadies and audiences to tell the true story of how anarchy once gripped the nation.
None
In the Western world, we have a plethora of groups and meetings. From multinational businesses to enclosed religious orders, from professional bodies and statutory services to community groups, from teams of colleagues to training courses, from local committees to self-help therapy, group meetings are endemic in our society.
None
UK church attendance hemorrhaging and one course is hailed as the most effective tool for "turning back the tide." From small beginnings in the early 1970s, Alpha has grown to become a global success. Churches from across the denominational spectrum have enthusiastically seized upon the course, seeing it as the remedy for declining church attendance. Inside Alpha explores such claims through richly grounded qualitative research on six Alpha courses. It assesses Alpha's primary aim of converting non-churchgoers and its longer-term goal of spiritual maturity (Colossians 1:28-29). It questions whether the Alpha program is as successful as it claims at uniting evangelism and discipleship, mission and spiritual formation. This is an invaluable study for those--in the academy and the church--who have an interest in ecclesiology and mission. How exactly is one to understand conversion? What is it to "be Christian"? How does ambiguity and doubt fit within one's journey of faith? The importance of this work is in discovering--through an engagement with Alpha--how people might appropriately be initiated into and discipled within the Christian faith in contemporary culture.
As the Church of Scotland approaches its sixth year as a partner in Fresh Expressions, Seeing Afresh tells the story of eight very different church communities that have emerged and asks what can be learned from them and how their examples can inspire other churches to engage more imaginatively in mission. The stories featured include fresh expressions of church working with: •marginalised youth in the heart of a city •millennials and homeless in a busy commercial centre •a scattered rural community •all-ages on an island community •those living in sheltered accommodation •active, retired and socially minded, but sceptical about faith •online communities The opportunities and the challenges of creating and sustaining different kinds of church are treated with realism and many essential insights on motivation, vision, understanding the context, first steps, pioneer leadership, nurturing disciples and more are discovered and shared.
Priestly ministry in the Church of England needs a radical rethink... George Herbert died in 1633. His legacy continues. His poems are read and sung, and his parish ministry remains the model for the Church of England's understanding of how and where and why its priests should minister. But there is a problem. The memory of Herbert celebrated by the Church is an inaccurate one, and, in its inaccuracy, is unfair on Herbert himself and his successors in the ordained ministry. This is a book of the long view. It sets out to assess realistically the context of Herbert's life and to explore the difficulties of parish life today. By examining the status and role of parish clergy since Herbert's ti...
Reforms and processes of change have become an increasingly pervasive characteristic of European Protestant churches in the last fifteen to twenty years. Driven by perceptions of crises, such as declining membership rates, dwindling finances, decreasing participation in church rituals, and less support of traditional church doctrine, but also changes of governance of religion more generally, many churches feel compelled to explore new forms of operations, activities, and organizational structures. What is the inner dynamic and nature of these processes? This book explores this question by applying perspectives from organizational studies and bringing them into dialogue with ecclesiological c...