Saturday, February 11, 2006
emerging church in australia
There is a superb exploration of emerging church in Australia in the latest (Summer 2006) Zadok magazine.
Highlights for me where;
Stephen Said’s historical narrative around the emerging church in Australia;
Barb Daws, who discerns the links between emerging church values and new ways of education and learning;
Matthew Stone’s plea for a missiological understanding of New Age spiritual search to be entwined with expressions of emerging church;
Dan McCredden’s answering the question; “Can an existing denominational church be emerging?”
Anne Wilkinson-Hayes plea that ‘new missional churches’ seek a more authentic, gospel-centred approach to living our the faith in our society today. (For those interested, there’s an interview with Ann here (scroll down to bottom of page 2) as part of research for my out of bounds church? book) which also interleaves with the question of denominations and emerging church.)
Plus there’s a nice review of my book, both by Dan McCreeden and Darren Cronshaw, who has written an introductory reading guide to the emerging church phenomenon, covering 50 books, a number of internet links and blogs.
If Zadok is any guide, there is a rich breadth in the emerging church conversation in Australia. The edition would sit as a more popular companion to the International Journal For the Study of the Christian Church;
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this was my first go at editing, so i’m chuffed that you liked it!! 😉
Comment by bec — February 17, 2006 @ 5:40 pm
Rebecca, thanks for dropping by. One of the things I most liked was the breadth of articles. For example, you often hear the cry that emerging church conferences are dominated by male voices because women are not involved, yet this edition showed that their are Aussie women involved — with great gifts to contribute — in the emerging church. Great stuff.
Comment by steve — February 17, 2006 @ 6:03 pm
I’m even more chuffed now – I went to a lot of effort to chase up voices other than simply “the usual suspects” (ie those that get all the speaking gigs). I also put in a fair bit of effort (and was helped by various people) to find some women writers – there’s a lot of women out there doing emergent stuff, but they don’t tend to get the speaking or writing guernseys.
Anyway, I wanted a variety of voices to be represented not only because I think they’re doing interesting stuff, but because it’s partly what Zadok’s about – providing space for various (sometimes competing) voices. We don’t have any particular agenda, but are interested simply in provoking, stimulating and providing the resources for thought.
Comment by bec — February 17, 2006 @ 7:09 pm