You can read it here, in advance of it appearing there. It’s based around the loss of the charismatic in the UK churches.

Christianity magazine in the UK, ran an article in March 2008, titled, ‘Hands Down’. It provided a comprehensive review and analysis of how charismatic, charismatic churches in the UK are now.
In true blog style, here is a summary of their findings with my paraphrase from interviewing people:

1. Less: Whilst black and Pentecostal churches overtly practice spiritual gifts, most charismatic movement Christians are moving away from the charismatic in its usual forms, especially in public meetings.

2. Bad Experiences: Many are doing so due to previous hype and bad experiences with the charismania of charismatics

3. Mundane Charisma: Yet many are deepening their experience of the charismatic, into quieter, less dramatic and expressive/emotional displays

4. Problems with Establishment: Large sections of the charismatic church moved from homes to established churches and denominations, and the focus on growth and structure, and seeker issues, enervate the charismatic experience.

5. Lack of training: Some think that church leaders are not training people anymore in the use and practice of spiritual gifts.

I think there is a reaction to the abuses and power plays of leaders and groups within the charismatic. There is move to a broader and healthier understanding of the Spirit, and there is a lack of churches teaching, and engaging in the practice of spiritual gifts, with the charismatic needing to be renewed for our emerging culture.

From my theological research and my experience of being involved in a denomination from a charismatic background, I do think that under the surface of these corrections and adjustments (many of them good) something is also being lost, due to:

1. Extending Immanence: In modernity a role reversal took place, and we became the subject, and God our object, who is there to support our autopoiesis (self creation). If our charismatic experience was about the personal experience I had of God, to get the identity and life I wanted, we have extended to its logical conclusion. The collapse of worship into private aesthetics, and my inner experience are the fruit of the project of immanence in charismatic experience, and the trajectory of the charismatic into the post-charismatic.

2. Privatisation: Consumerism and secularism have demanded that religion be private, away from others, and in support of our private aspirations. The therapeutic direction of many churches, and the private God spaces of the post-church movement are far more in keeping with this sensibility. The church is the public of the Holy Spirit yet we live at a time when in secular Europe, practicing faith in public with others is suspect, inconvenient and seen as outmoded. The post-church combines with post-charismatic, for self-constructed God spaces.

Reasons you should check out Robin’s new blog:

1. Friend: He’s a good friend, and you’ll like him
2. Smart: He is very clever, but not in a way that makes you feel stupid
3. Quirky & Interesting: Robin sees the world in a different and fascinating way, that will ensure his blog is far from run of the mill.
4. Publisher: He is the acquisitions editor for Paternoster (a great publisher), so be nice to him, and he might help get you published.
5. Dr Who: He loves Dr Who, what more could you want?

Ben, Steven and Karen will each be writing a guest post that we will be publish on the site next week, starting with Ben’s post on the 21 July. We hope you’ll find their thoughts challenging and be prepared to discuss the issues they raise and your own questions and thoughts on this topic.

We will also be providing links and resources to stimulate your own thinking in this area.

Research is always better when addressing a problem, at least that’s what people good at research tell me.

At each supervision I have a fear that I will be unmasked as an idiot with ideas above my station (maybe that explains the dreams preceding my supervisions where I arrive naked and hope my supervisor won’t notice? :-).

So after my last supervision, fully clothed, I came away and tweaked my research method problem and question. In other words what am trying to address and why?

For the few of you who need some sleep aids, the outline for that follows (I wrote a less academic version here):

Research Problem/Question
‘I wish to explore and understand the nature of a consumerist, secular society as a competing religious system in particular its privatising effects upon Christian religious beliefs and practices such that Christianity is unable to function as a genuine public body, and how, without such public life, individuals cannot undergo Christian formation, and the implications for ecclesiology as a result of this exploration.
I will be seeking to show that at the heart of this privatisation of faith, and withdrawal from public life, is the dialectic of structure and agency, best understood by a traditioned theological description of the anthropologies and soteriological teleologies at work.
As a church planter this research seeks this diagnosis in order to address some the symptoms of this problem that impede the daily mission and life of my church community. These symptoms include the idealisation of church into ‘blueprints’ with a separation of theory and practice, so that these idealisation are never attempted or are abandoned at the first experience of human failing and frailty, the inability to engage in church as public and concrete mission despite the desire to do so, the seemingly endless self creation and identity crises of modern society that is then used to provide measures for the assessment of the ‘authenticity’ of church practices. ‘

How I aim to achieve this will follow in some follow up posts.

Mark Driscoll and the Emerging church are joined at the hip. Mark seems to be pathologically inclined to produce anti emerging church statements and videos, and some sections of the emerging church seem to be just as pathological in being anti Mark Driscoll.

Whilst I find Mark’s approach to women in ministry, and his public rhetoric something that troubles me, but I have met some of the people from his community, and I am impressed with the concrete missional community they have. Real churches with real people, doing mission, and not just talking endlessly about how they dislike church, or hypothesizing about church.

This is late notice, I only just found out myself. Seems Mark is in the UK, and tonight (Friday 11th July) is at St James, Clerkenwell at 8pm.

The event tonight has been described in the advertising as:

“At ‘Driscoll Unleashed’, Mark will be free to raise the issues he feels we all need hear! This is open to all and there is no need to book, so tell your friends / church members / colleagues about it and just turn up on the night.”

I’ve been invited and signed up to write for a new blog, Azusa Remixed.

It’s billed as a compendium of global pentecostal theology, praxis and history. I’ll be writing once a month or so on the intersection with the blog’s main theme, and the topics of leadership, the emerging church, and Christianity in the U.K.

When I make a post there, I’ll link to it here.

Following on from my last post, I wrote a more academic piece for the Church and Post-Modernism site, here.

After 18 months and 1,300 hours of reading and writing in the early hours of the mornings I’ve been trying to summarise my learnings, by editing my PhD Methodology.

In short trying to get into one document, what I am doing, and why I am doing it, along with an outline for each chapter of the thesis I now want to spend the next 4.5 years finishing.

When people ask me in general, I talk about how I’m exploring how consumerism and secularism are like a religious system and what are the implications of that for how we do church.

It’s been interesting (for me at least), to watch that take shape around a method, and specific thesis.

In particular, I’m looking at two key challenges, firstly how secularism seeks to privatize Christian faith into nothing more than a religious association or club for individuals. Then alongside that I am exploring how commodification fragments bodies and communities into individuals, unable to do life together in community.

In terms of church, I think this means that we are unable to be a genuine ‘public’ anymore. Ecclesiology then becomes about accommodations to that privatization and ‘private God spaces’, and less about the redemption of Creation in Jesus and our experience of that together as the church, in every space of life.

The loss of confidence of being a genuine public, is the loss of what it means to become and be a christian.

The scandal of early church was that it took the God of the personal, ‘Abba Father’, and worshipped him in public, it refused to keep him at home, in private, whereas the Romans practiced their private devotions away from the state Gods.

The rest of the scandal, was the bringing of the God of the public into the home, the households. In a society where women had no place, where only a few were citizens, whole households, that were more like business communities, met together declaring non citizens to be citizens, and gave each other worth and status.

No wonder the church was a radical and revolutionary cult, able to undermine the power of the Roman Empire.

I suspect that finding ways of doing church, to fit a consumer rhythm, of private God spaces, conformed to my agenda and convenience, around what I like or don’t is no kind of revolution at all.

If the market and consumer dream is the new empire, if I am the new Caesar of my life, what does it mean to bring Abba Father into my work, and my community? And what does it mean to bring the Lord of Creation into my private life, and order my inner life around the reality of the resurrection of Jesus?

That’s the real revolution I’m trying to explore.

I’m off to Rome for a few days with work, I’m looking forward to the ambience but not the 34 degrees expected temperature.

Back in September 2007, I blogged this piece about some of the key magazines and journals/e-zines that I subscribe to, in order to keep my pulse on emerging culture in terms of culture, art, writing, music, movies, politics, economics, science etc.

I’ve just been sent a preview copy of a new magazine that has made it straight onto this list, and I’m going to subscribe Standpoint for sure.

Standpoint describe themselves as:

“Standpoint is a monthly cultural and political magazine published by Social Affairs Unit Magazines Ltd, a subsidiary of the Social Affairs Unit (Registered Charity No. 281530).

MISSION STATEMENT

Standpoint’s core mission is to celebrate our civilization, its arts and its values – in particular democracy, debate and freedom of speech – at a time when they are under threat. Standpoint aims to be an antidote to the parochialism of British political magazines and to introduce British readers to brilliant writers and thinkers from across the Atlantic, across the Channel and around the world.

In a market swamped by the journalistic equivalent of fast food, Standpoint hopes to offer the discerning reader a feast of great writing — properly edited and presented in an elegant design that makes even longer pieces a pleasure to read. Unashamedly highbrow in an era of relentless ‘dumbing down,’ it responds to the unfulfilled needs of the educated public.

Standpoint aims to provide an opportunity for a fresh, truly international cast of writers to explore the timely and the timeless. It will offer a guide for those perplexed by the 21st century and a running commentary for those who are happy to embrace it. In a world of rapid change, Standpoint is an indispensable resource and companion.”