making disciples in a churchless age

I did say I would post up some more thoughts and my notes from the Organic Church Rountable in Northampton, so here goes;

It was an excellent time with input from Stuart Murray Williams and plenty of interaction and dialogue throughout. Not everyone may concur with Stuart's take on Christendom but he brought some challenging and helpful thoughts on 'Making disciples in a churchless age'.

Stuart is comfortable (or maybe just plain wise) taking a wait-and-see approach to the whole emerging church scene. He wonders whether the real hope may lie in the 'evolving church' ie. new shapes of church evolving from the existing.
(Apologies for the pic quality not sure what went wrong!)
He pressed the case for a more radical theological re-examination of the Gospel if we are going to connect with todays culture.

I resonated with some of his conclusions and proposals; that we need a 'simple' church, freed of much of the 'Christendom' baggage, but one that is able to sustain communities of disciples in the long run through a robust spirituality and lifestyle of accountability.

I also strongly agreed with his suggestion illustrated by the story of Peter at Cornelius's house that 'the future church will grow out of conversations between the inherited church and the emerging church.' With such a diverse group of people present, the day itself was a good outworking of that.

In the attached notes there is more stuff including:

- Post-Christendom: A Summary
- Emerging Church: A Tentative Classification
- Rehabilitating Evangelism
- Why People leave Church
- Anabaptist Network Core Convictions

OCRT combined notes.doc

It was a good chance to catch up with a number of people coming from very different settings who are travelling down similar paths. There were discernable commonalities amongst our stories but the outworking in each setting has it's own personality. And that's how it should be.

posted by alexander @ 7:16 PM    2 comments

2 Comments:

Did you record his message and is it available for general consumption.

Thanks

Tim

By  Tim, at 1:39 PM  

Yes it was recorded; for info try Graham at geold177@aol.com

By  alexander, at 1:49 PM  

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