The need for society within society. A culture within a culture.

Throughout lockdown, and even a little before, I’ve been fortunate enough to connect with a range of different people either through this blog or other watering holes and gathering points of a sort. The people and contexts are all different but we often end up talking about our faith, what is happening in our societies …

What Do We Want? Owned Space and Thick Culture! When Do We Want It? Now!

As I mentioned in my last post I’m thinking about moving, and I outlined some of things I’d be ideally looking for in a church community. In this post I thought I’d take it up a level and talk about Christian institutions in the UK wholesale, or rather the lack of them. For the last …

Discursive Christianity, Matrilineality and Men

Earlier this year I read the book The Death of Christian Britain. It charts the growth and decline of predominantly Evangelical movements from the 1800s and attempts to give insights to both. Brown, the author, argues against those who see the decline of Christianity starting at the Reformation, or the Enlightenment, and draws on an …

Parish decline and pioneer ministry

I recently read a piece over on Unherd by the Journalist/Priest Giles Fraser on ‘The neoliberal revolution within the Church’ which I’d normally have passed over but something in this has made me want to dig deeper into the claims it makes. I normally like some of the stuff Fraser writes, but in this instance …

Plans to prosper

Off the back of a conversation I had recently I’ve been prompted to explore what a positive vision of what the future could look like in my own context. This is in response to the fact that it was felt that the general diagnosis of the future doesn’t look great from the perspective of an …

‘If the Church of England really is a hallway…’ and other thoughts

It wasn’t long since I stepped away from the discernment process that lockdown began in the UK. A lot of my thinking about Church since then has been rendered pretty abstract since we can’t actually go anywhere, especially given we spent Easter in lockdown this year. Yet I can’t help but wonder what things will …

Reimagining the Parish and Beyond

Off the back of my recent post redesigning my Parish church after reading about the tradition of the Church of England when it came to the Lord's Supper I've been thinking about how Parishes, Dioceses, and potentially Provinces could be organised. What follows, I think makes sense, but I'm not under any illusions that there …

The Many Rooms of the Anglican House: The Problem of the Infallible Interpreter and Why I Am Still An Anglican

Recently I’ve been reflecting on an awareness in myself to chafe at the idea of considering myself an Anglican. It’s been an uncomfortable feeling but I’ve noticed it has start to colour my interactions with others. On reflection I can't help but describe it as a side effect of this extended period of cognitive dissonance …

The Home Office’s Hostile Environment for Converts

In the last week or so a story has been making the rounds of a Muslim convert to Christianity being refused asylum in the UK. The reason is because the Home Office has determined that Christianity is not more peaceful than Islam, which was a partial justification for the conversion, and therefore rejects the authenticity …

China’s ‘Social Credit’ is at home in the West

There was a recent piece of coverage by the Spectator on China’s new attempts to role out its Social Credit system in an effort to better manage its growing populace. I was shocked when listening to the journalists on a recent podcast on the topic discuss the advantages of the system and confess that because …