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It used to be about ‘hand-me-downs,’ items past down through the family but now we are entering a world of ‘hand-me-ups.’ Phones, cameras, mp3 players are now being given to parents by their children as they upgrade to the next new thing [no doubt the parents are grateful for the on-tap technical support!].
The emerging church in many ways is a positive and exciting move of God that is engaging a generation and is resulting in many valuable ‘hand-me-ups’ to its parent church, in its exploration and engagement with the ‘post’ generation.
However, is there a danger that we in the emerging church forget also the tradition that has been handed down to us? What happens as we as a conversation grow, as the novelty of the ’post’ world wears thin, when the rest of the church has caught up with us ‘early adopters’ and a new generation has overtaken us with the latest of church engagement:
- are we destined to become a novelty seeking, emotional, reactionary movement, defining ourselves by our angst with the modern church? or
- are we able to mature grace-fully rather than stagnate - to continue to blend the best of the Spirit inspired new things with the best of the Spirit inspired past?
This article will explore some ways in which the emerging church can recognising our place in the chain of faith past down to us through the traditions and practices of the church and taking in our place in handing on a deeper faith, blended with our own unique contribution, to those who will proceed us… It is a recognition that whilst we have ‘deep’ pools of life to contribute we also have our own shallows as well and therfore I think we need to be connected to the an ongoing cycle of handing on, handing down and handing up of the christian faith, practices and traditions…
This piece has been particularly inspired by Luke Bretherton’s chapter in ‘Remembering our Future’ on the emerging church and by Andrew Walker’s essay on paradosis in the same book.
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We’ve got the site migrated to it’s new installation here. We’ve got new RSS feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/deepchurch .
We’ll be posting a main item once a week for discussion here on the topic of Deep Church. If you want to contribute a piece please let us know.
Jason
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Remembering Our Future
‘Deep Church’ is about remembering our past in order to face our future. At the heart of the ‘Deep Church’ conversation lies the attempt to reconnect with “a common Christian tradition from the apostles to the councils, creeds, and writings of the fathers of the early church” (Remembering Our Future, xvi). But, very importantly, “The vision for a deep church is neither an attempt to simply restate or repristinate the Christian tradition, this is tantamount to ancestor worship; nor does it take its bearings from the emerging culture, to do this is simply to assimilate the prevailing hegemony; rather, to be a deep church means to stand on the cusp or the breaking point of both the Christian tradition and the emerging culture, deeply rooted in the former while fully engaged in the latter” (Remembering Our Future, xviii).
Continue reading »
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In the world of psychiatry, students study not just the manifestations and causes of mental dysfunction, but the idea of ‘wellness’, of what helps the well part of a patient become ‘more well’. In the worlds of education, and business, rather than focus on people’s weaknesses, there is the move to explore and develop people’s strengths. In looking at developing countries,debt relief agencies, look for positive attributes for assessment, instead of previous models that just measured the bad ones.
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Welcome to Deep Church. We hope to bring you shortly a number of guest authors, from a variety of perspectives to kick off the conversation on Deep Church.
In the meantime if you haven’t checked out the book, ‘Remembering our future - explorations in Deep Church,’ I can recomend it to you as a great book to begin exploring with.
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Our aim is to post items once a week, for sustained reading and discussion here. Due to the initial interest and high volume of traffic, we are going to migrate this site to a hosted new word press install this weekend. So it may go down for a couple of hours whilst everything moves over.
The URL for the site www.deepchurch.org.uk will remain the same, but the RSS feeds will change, so if you read this please refresh/visit the site to see them.
Next new post will be monday next week. Have a great weekend.
Jason
