What is Deep Church?
Remembering our shared christian past is essential for facing the future.
This site provides a place for academics, practitioners, church historians, theologians and, most importantly, church communities to reflect on a range of issues for which a vibrant contemporary faith requires a careful listening to the past even as we move into the future.
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Author
Jason Clark
I was born in 1969, and am married with three teenage children. I’m a full time pastor/minister of a church that my wife and I planted whilst I was an investment broker/financial planner in London.
I have a Doctor of Ministry degree in the area of “Church and Culture” and am now a PhD candidate at Kings College London, researching theological assessments of consumerism and secularism, and the implications for ecclesiology.
I lecture, and teach, in the UK, and internationally on a regular basis, on areas of church and culture.
Welcome to the conversation.
What is deep church?
“Deep church is far more than an ecumenical dream of coming together across the barriers of ignorance and predujice: it is predicated upon the central tenets of the gospel held in common by those who have the temerity to be ‘Mere Christians.’ This commonality in the light of post-Enlightenment modernism is greater and more fundamental than the divisions and schisms of church history… Deep Church, as its name implies, is spiritual reality down in the depths – the foundations and structures of the Faith – which feed, sustain and equips us to be disciples of Christ.”
Professor Andrew Walker, Editor of: Remembering our future – explorations in Deep Church, Paternoster, 2007.
What is Remembering our future and this Deep Church site about?
Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions drink from the well of a common Christian tradition rooted in the early centuries of the Church. Many Evangelicals are now reengaging with the faith and practice of the early church as they seek resources to live as disciples in a postmodern world. Remembering the past is essential for facing the future.
As evangelicals recover from their amnesia they are discovering that they have more in common with orthodox Christians of all traditions that they ever realised. This re-engagement of different streams of the church with a common tradition rooted in the Early Church is what Lewis termed ‘Deep Church’ and it provides the foundations for a contemporary Christian ecumenism.
In the book and this site church leaders and theologians reflect on a range of issues for which a vibrant contemporary faith requires a careful listening to the past. What is the place of tradition in the life of the Church? How should we interpret the Bible aright? How should we worship? What is the place of baptism and the Eucharist in spiritual renewal? How can Charismatic and Sacramental traditions unite? What should discipleship look like in our pagan cultures? How can we invest our mundane, ordinary lives with spirituality? What, in other words, might ‘Deep Church’ look like?
Welcome to an ongoing conversation…
What Deep Church might look, feel and be preactised like is a conversation for academics, practitioners, church historians, theologians and, most importantly, church goers – those who partake, who bring with them both tradition and context, to share, think and work together to make this a reality.
This site will hopefully allow you to contribute to the conversation, give you resources and links to explore and provide a safe place to be positive about Deep Church.