Margaret Poloma and Ralph Hood’s recent book, Blood and Fire: Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church (NY University Press, 2008), left me feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Poloma and Hood offer a sociological account of a church that has ‘failed.’
By ‘failed’ I mean that Poloma and Hood’s research coincided with a time when the Atlanta-based congregation they were studying abandoned its downtown premises. The homeless they were trying to attract were seemingly forgotten about.
Continue reading ‘Poloma and Hood Book Review: Blood and Fire – Is this the Emerging Church?’
If you yearn for economic justice and human flourishing in the southern hemisphere, you may be plagued by the nagging suspicion that there is little that you can do to promote this. Sure, you can give to charity or even go on a short term volunteering mission, but still there’s a sense that these efforts are at best band-aid ‘solutions,’ or at worst, volun-‘tour’-ism for rich Westerners to salve their consciences.
Dr Aidan Donaldson confronts some of those doubts in his new book, Encountering God in the Margins: Reflections of a Justice Volunteer (Veritas, 2010). Donaldson is Assistant Head of Religious Education and Chaplain at St Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School in Belfast. He writes out of his experience of the Christian Brothers’ Developing World Immersion Programme and its work on Project Zambia.
Continue reading ‘Aidan Donaldson Book Review: Encountering God in the Margins’
The Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin, is marking the midpoint of its three-year research project this week with a conference, ‘From World Mission to Interreligious Witness: Visioning Ecumenics in the 21st Century.’
The conference is recognising the centenary of the 1910 Edinburgh Missionary Conference, which is considered the birth of the modern ecumenical movement. Prof. Linda Hogan, Head of the Irish School of Ecumenics, opened the conference on Wednesday by acknowledging that ecumenical heritage. But she noted that the concept of ‘mission’ articulated at Edinburgh has become problematic in our pluralising, globalising world.
Continue reading ‘Questioning World Mission: Trinity College Conference on Ecumenics in the 21st Century’
Patrick Mitchel, a lecturer in theology at the Irish Bible Institute in Dublin, has posted a blog about ‘Irish evangelicals: unity in diversity or just disunity?’ In the post, Mitchel engages with a chapel message delivered by Crawford Gribben last month at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.
Gribben is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture at Trinity College Dublin. His talk is aimed at an audience of American seminarians from the Reformed tradition, and his purpose is to provide them both with a general perspective on the lie of the land on Christianity in Ireland, and a particular view of evangelicalism in the Republic.
Continue reading ‘Evangelicalism in Ireland: Slow Motion Revival or Faction Fighting?’
Last week as the conference, ‘Re-emergence: Christianity and the Event of God,’ was coming to a close, we were shaken out of our conversations as the fire alarms in the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin at Belfast, reverberated throughout the building.
It wasn’t a fire. The alarms had been set off by the dismantling of a Light Installation by Beyond Church from Brighton. The installation had involved the use of a smoke machine, which our alarms took every bit as seriously as real smoke.
Continue reading ‘Re-Emergence in Belfast: De-Institutionalising Christianity’
I’m intrigued by the astronomical growth of Christianity in the majority world, and I think it’s important that Christians in the West ask themselves what the churches in all the far-flung corners of the globe can teach us. That’s a part of what motivates my research on charismatic Christianity in Zimbabwe.
During my fieldwork in Zimbabwe in 2007, I couldn’t help but notice the Masowe Apostles. They are distinctive for dressing in white robes and meeting for hours in the open air. It is hard to miss them.
Continue reading ‘What can the Churches Learn from Zimbabwe’s Masowe Apostles?: Isabel Mukonyora Book Review, Wandering a Gendered Wilderness’
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