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BlogHere are the thoughts and news of the people in our community. Leave a comment as you wish. If you want to join the blogging ask Mark.
Thursday, February 12, 2004Changing County, Changing Church? Last Tuesday I went to a day conference at King's Park. The purpose was to discuss the huge building work that will go on in our county over the next 30 years, and how the church should respond. To put it in real terms they reckon that there will 26,400 new homes in Northampton alone in 20 years time. In terms of people, that could be around 52,000. Which if my maths is any way correct [no comments, Mica!] then the population of Northampton will go up by 25% over the next 20 years. The highlight of the day was hearing Stuart Murray Williams, CHurch planting guru, talking about church planting [funnily enough!]. He did an overview of the church planting movement over the 90's and into the last couple of years. It was fascinating. He reckons that around 1900 churches were planted in the 90's, but around 2700 closed. One lesson being that church planting "did not reverse the decline or stimulate overall church growth". Wow! Why not? Unrealistic goals, short term planning, not rethinking church or mission in the way that was needed. The rethinking of church and mission was high on the agenda for the day. "How do we create mission-shaped churches". What I would call "missional communities". Even the Anglical Synod was meeting to discuss it. What was clear to me was that the established churches are being more experimental than "new churches" in this area. Home Churches are [should be] missional communities. How? Posted by: Mark | 1:13 pm |
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