Kester Brewin

In discussion about a forthcoming UK project with Jonny and some others from various networks on Friday, the question was asked “where do we want to be [with this project] in 5 years?” In the ensuing debate the question was then raised: “in what way is what we are doing not the establishment of a [...]

Exciting event coming up 24th – 26th Feb 06. For fuller details read Jonny’s post here. Highly recommended. For current practitioners. Limited to 100 places. Email nationalgathering@xalt.co.uk for further details.

As we think about the coming season of Advent, I’ve been mulling about the process by which ‘newness’ comes about. I was talking with two Vaux accomplices on Sunday, who are both doing post-graduate studies variously around ideas of space. Both were commenting on the varied backgrounds of the people they were studying with, and [...]

Perhaps it was the mixture of darkness, waiting and the great mulled wine afterwards, but Advent was always my favourite time of year at Vaux, and as this will be the first year for about 7 years when we won’t be doing something I thought I’d offer some resources from the services we did on [...]

The language of the Spirit has been hijacked by the charismatic/pentecostal movement, which is probably why people in Emerging circles have been shy of using it. What some of them appear to have seen from their side of the fence is that this shyness amounts to a rejection of the Spirit, and what they interpret [...]

Apparently the title didn’t translate very well… ISBN 3-928093-73-8 €14,80 Part of an excellent forth-coming series on the Emerging Church by C+P Verlag. Accompanying website to follow.

In the last post on this I tried to argue that we need to re-imagine our language of spiritual gifts, and used some of Lewis Hyde’s thinking on gift to consider how, in fact, any transaction that occurs in the ‘gift economy’ is actually rooted in God’s breathing into us. When you let someone into [...]

I ended the last post – which was a critique of Chris Simmons’ article in Christianity accusing the Emerging Church of lacking power manifestations, and thus lacking the Spirit – by arguing that we needed a fresh understanding of the concept of ‘gift’. It is only by doing this that we can prevent the hijack [...]

EC and Spirit [2] | EC and Spirit [3] | EC and Spirit [4] Any visit to my parents’ house requires the customary penance to be done: reading all the Christian press that they subscribe to. October’s Christianity carried an article which questioned whether the Emerging Church was lacking the Spirit. Their much-used stock graphic [...]

In a great post [ here ] Will Samson describes how the dominant psychological metaphor for our culture, as set out in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, needs pushing further. Maslow’s system is very much based around the needs of the individual, and Will has done some thinking about how, once the individual ‘self’ is actualized, [...]