This is an emergency blog which would normally appear on www.geoffreybaines.voxtropolis.com.

Welcome to the conversation.

I've got some great reading suggestions from previous what you reading? posts, so I thought I'd let you know once more what I'm reading and hear what you are reading at the moment.

Here's what I'm reading:

• The 8th Habit by Stephen Covey
• Reveal by Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson
• Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
• The Unexpected Journey by Tom Rainer
• The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Here are some titles I've got waiting for me:

• Post-Christendom by Stuart Murray
• One From Many by Dee Hock
• Resourcing Renewal by Martyn Atkins

If you go to http://geoffreybaines.voxtropolis.com/2007/09/22/what-you-reading-2/ you will be able to read about these books in the replies/comments as I write them out. 

So, what are you reading?

Welcome to the conversation.

I thought that I'd write up a new blog entry after the last few posts, in order to dig deeper into what we might call missiontribes: groups of people who are meeting together with the aim of dreaming up, planning, and even doing mission together.

Here are the books I'm reading at the moment:

• THE PRESENT FUTURE  (Reggie McNeal)
• THE POST EVANGELICAL (Dave Tomlinson)
• SOUL CRAVINGS (Erwin McManus)
• GATEWAY COMMUNITY CHURCH: A2 CASE STUDY (Willow Creek)

It's over a year since I read George Hunter's 'The Celtic Way of Evangelism', so Anne's posting sent me back to the bookshelf so I could check out what might have struck me from chapter seven to the end.  Here's what I found.

Hunter talks about the notion in many churches - unverbalised, mind you - that the new barbarians are unreachable with the gospel; as it were, they have to become civilised before they can come to faith (pre-evangelism).  Hunter's personal experience is that this couldn't be farther from the truth.  Interestingly, Vincent Donovan ('Christianity Rediscovered') came across the same ideas in others when it the Masai people he was seeking to evangelise (his book is a fascinating journey of sharing the essential gospel into new cultures - not wrong cultures but different cultures).

In another place, Hunter cites Methodism as an example of Celtic Christianity, that is, understanding the culture it was seeking to reach.  Is it too unfair to suggest that a quick scan of today's Methodist churches would suggest that we think the culture sings 18th and 19th century songs, frequents public buildings with the least comfortable seating possible (and I'm just thinking about the knee room), involving itself in meetings that are time-wasting and often pointless, and dare we say it, boring?

Shane Claiborne, in his painfully challenging but excellent book, 'The Irresistible Revolution', talks about how the most telling thing is not that we are not concerned for the poor (we often are) - the poor being the people Hunter says Methodism made contact with - but that we don't know any poor.  A few weeks ago I was talking with a true-hearted Celt, concerned to reach the estates of Edinburgh, knowing that what so many of us are about in our churches has nothing to say or do with the people living in them.  (This links up with the other point, above.)  Dave Tomlinson ('The Post Evangelical') makes the same noises; we have created what Tony Walters calls a "culture religion".  Tomlinson quotes Walters when he says: 'Christians may not be aware of the extent to which they have conformed to a middle-class lifestyle.  So many of the public values of society are middle-class that they values, which are far from inevitable  or God-given, are taken for granted'.  As Tomlinson follows on to say: 'The consequence of confusing Christianity with middle-class values is that people who do not identify with that culture reject the church and, in many cases, the gospel too'.

However, there are clearly cultures that are not good for people, like addictions, which carry whole culture-systems with them.  Here Hunter talks about the crucial need for an alternative culture for people to be brought into if they are going to leave the old culture behind.  Ethan Watters writes insightfully in his book, 'Urban Tribes' about tribes and new families in today's Western world.  Watters claims no faith allegiance and his writing allows a glimpse of a new world. 

A final thought pulled from Hunter's final pages, asks, What might a truly Scottish church look like, grown out of the new-found faith of the people being reached by missionaries seeking to understand the culture in which they find themselves.  This is the exploration of the missiontribe and I look on it with much fear, for whatever it is we find we must do will not be easy - but it might just be glorious.