Published in Holiness
While ‘Mission in Britain today’ includes many aspects, this article focuses on the witness of the Church within Britain’s contemporary highly secularized culture. Rather than ‘technical change’, the Church is called to work at ‘adaptive change’, and so to concentrate less on strategies and more on internal renewal. Such adaptive change involves fr...
Published in Holiness
Using a qualitative study of interviews with ministers who work in ethnically diverse British Methodist congregations, I explore the practices that encourage a sense of belonging together as one body in Christ and how these influence a congregation’s ethos. Analysing how the respondents see their own role in this work I argue that the key challenge...
Published in Holiness
The Mission-Shaped Church report by the Church of England prompted the Methodist Church and the Church of England in the UK to respond to the dislocation being felt between the inherited model of church and the missiological challenges of the twenty-first century. The most significant ecumenical development arising from the report was the formation...
Published in Holiness
This article aims to explore the significance of embodiment, sacrament and ritual in urban pioneer ministry. Stemming from early experiences working within this context and from a particular experience of using installation art to help engage those outside the Church with its rituals and stories, I argue for the importance of the embodied experienc...
Published in Holiness
This paper aims to shed light on the ways in which politics can be a site of temptation for Christians. In the first part, it explores the circumstances in which John Milton wrote Paradise Regained, printed in 1671. The poem may be understood, in part, as Milton’s reflection on the failed politics of the Republic in which he had played a leading ro...
Published in Holiness
This article invites reflection on the theological purposes of the education of church leaders. It is conceived as a piece of practical theology that arises from the challenge to the Wesley House Trustees in Cambridge to reconceive and re-articulate their vision for theological education in a time of turbulence and change. I reflect on Wesley House...
Published in Holiness
This article gives a critical account of the engagement with Scripture among a group of women and men from the Villa Road Methodist Church, Handsworth, Birmingham, UK. It presents research done in community during 2004/05 for the unpublished thesis, ‘Mary in the Kitchen, Martha in the Pew: Patterns of Holiness in a Methodist Church’ (MPhil., Birmin...
Published in Holiness
After addressing the teaching and learning context in which contemporary theology exists, this article seeks to address contemporary Methodism and Methodist theology. Drawing on Scripture and theologians, it is argued that the Church is a creation of the Holy Spirit, and knows itself as such not only as it is created intensely so by an event of the...
Published in Holiness
John Wesley summarised Methodism’s mission as spreading ‘scriptural holiness’. This article argues that the praxis of social justice as an expression of holiness is integral to the mission of the Church. The following themes from Wesley’s theology are examined: holiness as love; ‘justice, mercy, and truth’; social holiness; works of mercy as a mean...
Published in Holiness
The article tracks the development of a new ecclesial strapline for the British Methodist Church in the period between 2007 and 2014 and assesses the initial impact of the identity on education and ecumenism. It argues that the theme and practice of holiness has been underplayed and underdeveloped in the discourse to find a fresh expression of Meth...
