As you know, pioneer training at Wycliffe College is still in its infancy, and the Fresh Expressions mantra—“we’re making this up as go along”—is as true here as anywhere.  This spring George Sumner is planning to bring a group together to discuss how we can improve the present program. Here are some of the models [...]

This week I was at a very unusual defence of a Doctor of Ministry thesis—on the pastoral care of inter-cultural marriages. The student, whose work I supervised, is a hero of mine: Pishoy Salama. Why was the defence unusual and why is he a hero?
Pishoy is a Coptic Orthodox priest who leads the multicultural congregation of [...]

Eighteen months ago, Wycliffe College introduced into its M.Div program a so-called “pioneer stream.” The advertising cited the writings of missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, and his call to the church in the West to rise to the challenge of a post-Christendom world, and then concluded:
The kind of leadership that was required for established, healthy churches in [...]

How do you do Bible study? I suspect that for most of us it’s actually quite superficial. When did we last have an experience that might be described as “going deep into Scripture” or “being immersed in a book of the Bible”?
This spring, May 1-7, there is an opportunity to encounter Scripture—which is to say [...]

One of the formative experiences of my life was at the age of twenty, when I spent a summer for working for Operation Mobilisation, selling Bibles door to door in rural France. It was formative in many ways, most of them good, but in particular for the discovery that God can answer our prayers for [...]

Tomorrow (Tuesday November 29th), I trust you will take a moment to sing (perhaps silently—you wouldn’t want anyone to think you were weird, would you?) “Happy Birthday” to C.S.Lewis, who would have turned 113 on that day.
Does he have anything to say about pioneer ministries or fresh expressions of church? It would be nice to [...]

This summer, my wife and I spent some time in the UK. One day, we checked online for churches to visit that Sunday, and found one that seemed very lively. I clicked on the “staff” page. There I found an impressive number of staff, both full and part-time, but I confess I was baffled by [...]

When I worked for IVCF, the question was often raised: Are IVCF chapters churches? The answer was always a resounding No: we do not practise sacraments, nor do we have ordained leadership. Both staff and students were expected to be members of a local church off campus.
But if we were not a church, what were [...]