si johnston buzzed me an e-mail to say that having had a small community going for 4 years in NI their community are going a bit more public now – see church. there are not many spaces in NI that i know of exploring christian faith in a non-institutional way. so it’s great to see this development.
pete and becca brierly are doing some stuff with them next weekend – 12 and 13 dec – if you are in that part of the world
this is how they describe their thinking about calling themselves church…
church is always spelt with a lower case ‘c’.
church is always plural and never singular.
church is not the space we mostly meet in.
church needs neither prefix nor suffix.
church is as much a verb as it is a noun.
church is, for us, an aspirational name.
Love the definition of church here.
like it!
Um, isn’t that definition pretty much the exact opposite of “We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostalic church”? One: singular not plural. Catholic: univerisal [what in the ancient world probably meant ‘upper case c’ in our sense]. Apostolic [prefix]. I’m totally for missional, fresh experssions, etc., but a definition of church that almost point-by-point contradicts the Nicene Creed? Well, I wonder if there might not be a better way to put it. I do think the other parts of the definition (not the space, aspirational, verb) work well, however.