Mark Scandrette and family

Mark Scandrette, originally uploaded by mattfreer.
Really enjoyed the company of Mark Scandrette and family who stayed with us at House244 whilst visiting Oxford at the weekend. They joined us for hOME’s Pentecost service and Mark and Lisa spoke about their community ReImagine in San Fransisco and their involvement with their wider community… incarnational radical presence… [...]

Hospitality and Jean Vanier

Boy with the purple hat #1, originally uploaded by Matt & Polly.

I’ve recently been re-reading From Brokenness to Community by Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arch. It is a great little book based on lectures he gave at Harvard, and is one of the best books I’ve read on the area of community. So I [...]

Benedict and community

A while back I finally got round to reading Finding Sanctuary by Abbot Christopher Jamison, the Abbot from Worth Abbey that gained a lot of attention through the BBC TV’s ‘The Monastery’ a few years back. I really enjoyed it and in particular welcomed the chapter on ‘community’, which starts to explore some of what [...]

21M – Five Marks of Mission Resource

Whilst working for CMS I was involved in getting a long awaited resource called 21M finished, and it is now available…
21M is an eight-part DVD resource that explores the Five Marks of Mission, which were produced by the Anglican church to help give a broad understanding of ‘mission’. Others might talk of integral mission or [...]

The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne

I’ve been trying to blog about The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical by Shane Claiborne for a while now… but somehow every time I think about it I can never really sum it up. But that is probably because it is such a simple book about the story of a community of hopefuls [...]

Wild Swimming

I suffered from a post-viral fatigue illness for a number of years and despite many visits to many doctors I got very little helpful medical advice about what I could do to get better. With no quick fix and no drug that can be prescribed, doctors often just don’t know what to do… and as [...]

Blood River

I recently borrowed Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher from the Crowther Centre at CMS – it’s a great read and I flew through and have been meaning to mention it for a while…
The book follows Tim Butcher as he attempts to retrace the steps of Henry Morton Stanley [...]

Exiles by Michael Frost

Over the past 4 or 5 months we have both been reading Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture by Michael Frost – another good book that we’d recommend. In a nutshell the book explores ways of being church, or communitas, in a post-Christendom western-culture dominated by consumerism, isolation and indifference, where the church too [...]

The Secret Message of Jesus

We mentioned The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McLaren whilst in the UK but until now haven’t had the chance to actually explain much about it. Brian McLaren is a church leader who has written a number of books and is a significant voice in the EmergingChurch movement, particularly in the USA. In The [...]

GodSpace by Christine Sine

I was pleased to see that Sacred Rhythms (which we’ve mentioned before) has been updated and revised, now reprinted as GodSpace: Time for Peace in the Rhythms of Life – and Christine Sine has started a blog called GodSpace.

GodSpace… looks at the natural rhythms God built into our world and how paying attention to [...]