Note from Rowland: the following is an important corrective to ‘Church Growth triumphalism’… Food for thought.

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I had a look at the link to the article by Tom Bandy provided in Rowland Croucher’s website.

See http://jmm.org.au/articles/14771.htm

While Bandy says some sensible things and proposes some ways forward, I get a bit tired of people trying to tell us that everything we have know and done is wrong and it all has to be different now (and please pay me a fee to tell you how). Yes, being faithful in 2005 looks different from being faithful in 1955.

But some of these people have very short memories. They only think back to the way the church was in their own experience. What about the 2000 years before that? Was God asleep all that time? Did the Holy Spirit do nothing? Sometimes we can move forward by creatively learning from the wisdom of the past and adapting it to our own culture and context.

I like Robert Webber’s notion of the ancient-future church. I have seen too many perfectly good babies thrown out with the bath water.

[Name withheld].