The West Midlands is home to 2,607,000 people. That includes over 1 million in Birmingham and half a million living in a cluster of towns and urban villages where the Industrial Revolution started known as The Black Country. Over the past decade, significant work went into encouraging church planting via The 2020 Birmingham Initiative, a… Continue reading Could you help reach the urban West Midlands with the Gospel?
Category: church planting
Regathering and Replanting
I want to think a little bit more about what is involved for churches coming out of lockdown. I did one of my mini-surveys via twitter recently and here are the results. As always, I’m not claiming that my survey gives infallible, fully representative, scientific, Gallup standard analysis. However, it is a good dip check… Continue reading Regathering and Replanting
Bradford: city of culture, city of need
Update: Bradford was confirmed as UK City of Culture 2025 on the 31st May 2022. I’m resharing this article hoping it will motivate people to pray for Bradford and even consider church planting there in time for 2025. Culture is coming home. We awoke to the news this morning that Bradford has been placed on… Continue reading Bradford: city of culture, city of need
On idols families and estates
Mez McConnell has written this on people considering Gospel ministry on estates – or as they are called in Scotland “schemes.” There’s some helpful truth about the cost of discipleship and mission in Mez’s article. I hope he won’t mind though if I just push back a little on a couple of points. First of… Continue reading On idols families and estates
West Smethwick Replant
It’s about three years ago that I had a call from a chap called Steve Horton from Sheffield. He wanted to meet up with me to talk about the local church situation in the West Midlands. He’d just been asked to start looking after evangelical Congregational Churches in the area (Evangelical Fellowship of Congregational Churches)… Continue reading West Smethwick Replant
Thoughts on re-planting as a form of church revitalisation
Replanting is a little different to church revitalisation. There is a sense in which any church of any size could need and probably at some point will need a form of revitalisation to breath fresh life in. That might involve changes to personnel, culture and to teaching to enable renewal and/or reformation depending where the… Continue reading Thoughts on re-planting as a form of church revitalisation
More thoughts on urban planting
As you know, one of my concerns is to see churches planted into our less fashionable areas and to see them established and multiplying. Moving from what we desperately want to see to actually seeing it, is the challenge though. We’ve been looking to see if it would be possible to get involved in pioneer… Continue reading More thoughts on urban planting
A post coronavirus church planting strategy
I’m continuing to try and encourage people to think about future church planting. I realise that after the pandemic a lot of us will be looking at the fragile state of churches and the temptation will be to go into maintenance mode. I hope we won’t do that. There remains a great need out there.… Continue reading A post coronavirus church planting strategy
Are you ticking “not religious”?
Humanists UK are launching their every decade campaign for people to tick on the Census that they are not religious. The argument is that people tick to say they are Christian or whatever because they associate it with a cultural identity or their parents. The recognition that one is not born a Christian and cannot… Continue reading Are you ticking “not religious”?
#ProjectHope – church planting post pandemic
One of the things we’ve talked about quite a bit over the past 8 or 9 months is the expectation that a proportion of people will not be returning to our churches after Coronavirus. In the early heady days of online content, it was easy to get carried away with the high viewing figures for… Continue reading #ProjectHope – church planting post pandemic
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