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June 2016

Small Church

Small is Beautiful

Recently, I read an article “Small ≠ Broken: 5 Steps to Greatness In a Small Church“. It emphasised the value of small communities and (what I stress repeatedly) don’t try and clone/mimic one style (in this case the mega-church model) in another context (in this case your local parish church). The Anglican model has traditionally

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Mute Congregation

The Day Church Singing Stopped

Church services have shifted from being the Body of Christ worshipping God to being primarily focused on evangelising the unchurched. With this shift, congregational prayers, affirmations, responses, and, singing were replaced with the “worship”-preaching-worship format. The music shifted to primarily being intended to create an emotional response. So, in summary, begins the hard-hitting post by

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Presider

The Role of Presiding

Along with the decline in Anglican common prayer in New Zealand is confusion about liturgical leadership. All too often liturgical leadership is comparable to a Television presenter, the continuity person on a show, the interviewer on a chat show. Add to this New Zealand’s tendency to divide the Eucharist into “two parts” – with the

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Orthodox Liturgy

What is Liturgy?

A friend pointed to the above image and exclaimed: “Now, that’s liturgy!” True. Very quickly, however, in our one-way culture (where affirming one thing is understood by many as denying anything different to what is being affirmed), people end up thinking that the above image is the only way to do liturgy, the ideal of

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Pastor

The One True Church

My friend and fellow-blogger, Peter Carrell, recently said it well: I belong to the one and only true church. It is perfect in every way, doctrinally, liturgically, morally, ecclesiologically. It only has one member. And you can’t join it in case you wreck it. In the spirit of Throwback Thursday I rework a blog post

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Videos of Note

Lyrics of Confía en Dios Translate the lyrics here if you need to Do you have any videos to share, to suggest? If you appreciated this post, do remember to like the liturgy facebook page, use the RSS feed, and sign up for a not-very-often email, …

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