Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 95

Missiological topics in other blogs

Here are a couple of missiological topics picked up from other blogs for those who may be interested.

1. Free and open-source missiology text books

This comes from Steve Taylor of Emergent Kiwi. The idea is to get people to write chapters for a missiology textbook to be placed on the web, and also made available by print-on-demand publishers. The material would be edited for uniform presentation and to fit in to an overall structure.

I thought it was quite a good idea, and posted it on the a

Philip Wetherell

I received news that an old friend, Philip Wetherell, died last Monday. For the last few years of his life he suffered from motor neurone disease, which left him paralysed. In the last couple of years he was only able to communicate using a device called a Megabee. So it seemed appropriate to write about him on a day when people are being asked to blog about empowering people with disabilities.

I first met Philip 40 years ago, when I first went to Namibia. He had been studying theology at...

Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and Pentecostalism

In an interesting blog post Bishop David's Blog: Orthodoxy, a Vicar in Sunderland, and Pentecost Bishop David Chislett traces some links between Orthodoxy, Anglicanism and Pentecostalism.

On 6th January this year, Father Michael Harper died. He was one of the early leaders in the charismatic renewal. You can read my tribute to him HERE. In 2008, as an Archpriest of the Antiochan Orthodox Church he delivered a lecture for the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge in which he...

Anniversaries

The 19th of July has often seemed to be a significant day in my life — or at least it seemed like that 40 years ago. On this day 40 years ago, I was ordained as an Anglican priest at St George's Cathedral in Windhoek, by Colin Winter, the Anglican Bishop of Damaraland. Exactly a year before, on 19 July 1969, I had travelled to Namibia for the first time, to decide whether I should work there. And a year before that, 19 July 1968, I returned to South Africa from the UK, after being away for...

Women's ministry

I've been putting off writing this post because the way things are in the world today, it is bound to be misunderstood. I'm writing to clarify some things I said, and didn't say, in the two preceding posts, both of which alluded to the debate in the Church of England about the ordination of female bishops.

As most people reading this blog will know, I am a member of the Orthodox Church, and the Orthodox Church does not ordain women as bishops, priests or deacons. That has led some people to...

The end of an era — Anglo-Catholicism rides off into the sunset

I read a rather sad blog post this morning, about the end of a parish blog. It was a parish diary of St Peter's at London docks, and the priest who wrote it bids farewell to his readers. St Peter's London Docks:

I have decided to end the Peterite Blog. It has run for just under four years, some 198,000 of you have visited (over 600 yesterday), which is a goodish score for what never purported to be other than a parish diary online. I can see little future for a blog of this sort and thus it...

St Euphemia the Martyr and Paul the Octopus

The gist of a sermon preached at St Nicholas of Japan Orthodox Church in Brixton, Johannesburg on Sunday 11 July 2010 [1:]

Most people in South Africa who have been following the football World Cup know about Paul the Octopus, who lives in an aqarium in Germany and is said to predict the winners of the football matches. He is given his lunch in two boxes, each marked with the colours of one of the teams playing, and the first box he opens is said to be the team that will win. In this way he...

Original sin

Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs

I haven't read or rated this book yet, but merely marked it as "to read" in my Good Reads list, and will only read it if I can get a library copy. My Good Reads friend Fr Ted has blogged about it, however, and I thought his comments were worth reading.

Alan Jacobs, English Professor at Wheaton College, in his book, ORIGINAL SIN, takes an in-depth look at how, since the time of St. Paul, thoughts on original sin have shaped the history of Western...

Multiethnic church or homogeneous units?

I was recently asked to write an article on the Orthodox diaspora in South Africa, which is to be published in Studies in World Christianity. One of the effects of diaspora is that it tends to lead to the formation of relatively homogeneous monoethnic churches, and so I was interested in some recent blog posts from Australia and the USA, which discuss this question.

This one, from the USA, where there has been a strong diaspora influence on Orthodoxy, was interesting to compare Orthodoxy in...