St. Matthew's - Living into God's Kingdom
- Details
- In: NA Stories
- By Blair Pogue
When I arrived at St. Matthew’s, St. Paul in September 2005, I was delighted to encounter men, women and children not only of Norwegian, Swedish, and Irish ancestry, but also from Uganda, Nigeria, Jamaica and the Philippines. The Holy Spirit had placed our church close to the St. Paul Campus of the University of Minnesota, International Student Housing, and Luther Seminary. Men, women and children who had grown up in the Anglican Church abroad connected with us because our worship reminded them of home.
While the Spirit had worked through the St. Matthew’s community over the years to offer hospitality to Christians from around the world, church participants from other countries were on the margins of our church’s life. As first generation immigrants, many of them were working at least one job and going to school. Quite a few of our international parishioners were in the health care field where they ended up assigned to night shifts, which made their church attendance infrequent and church connections minimal.
Blair PogueLord Glasman & the Place of Faith
- Details
- In: Culture
- By Martin Robinson
Lord Glasman is closely associated with Blue Labour and the attempt to help the Labour Party discover its Christian roots. He recently helped us launch the Journal of Missional Practice at the House of the Lords. Martin Robinson caught up with Lord Glasman recently at the House of Lords and capture this brief conversation.
The Munk Debates & Denominations
- Details
- In: Leadership
- By Alan Roxburgh
The headlines across the media last week were reporting the common anxieties again. This time it's tiny little Cyprus. Will this little island in the Mediterranean be the tipping point for Europe? Will their refusal to go along with austerity measures precipitate the final unraveling of the Euro? How to address the crisis that is European Union (EU)?
Last year in Toronto one of the Munk Debates was held around the issue: Be it resolved that the European experiment has failed. These debates are funded by the Munk brothers and are designed to address critical issues of global importance. Peter Munk introduced this debate about Europe and its future with these words: What lies at the core of the EU breakdown, and what we are witnessing, is the historic recalibration of the role of the modern state in real time. That statement, made in 2012 is even more the case in the spring of 2013.
The crisis of Europe has to do with the very nature of something we have taken for granted for about four hundred years - the modern state. As a result of this crisis the citizens of Europe are struggling to reimagine what role nation states and their governments can and should have in their lives. This is a basic question that goes to the core of identity, society and culture in the modern period. It is a fundamental question of how states (if they should exist as they are in the first place) ought to function and how they should be structured. Beneath these questions lie much deeper ones about the purpose, goals, and values of a state. A similar wrestling is occurring in in North America.
