Fragility and Hope

January 11, 2023By Alan Roxburgh

Exhausted? Saturday mornings have, like Sundays, a ritual beginning for me. Around 6am I have a fresh coffee, my dogs beside me and the weekend newspaper (Saturday, the Globe & Mail; Sunday, the weekend New York Times). It’s the first Saturday of the new year, the coffee is good and the dogs are settled. I … Read More

No Straight Lines

December 6, 2022By Alan Roxburgh

I can’t separate my thoughts about a lot of things from Advent just now. What does Advent say to us in our time of disruptive uncertainty? How does Advent connect to the unfamiliar, hard places where so many of us find ourselves? The Context Over the last few months we sponsored a series of Leaders … Read More

Leading in the Tensions

November 30, 2022By Alan Roxburgh

I’m in regular conversation with church executives about the challenges of leadership in this disruptive time. Each person describes their experience in a somewhat different way but the underlying issue is the same in each case. These leaders are hard working, love their churches and have big hearts for kingdom ministry. Yet each has high … Read More

The question we must address

September 7, 2022By Alan Roxburgh

Over the last forty years I’ve written more than a few books about the Euro-tribal churches and the nature of leadership. I’ve wrestled with questions of what it means to be God’s people in an era of unraveling. I now believe that the most important question we must address is: In a world confronted with … Read More

Reflections on Leadership

May 31, 2022By Alan Roxburgh

Scriptures are replete with stories of promise that address this question of how we live in a time of unraveling. Above all else, the Easter narrative is the story at the centre of our lives. Right now, however, I see the Euro-tribal churches being more like those bewildered followers of Jesus lost in their lament … Read More

Roots Resist

August 4, 2021By Alan Roxburgh

There are moments in our lives when we encounter people who, through a story they share or a picture they paint, reorient our sense of the world. Over these last five posts, I’ve shared how this experience came to me through four amazing women writers. Five years after writing Joining God (2015), I’d become less … Read More

Your Job is to Hold Hands

July 26, 2021By Alan Roxburgh

I wasn’t prepared to be changed by a book on the dieback of yellow cedars in southeast Alaska. But that’s how God changes us – in completely unexpected ways. Several years ago I found myself reading Mary Jo Leddy, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Lauren E. Oakes and Simone Weil. Collectively, the Spirit was using their writing … Read More

God’s People and Resurgence

July 19, 2021By Alan Roxburgh

In this blog post I want to address the question: Within the communities in which we live, what does a Gospel response to the fragility of belonging look like? Another of my conversation partners in Joining God in the Great Unraveling: Where We Are & What I Have Learned (2021) is Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and … Read More

Manufacturing and Mystery

July 12, 2021By Alan Roxburgh

Our very human tendency is to try to manufacture our own lives. We try to control through what we manufacture rather than trusting in the mysterious process…which is God’s gift to us and our work. Fabrications are not suited to the life of faith. They don’t wear well. – Mary Jo Leddy, Reweaving Religious Life, … Read More

What I’ve Learned

July 5, 2021By Alan Roxburgh

Six years ago (2015), Joining God, Remaking the Church, Changing the World was published. It was broadly received across the Euro-tribal churches because it signalled the malaise confronting these churches (ecclesiocentrism, technique, individualism and clergy-centrism). It proposed that God’s central concern is not the fixing of these churches. Rather, the Spirit is out ahead in … Read More