We want our website to be more than just information. We are not interested in a website full of static 'stuff!' We want to create a place packed with dynamic and interesting content - a site you might want to revisit regularly.
We want our website to be an extension of our vision and values - a place of community, conversation, creativity and interaction. The Collective is the place for that. It's here that you will find contributions from many different people, including those who are part of the Redeemer Community and, from time to time, some special guests. You will find things that made us think, laugh, cry, hope, and be challenged. It's a section that will keep on growing - so just keep on scrolling and watch more articles load.
We would love you to interact with us through the site - so make sure to leave your comments!
Interested in contributing? Simply e mail contribute@redeemercentral.com
Loading...
Twenty Ten
Wow - what a year we had last year. So many exciting things that happened I thought I'd list as many of them as I could!
How not to be a missional church No.2 Meetings
A sure fire way to avoid being missional is to have lots and lots and lots of meetings. Have lots of ‘proper’ meetings, with a chairman and minutes and lots of people. Spend the first 40 minutes of the meeting reliving the previous meeting by going through the minutes, slowly. To spice things up make sure that there is one person there who talks, a lot, and knows the answer to everything on the agenda. He’s important, because to have a missionally avoiding meeting you need to waste lots of time discussing ‘things’, but never actually agreeing anything. Talk lots about internal procedural things too, talk about structures, processes and organograms, this is great because it has nothing do with other people, and everything to do with you.
Tags: Church, Church planting
How not to be a missional church No.1 The air raid shelter
Church as air raid shelter; The air raid shelter is the place where you go to hide from the scary, evil, dark and dangerous pagans. The place to huddle together away from the blitz of ‘nasty’ postmodernity for fear that you might actually become a little bit like ‘them’. Its the place to tell stories of the dark and foreboding storm that is modern life, convincing each other that the shelter IS the safest place to be. Sit tight, wait, it wont be long, the end is nigh, and if not nigh, then hopefully soon (please).
Tags: Church, Church planting
New to Redeemer?
New to Redeemer? Want to find out more about who we are and where we are going and how you can get more involved? then read on .......
Tags: Church, communication, Community
The curse of the restrictive ism
Back in the middle ages when men wore hairy capes and women stirred cauldrons with big sticks people were not too concerned with rationalism. After all there wasn't too much to rationalise, most peoples worlds probably didn't extend much beyond the edge of their village or town, If it did it was flat, and had an end which you might fall off. Life revolved around hunting, eating and running away from vikings. By the end of the 1700's hairy capes went out of fashion, you could no longer fall off the edge of the world and people started to think a bit more. Enter modernism. Architecture got boring, art went abstract, Nietzsche got excited, Freud got in your head and belief in God became irrational. Everything was explainable and an explanation for anything that couldn't be explained was found. The curse of the restrictive ism had started.
Tags: Church
Redeemer Info night
Are you new to Redeemer? Have you recently started coming? Or are you wondering how you can get connected? On Thursday 17 June 2010 we are hosting an evening where you can come and hear more about us, our vision and what we are about. So if you are new and want to know more this will be a great opportunity for you to find out more about Redeemer.
Tags: Church
The Story we find ourselves in: God’s Grand Narrative
As people individually and as a body we are in a story bigger than ourselves, bigger than Redeemer 'Central', bigger than 'Redeemer in Belfast'.
Tags: Belfast, Church, Church planting, Community
Graceocracy
Forget everything you know about the parable of the good Samaritan. It is not a nice moral tale about a kind man who does a good deed by helping someone who has had a bit of a nasty turn. Nor is it about an arrogant priest who ignores a dying man leaving him to his obvious fate. It is a story about a different kind of priest, one who would come to end all that the earthly priests had been required to do.
Tags: Christianity, Church, CityGroup, Community, Grace
Super Noodles & Sushi (Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us….........)
A year ago tomorrow, which if in fact you are reading this tomorrow, the 17th, it will be a year today. And if you are reading this at some time after the 17th .... well you get the idea. Either way the church plant Redeemer Central will be one year old. Birthdays are odd things. A while ago we celebrated the birth day of our wee boy Jude. That was shortly after I told our seven year old that if the baby was a boy we were going to name him Bubbles. If you have got an seven year old you will know that they take things very literally. She told her school teacher that we were calling the boy Bubbles. A few days after he was born we get a card from her teacher saying 'congratulations on the birth of baby Bubbles'. I hastily had to reach for my broom and begin a quick exercise in sweeping up. As a thirty something grown adult having to explain to a teacher the reasoning behind my faux naming of my first born son ........ lets just say it is a beetroot head kind of experience.
Tags: Church
We are looking for you
Are you a regular at Redeemer Central? Why not write something for The Collective. You could write anything. Why not look through and see what others have written and have a go. You don't even have to be a great writer! E-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) for more info.
Tags: Church
The grass roots radicals
I've been hanging out with the tales of the early church as told by Dr Luke in his appropriately named book Acts. In fairness, by anyones standards the few months leading up to the beginning of Lukes writings were epic. The twelve disciples became eleven plus a traitor and watched as everything they had been told would take place happened, although to them it would have hardly made much sense at all. The king of the Jews, freedom fighting Rabbi, son of God, friend, companion and old testament legal advisor was now hanging naked on a tree. Out beyond the city wall, with the leapers, criminals and city rubbish dump hung everything that they had spent the last three years pinning their hopes on. It must have felt like the end, the twelve now eleven soon to be twelve again were in disarray, the great revolution had seemingly come to an abrupt end. The end it was, in one sense that is, it was the end of something old and the beginning of something very very different. It would take them three days to realise the gravity of what had just taken place. Nothing was ever going to be the same again.
Tags: Christianity, Church, Community