Suburban Church Parking Lots vs. Peak Oil

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

You know, it used to be that being on the outside of town was not such a desirable place to be. That’s where we used to cast lepers. That’s the place where society cast those who were considered to be of little worth, those who were considered ‘impure’. And in old Jerusalem, that place was a burning rubbish dump, a place called Gehenna, not terribly far outside the south wall.

Loosely translated, Gehenna means “suburb.”

Well not quite, but…In Judaism, Gehenna was a real place. It was metaphorically linked to the underworld, and not without reason. A place of loneliness, despair and destruction. A place of punishment where the bodies of the dead were burned. Not a spiritualized place. A real, live, burning garbage heap. And it’s from this real-life place that our more modern understandings of hell are derived.

Church + Walkability + Neighbourhood Life (Part 1)

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

In a previous post, I began to track the growing discussion around the impacts of current economic fragility on the future of the church. I quoted comments from Chris Marshall, Jason Evans and Alan Roxburgh, while also mentioning an exceptional post from Jordon Cooper.

Something that just popped up on my radar this morning, however, was a reflection from Malcolm Irwin over on the Just Comment blog:

The loopier, newer, and more scandalous thinking only starts to emerge when we honestly look at the potential impact of commuting less on our commuter-centric churches and the commuter-centric dispensaries of our social services.

What if people cannot get to church? What if people cannot make it to our centralized sites of professionalized help? What if we got to a point where we only went where we could walk? What could that mean for how we practice church?

The Church As We Know It

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Now this is interesting. Or at least I think it is. In the past couple of weeks, there have been a flurry of blogs discussing the church’s response to a fragile economy. These bloggers are (thankfully) digging into these rather deep issues that will unquestionably impact the shape, societal role, and mission of the church in years to come.

My friend Dave, an inestimable theorist of inevitable urban apocalypse, and I have been talking about these things on an ongoing basis for months now, which is one of the reasons why it caught my attention to see these conversations bubbling to the surface elsewhere. Back on April 23, Chris Marshall posted:

Recession seems inevitable, will it go way beyond that? A nation already ruled by fear and over-spending with no margins by individuals and the government, what will be the consequences? How will this impact churches and mortgages and credit lines that can’t be fed?

Curing Cancer…With Cancer

by Andrew Stephens-Rennie

Homeopathy has this saying, and this understanding of disease, that “like cures like.” But to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that’s always the case. And I’m also not so sure that the dominant medical establishment has somehow fallen in love with complementary medicine.

Yesterday as I was taking the bus to work, I found myself glancing over the shoulder of the woman sitting next to me. She was flipping through the tabloids, finding out the latest with Britney, Tom, Kanye and all the rest. As she flipped the pages, I noticed a full-page ad on the back cover. An ad for the Princess Margaret Hospital Home Lottery.

The lottery will give you a chance to win a Brand! New! McMansion! in the suburbs. Whether Woodbridge or Milton or Markham, you too have the chance to win your own castle. And with housing markets across Canada feeling prohibitive to first time buyers, what a way to jump the line…