Archives
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Ecclesial Futures
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2024)Welcome to what is the tenth issue of Ecclesial Futures, a journal focused on the mission of God in the world, particularly in local Christian communities and the systems that support them.
In this issue you will find eight book reviews, a wonderful testimony to a growing community of scholars who are reading, thinking and interacting together. You will also find five articles that explore the nature of the mission of God as analysed in local church partnerships, spiritual practices, liturgy, patterns of migration and liberative readings of Scripture. The articles and book reviews contribute to a growing body original research about the mission of God in the world in and through Christian communities.
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Special Issue: Christian Empowerment, Secularity and Church Development in Germany
Vol. 6 No. 1 (2025)Welcome to this Special Issue of our journal focusing on the church in Germany. It adds to our publishing around a specific country focus in a special issue which we began when looking at South Korea in 2023. The papers presented here have been developed from lectures given at the annual gathering of the International Consultation on Ecclesial Futures (ICEF) in Halle/Saale in Germany in June 2024. The golden thread running through this special issue is the current circumstances and challenges of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The issue provides a helpful case study on how the German church is responding to secularisation and its concomitant decline in church membership which we hope readers will find informative and instructive with pointers to fruitful ecclesial futures. We also include seven wide-ranging book reviews from five readers with new departures into non-English language books (though reviewed in English) and published research dissertations.
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Ecclesial Futures
Vol. 5 No. 1 (2024)With this fresh issue of Ecclesial Futures, we pass an initial milestone for our new journal of having published fifty articles since we began with our first volume in 2020. It has been quite a journey and we might stop here, rejoice for a moment and look back on our achievements so far. We have created a journal that is finding its place within World Christianity. In a recent survey of where our website is visited from, many thousands of times per year, we might have expected the UK, USA, Australia and Germany to feature in the top 10 places – yet South Korea, the Philippines, South Africa and India were also present (alongside 57 other countries).
In the issue we continue this diversifying trend with seven articles authored from seven different countries on at least three continents representing a wide range of ecclesial traditions. We have an important article from the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, addressing head-on the crises the churches there face and then two articles which illustrate and respond to those dilemmas from an Orthodox perspective in the UK and an Episcopal church in the USA. Two articles are then placed side-by-side which engage with faith and religion in the digital world, through Artificial Intelligence and online worship. Presenting a public theology of peace-making in in the Reformed Church of Japan is a new departure for the journal in the sixth article. The articles conclude with four different contributors from last year’s International Consultation on Ecclesial Futures (ICEF) writing a Conference Report together. We also include three extended book reviews on important topics in our field to complete the issue.
Nigel Rooms, Co-Editor, Ecclesial Futures
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Ecclesial Futures
Vol. 4 No. 2 (2023)Welcome a new issue of Ecclesial Futures and another fine set of original research contributions on development and transformation in and through Christian communities.
This issue of Ecclesial Futures offers seven original research articles and six book reviews. The articles range over four continents, including contexts in Oceania, Africa, United States and Europe.
The focus of ecclesiological research includes local congregations, dioceses as a denominational structure and theological colleges. The research articles include empirical studies of placemaking, denominational renewal, reverse mission and migrant hospitality, along with methodological reflections on researching in theological partnership, church mobilization and missiological research.
I offer my congratulations to the thirteen authors and six book reviewers published in this issue and my thanks to the fourteen anonymous peer reviewers who provided constructive, thoughtful and engaged feedback. Thanks also to my colleagues Nigel Rooms (co-editor), Patrick Todjeras (editor of book reviews), Chris Pipe (copy-editor) and the team at Radboud University Press and Open Journals for their skill and care.
Through Diamond Open Access, all the articles and reviews is available free to authors and reader. Do please pass the news onto your colleagues and students. Do please invite them to receive updates via the newsletter, sign up at https://ecclesialfutures.org/.
‒ Steve Taylor, Co-Editor, December 2023
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Latest Articles
These are the latest articles to be published and available online before they are assigned to an Issue of the journal.
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Special Issue: Current Missional Church Perspectives in South Korea
Vol. 4 No. 1 (2023)It is with great joy that I can introduce our first ever special issue of Ecclesial Futures, focusing on Korean missional ecclesiology. As the guest editors, Bokyoung Park and Seonyi Lee write in the editorial, it came about as a result of the papers given at the International Association of Mission Studies Conference in Sydney in July 2022 in the “Christian Communities and Mission” Study Group track.
A number of these papers were from Korean scholars many of whom are younger and emerging – and wishing to present and publish in the English language. Our commitment in Ecclesial Futures is to broaden and widen the authorship of the journal globally and I trust this project goes some way to demonstrating what is possible.
It is important, in my view that we have seven articles all collected together in one place so that they can be taken as a whole – a significant contextual contribution from South Korea and its diaspora to scholarship in missional ecclesiology. I trust readers will be able both to delve into some of the helpful and detailed descriptions of missional working presented here and to learn from how Korean churches are responding, in the bigger picture, to how more traditional and attractional methods of Church growth seem to have had their day.
‒ Nigel Rooms, Co-Editor, June 2023
A print edition of this issue of Ecclesial Futures can be ordered from the publisher.
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Vol. 3 No. 2 (2022)
Welcome to another issue of Ecclesial Futures and another fine set of original research contributions on the development and transformation of local Christian communities.
This is also our second “Diamond Open Access” issue, with all our output free to download for readers, thanks to Radboud University Press and Open Journals.
The shift of Ecclesial Futures to “Diamond Open Access” has brought significant increase in downloads of abstracts, complete articles and book reviews. Do spread the news far and wide about this fantastic resource and invite your colleagues to subscribe to this Newsletter on the website.
The articles in this issue explore the interface between the individual and the communal in contemporary mission- how individual listening to the homeless results in transformations in communal belonging
- how a denomination might nurture cross-cultural friendships through relational ways of understanding the evangelistic sense of self
- how a film questions clergy-centric identities and communal processes of interpretation
- how the spiritual practice of beholding can form local communities in mission
- how embodied spiritual practices might offer a relational and dynamic participation in the missio Dei.
We also provide an activity report from the Christian Communities and Mission Study Group who gathered as part of International Association of Mission Studies 2022. This report reflects on hybrid conference and identifies current synergies and gaps in the development and transformation of local Christian communities. I commend the articles, report and book reviews to your reflecting, thinking and acting.
‒ Steve Taylor, Co-Editor, December 2022A print edition of this issue of Ecclesial Futures can be ordered here.
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Vol. 3 No. 1 (2022)
Ecclesial Futures 3.1 brings together some critical questions in missional ecclesiology addressed by a diverse set of authors from Britain and Europe. I hope this won’t always be the case, but it is interesting to have a group of articles addressing questions of ecclesial futures in the western world, all gathered in one place. There are significant overlaps and interactions between the articles as they are presented in the issue; use of the metaphor ‘pioneer’; how disciples are formed and grow into leadership; the forces ranged against such personal and communal maturation in discipleship; the importance in all this of embodied spiritual practices (and therefore neurotheological insights into the how the right hemisphere of the brain can help us) which all adds up to a very different understanding of ‘salvation’ from that which we inherited from our immediate forbears.
A print edition of this issue of Ecclesial Futures can be ordered here.
