Waymarks: Signposts for mission in a dying church; Introduction
INTRODUCTION - THE PROBLEM Nehemiah 2v17-18 “You see the trouble we are in. Jerusalem lies in ruins and its gates have been burned with fire.” I became a Christian when I was seventeen years old but I was brought up in a non-Christian home, like many families in post-war Britain. When I was 17, I heard a talk from Dr Cicely Saunders, a doctor who founded the hospice movement in the UK at St Christopher’s Hospice in London. I became an enthusiastic convert to Christianity. But many decades later I’ve experienced the pain of watching the churches in the UK in decline. I was at a conference some years ago and an Anglican vicar spoke of the death of the churches in his parish in Surrey. He said he was ministering to the dying, in a dying church. The problem is that there has been no arresting of that decline. Churches litter the UK landscape like monuments from a bygone age . Most church buildings were built in the nineteenth or twentieth century. Most are i...