In today's fluid culture, many churches are adrift--longing to reach spiritually thirsty people, but failing to make an impact. Have you noticed? Congregations are stuck or declining. Millennials and Gen Z are walking away. Volunteers and their generosity are drying up. Is your city, town, or neighborhood spiritually dry? Do you long to see more of the living water of Jesus flowing freely through your community, generating a fresh wave of ministry momentum? Buckle up: you're in for a whitewater ride! Liquid Church tells the fascinating story of a New Jersey church that began "on accident" and grew into one of America's 100 Fastest-Growing Churches, with over 5,000 in weekly attendance and more than 2,400 baptisms to date. Their secret? They harnessed the power of six powerful ministry currents sweeping across North America including: special needs, creative communication, ministry mergers, compassionate cause, radical generosity, and leadership development. With powerful stories and scriptural insights, backed by national research, Tim Lucas and Warren Bird describe dozens of fresh ideas, new ministry wineskins, and hard-won leadership learnings that resonate with rising generations in today's "show-then-tell" culture. Each chapter includes practical tools, real-life examples, and links to "Other Churches Making Waves" with cutting-edge ministry ideas designed to help saturate your city for Christ. Ready to dive deeper? Whether you serve a brand-new church plant, fast-growing congregation, or an aging ministry ready for reinvention, Liquid Church is an inspiring and practical guide for leaders ready to reach their spiritually thirsty neighbors--those who have given up on church, but haven't given up on God.

A visionary book for the emergent church. The church must be like water--flexible, fluid, changeable. This book is a vision for how the church can embrace the liquid nature of culture rather than just scrambling to keep afloat while sailing over it. Ward urges us to move away from the traditional notion of church as a gathering of people meeting in one place at one time to the dynamic notion of the emergent church as a series of relationships and communications. In the Liquid Church, membership is determined by participation and involvement. Liquid Church is continually on the move, flowing in response to the Spirit and the gospel of Jesus, the imagination and creativity of its leaders, and the choices and experiences of it worshippers. In this provocative, insightful, and challenging book, Pete Ward presents his vision of a Liquid Church that addresses the needs of the isolated consumer-Christian by providing connection and community, located in common cause and similar desire for God.

In Liquid Ecclesiology Pete Ward explores the theological contours of the turn to ethnography in the study of the Christian Church. His approach rests on a theology of culture that holds in tension and paradox the expression of the Church and divine presence. This theological framework is then developed through an extended qualitative empirical case study examining the communicative practices of the contemporary evangelical Church. The case study examines how the evangelical Gospel through expression has become marginalised in the everyday life of communities being replaced by a new more individual and personalised theology seen in worship songs. The final section of the book returns to the debates around ethnographic forms of theology and the question of normativity. This book will be of interest to all those engaged in empirical and theological work, as well as those researching the contemporary Church and evangelicalism

A collection of essays exploring the theme of an emerging or postmodern theology posted on the Open Source Theology website between 2002 and 2007.

"To make sense of the contemporary nature of the Church we must understand the way that encounter with God is mediated by cultural expression. Through participation in expression the contemporary Church is both a lived in 'culture' while it is also 'in-dwelt' by the Trinitarian God. Participation and Mediation explores the cultural and theological nature of the contemporary Church." "The book divides into three parts. The first discusses modern theology, mission studies and practical theology as part of a converging on the cultural. It sets Practical Theology within a wider theological discussion within modernity and a turn to 'culture'. The second part argues for a theological approach to Practical Theology based on a theology of participation and mediation. The relationship between theology and the operation of media is discussed. Part Three deals with the Liquid Nature of the Church based around the Christian Culture industry, commodification and identity."--BOOK JACKET.

"Religion inside and outside Traditional Institutions" combines conceptual reflection, methodological proposals, and research results that help to understand contemporary religious praxis. These contributions to empirical theology thereby adopt a perspective which includes religious praxis outside traditional institutions.

Is religion dying out in Western societies? Is personal spirituality taking its place? Both stories are inadequate. Institutional religion is not simply coming to an end in Western societies. Rather, its assets and properties are redistributed: large parts of the church have gone into liquidation. Religion is crossing the boundaries of the parish and appears in other social contexts. In the fields of leisure, health care and contemporary culture, religion has an unexpected currency. The metaphor of liquidation provides an alternative to approaches that merely perceive the decline of religion or a spiritual revolution. Religion is becoming liquid. By examining a number of case studies in the Netherlands and beyond, including World Youth Day, television, spiritual centers, chaplaincy, mental healthcare, museums and theatre, this book develops a fresh way to look at religion in late modernity and produces new questions for theological and sociological debate. It is both an exercise in sociology and an exercise in practical theology conceived as the engaged study of religious praxis. As such, the aim is not only to get a better understanding of what is going on, but also to critique one-sided views and to provide alternative perspectives for those who are active in the religious field or its surroundings.

"The Monkey and the Fish" decodes profound shifts and events taking place in the world today due to globalism, multiculturalism, and technology, and introduces an original approach to ministry, church, and leadership known as The Third Culture.

If you feel caught between the traditional church and the emerging church, read Jim Belcher. He paints a picture of an alternate, "deep" church--a missional church committed to both tradition and contemporary culture, valuing innovation in worship, arts and community but also adhering to creeds and confessions.

There has been a growing interest in the rapidly evolving nature of cities in the past 10-15 years, but especially in the last 5 years, and the profound impact this is having upon our understanding of community, belonging and church. This book shows that theology in an urban context has developed way beyond the inner-city nostaligia. It is a challenging, critical and constructive study of the role of the church in cities.