Blog
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Rise and Decline of Western Civilisation
Brexit, Corbyn and Trump Jeremy Corbyn It has been an interesting year in politics! I started writing this on the day that Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected leader of the British Labour Party. Perceived as an “anti-establishment” figure, he has challenged […]
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Modelling Secularisation
Part 3 of Christianity versus the Diversity Ideology In two previous blogs [1,2] I have been constructing a dynamic model of the competition between Christianity and the new secular ideology. The idea is that as Christianity declines in the West, […]
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Churches or Political Parties: Who has the Largest Membership?
Who has the greatest membership in the UK, the churches or the politcial parties? How do the dynamics of growth and decline compare?
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Revival is Real
After all the blogs on church decline, I felt I needed to write on something more positive. Not that I am negative about the future of the Christian church. The Lord Jesus promised that his gospel would cover the earth […]
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Conversion to the Diversity Ideology
Part 2 – Justification of Hypotheses In a previous blog [1], I outlined a system dynamics model of how Christianity is losing ground to a new movement in society, which I nicknamed the “Diversity Ideology”. I chose this name because […]
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The New Ideology
Part 1 – Model Construction In the last two blogs, I have referred to the “New Ideology”, an ideology which is gradually taking the place of Christianity in Western societies [1] and causing division in the Christian church [2]. So […]
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Where to Plant a Church?
Big City, Small Town, or Rural? Despite church decline, church planting continues at a fast pace. In the cities of the UK, the church landscape has a generous number of recently established, glossy, relatively wealthy, contemporary churches. It would appear […]
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Rewriting History
The other day I visited a Welsh mining museum [1]. The lady showing us around was describing the poor working conditions in the early 1800s, 10 hours a day underground, plus a long walk to work and back. She then […]
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Church Growth Limited by Inadequate Resource Production
Limits to Church Growth 3 In two previous blogs, I looked at congregational growth being limited by: Demand from society [1]; Supply by the church [1]; Lack of enthusiasts [2]. However, even if there is an unlimited potential […]
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Why Revivals Stopped in the UK
And The Churches Declined In two previous posts, I showed that the growth of the Presbyterian denomination in Wales came from a sequence of revivals that gave it a high conversion rate. Consequently, its subsequent decline was due to a […]
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Revival and Church Growth – Dealing with Objections
In two previous posts [1,2] I used the growth and decline of the Presbyterian denomination in Wales to put forward two complementary theses: The growth of the church in the UK from the mid-1730s to the 1870s was due […]
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The “Twitter Mob” and Free Speech – A Systems Perspective
Some Thoughts on the Christmas Message of David Robertson, Free Church of Scotland Recently David Robertson, Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland, delivered a Christmas message where he said society was becoming a monochrome culture where genuine diversity was being […]
In 1904-5, Moriah chapel was the centre of massive church growth in Wales through a God-sent revival.