Kester Brewin

Author: KB

  • Emerging Church and the Holy Spirit [3]

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    In the last post on this I tried to argue that we need to re-imagine our language of spiritual gifts, and used some of Lewis Hyde’s thinking on gift to consider how, in fact, any transaction that occurs in the ‘gift economy’ is actually rooted in God’s breathing into us. When you let someone into…

  • Emerging Church and the Holy Spirit [2]

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    I ended the last post – which was a critique of Chris Simmons’ article in Christianity accusing the Emerging Church of lacking power manifestations, and thus lacking the Spirit – by arguing that we needed a fresh understanding of the concept of ‘gift’. It is only by doing this that we can prevent the hijack…

  • Is the Emerging Church Lacking the Spirit? [1]

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    EC and Spirit [2] | EC and Spirit [3] | EC and Spirit [4] Any visit to my parents’ house requires the customary penance to be done: reading all the Christian press that they subscribe to. October’s Christianity carried an article which questioned whether the Emerging Church was lacking the Spirit. Their much-used stock graphic…

  • Beyond Self Actualization

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    In a great post [ here ] Will Samson describes how the dominant psychological metaphor for our culture, as set out in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, needs pushing further. Maslow’s system is very much based around the needs of the individual, and Will has done some thinking about how, once the individual ‘self’ is actualized,…

  • Leadership and Ethics […] 5 – What Does This Mean in Practice?

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    In a comment on the last post on leadership ‘Emerger’ asked: “What does this mean in real life? The most I can draw out so far is that we facilitate conversation. I don’t think that in itself is enough.” He/she then goes on to propose some thoughts on work by Carver and Bell (“John Carver…

  • The Gift: What Separates Us From The Apes?

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    Very interesting feature in the journal Nature (article here; podcast here) about new research that shows that chimps have absolutely no altruistic bones in their bodies. Given carefully constructed opportunities to do a friend a favour… they just didn’t. This research doesn’t, of course, prove that true altruism exists in humankind. Many would say it…