Just Launched: Learning From London with Jason Fout

Holy Trinity Brompton (often affectionately called HTB) has been especially successful in creating new worship communities in London.

We’ve just launched Learning From London with Jason Fout For Individuals and For Groups .

There has been much discussion both in the media and among Christians about the church’s decline in recent decades. A Pew Research Study released in 2015 revealed that in the U.S., Christians as a whole declined by almost 8% between 2007 and 2014. Mainline Protestant church membership declined by 3.4%; Roman Catholic church membership declined by 3.1%; evangelical churches declined at a slower, but steady rate. Meanwhile, the number of Americans, particularly younger Americans, who identified themselves as atheists, agnostics, or as nothing in particular, rose by 6.7%.

The Anglican Church is experiencing this decline. The reasons for it have been analyzed and re-analyzed, along with many suggestions for how the church can remain relevant, spreading the good news in a society that no longer orients itself around the church as it did for so many years. The church needs to adapt to not being the cultural center it used to be, and the Diocese of London is modeling creative and effective ways to make that happen.

Under the circumstances, we should pay close attention to the fact that in a city that is largely disengaged with the church (only around 8% of London’s population attends church on Sunday), the Diocese of London has been growing. It grew by 16% between 2002-2012, and it has maintained those numbers since then. It has been experimenting with new approaches to building worship communities, and those communities have proven remarkably effective. Jason Fout, an associate professor of Anglican theology at Bexley Seabury Seminary Foundation, spends a lot of his time teaching in London and has studied the Diocese of London extensively to discover the reasons for its great success in a time of decline.

In this class, Jason describes what the Diocese of London is doing and why it works. In his first lesson, he offers an overview of the Diocese of London’s approach and its success. In the second lesson, he discusses ways in which Diocese of London churches (Holy Trinity Brompton in particular) have reduced the thresholds that were keeping them from connecting with people in their communities. In the third and fourth lesson, he examines the Diocese of London’s approach to planting churches and building new worship communities and why these ventures have been successful.

This class is ideal for anyone interested in learning about revitalizing churches and connecting effectively with people in their communities. For a preview of the course, please click here.

Just Launched: Learning From London with Jason Fout

Holy Trinity Brompton (often affectionately called HTB) has been especially successful in creating new worship communities in London.

We’ve just launched Learning From London with Jason Fout For Individuals and For Groups .

There has been much discussion both in the media and among Christians about the church’s decline in recent decades. A Pew Research Study released in 2015 revealed that in the U.S., Christians as a whole declined by almost 8% between 2007 and 2014. Mainline Protestant church membership declined by 3.4%; Roman Catholic church membership declined by 3.1%; evangelical churches declined at a slower, but steady rate. Meanwhile, the number of Americans, particularly younger Americans, who identified themselves as atheists, agnostics, or as nothing in particular, rose by 6.7%.

The Anglican Church is experiencing this decline. The reasons for it have been analyzed and re-analyzed, along with many suggestions for how the church can remain relevant, spreading the good news in a society that no longer orients itself around the church as it did for so many years. The church needs to adapt to not being the cultural center it used to be, and the Diocese of London is modeling creative and effective ways to make that happen.

Under the circumstances, we should pay close attention to the fact that in a city that is largely disengaged with the church (only around 8% of London’s population attends church on Sunday), the Diocese of London has been growing. It grew by 16% between 2002-2012, and it has maintained those numbers since then. It has been experimenting with new approaches to building worship communities, and those communities have proven remarkably effective. Jason Fout, an associate professor of Anglican theology at Bexley Seabury Seminary Foundation, spends a lot of his time teaching in London and has studied the Diocese of London extensively to discover the reasons for its great success in a time of decline.

In this class, Jason describes what the Diocese of London is doing and why it works. In his first lesson, he offers an overview of the Diocese of London’s approach and its success. In the second lesson, he discusses ways in which Diocese of London churches (Holy Trinity Brompton in particular) have reduced the thresholds that were keeping them from connecting with people in their communities. In the third and fourth lesson, he examines the Diocese of London’s approach to planting churches and building new worship communities and why these ventures have been successful.

This class is ideal for anyone interested in learning about revitalizing churches and connecting effectively with people in their communities. For a preview of the course, please click here.

Just Launched: The Living Diet with Martha Tatarnic

We just launched The Living Diet For Individuals and For Groups.

A family celebrates a military member’s homecoming with her favorite meal: pork tamales, rice, and black beans, with her grandmother’s famous tres leches cake for dessert.

A woman and her son make zucchini soup for the family out of the giant zucchini that they grew together in the backyard over the summer.

Old college friends get together 0nce a month to make sure they keep up with each other. They always meet at an Italian restaurant run by one of the friend’s family members and share her homemade pasta dishes and a bottle or two of red wine.

Which of these meals is the most healthful?

According to most diets, probably the zucchini soup. According to the living diet, they are all healthy choices.

In this class, Martha Tatarnic, rector of St. George’s Anglican Church in St. Catharines, Ontario and author of the book The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating , describes a new approach to food. Traditional approaches to healthy eating focus mainly on the physical and treat individual bodies as separate from the community and from their surroundings — like machines that need certain kinds of fuel in order t to function. The living diet, however, takes as its premise that people are connected to the world through what they eat. We take in energy from the plants and animals we consume, and we make choices that connect us to one another and to the world around us in different ways depending on the approach we take to eating.

In this course, Martha describes ways in which we can build physical, spiritual and emotional health by acknowledging and building our relationships through our choices about food. Lesson one identifies unhealthy eating patterns in our culture — patterns inherent in traditionally healthy diets as well as in fast food and the like — and identifies their root cause. Lesson two discusses Jesus as a model for eating according to the living diet. Lesson three talks about what it means to eat according to the living diet and why eating that way involves a series of healthy choices. Lesson four explains what healthy approaches to food look like on the living diet, with examples, and contrasts it to traditional definitions of healthy eating.

This course is ideal for anyone who is interested in food, building community, or healthy living. For a preview of the course, click here.