About

Deep Church is a blog dedicated to helping Christians (and particularly those interested in theology and church leadership) to access the resources and wisdom of Christian history and the wider Christian world in order to address contemporary church life and the wider culture.

While I (Phil) work and minister as a charismatic evangelical in a British free-church, the material posted here endeavours to draw from the deep ecumenical tradition shared across the different wings of the church. The Deep Church idea has been around in contemporary discussions for a long time.  It also embodies something profound that can be found in the commitment to the catholicity of the Church going all the way back to Paul (see Galatians 1, for example).

In summary, people writing as part of the Deep Church movement tend to do so with certain values. The articles you will find here aim to embody these values:

  1. We love, cherish and obey Scripture. It is the supreme authority for all true Christian doctrine and is true in all it teaches.
  2. We love and cherish the Church in all its fullness. It is the Bride of Christ, beautiful even in the midst of its imperfections and failures.
  3. We revere and honour the deep traditions of the Church, believing her to have been lead and guided (in the midst of her stubbornes and sin) by the Holy Spirit. In doing so we recognise that the fragmentation of the Church is in part a tragedy and prioritise hearing the voice of the Fathers and Mothers who have gone before us.
  4. We seek to understand and learn from our brothers and sisters in every denomination, movement or wing of the global Church. While we do not ignore the theological and historical differences that separate us, we recognise that we share a common love for Christ and commitment to Nicene orthodoxy.
  5. We love one another. We therefore write in a spirit of charity and clarity, seeking both to understand and to be understood.
  6. We love the world. God made it, God loves it, God gave Jesus to save it. Our aim, therefore, is to equip the Church for mission in order that we might share in that expression of his love for it.
  7. We reject any form of hatred of persons either in speech or act. We are therefore committed to writing respectfully and avoiding, as far as possible, personal insults or unkindness.
  8. We reject the idea that to disagree with someone’s ideas or behaviour is an expression of hatred or can reasonably construed as such. We therefore critique ideas, movements and actions robustly and sincerely and invite others to do the same.

If you are interested in the Deep Church idea, you might want to check out this further reading.