A great place to spend some time is the back articles section of the Road to Emmaus Journal and there’s one article in particular that I’ve been waiting to get added: Celtomania in Eastern Siberia.

I heard Fr. Nicanor Lupeshev give a talk (and show a video) on this a few years back, and I was struck by the way in which Orthodox Christianity could interact with a very different culture. This is all good cross-cultural mission, but remember that Fr. Nicanor is a monk-priest and so has long hair, a long beard and wears a large cross over his robes.

This, then, is mission which is authentic and which does not try and pretend to be something else. Read it!

Picture from Arturo

Mr. Gramling’s Flamingo Road Church, which has a weekly attendance of 8,000, is based in Broward County, Fla., where he records his sermons on DVD for screenings here, as well as at three branches in South Florida. Each church uses the same distinctive music, banners and logo — a white cube bisected by a black curving road. Mr. Gramling says he tried to copy the success of Starbucks by assembling a creative team to hone “the look, the feel, the branding idea, of what Flamingo Road is.” Like Starbucks, Mr. Gramling is thinking big. His goal is 50 churches world-wide, 100,000 members and a $150 million-a-year budget.

From inspired by Starbucks from the Wall Street Journal.

Flamingo Church is an example of a church which is influenced by the Purpose Driven model (its minister has written on this here). We’ll be talking about this, as well as other models of church including the emergent church on Thursday. This is a taster to get you thinking before then…