10:00 Welcome from Revd Dr Jen Brown
10:05 Mark Clavier
Consuming Delights: What Augustine can teach us about mission in a consumer society
This session will draw on Augustine’s rhetorical theology to show how consumerism shapes our identities and desires that undermine the Church’s ministry and mission before they have begun. His theology, however, also offers a solution: instructing, delighting, and persuading people by offering God’s eloquent wisdom.
Mark is an American who has now lived in the U.K. for thirteen years. He currently serves as Residentiary Canon of Brecon Cathedral and is Director of Convivium: an initiative to connect faith with local environments, heritage, and communities. Previously, he was Acting Principal and Dean of Residentiary Training at St Michael’s Theological College in Cardiff and Vice-Principal of St Stephen’s House, Oxford. Before that, he was a parish priest for fourteen years in the States and England. He is the author of four books, including Rescuing the Church from Consumerism and On Consumer Culture, Identity, the Church, and Rhetorics of Delight. His next book, A Pilgrimage of Paradoxes: A Backpacker’s Encounters with God and Nature is due out later this year.
11:00 Dr Michael Dormandy, Cuddesdon Lecturer in New Testament
Greed or Grace? Church in a Consumerist World in Jesus’ Time and Ours
Michael studied Classics and later Theology at Oxford University. He then completed a PhD at Cambridge University in the earliest Greek manuscripts that contain the entire Bible. His research has been published in Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism and Studia Patristica. He has also published a Latin textbook and a critical edition of a work by a seventeenth-century, Catholic priest, Bartholomaeus Holzhauser. He was a visiting student at the University of Salzburg and a Research Fellow at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies, Innsbruck.
12:00 Revd Dr Chris Goswami
Is Consumerism a vehicle or a roadblock to your church’s mission?
Chris has worked for 30 years in the technology industry and is currently Vice-President of Communications and Marketing at a Silicon Valley company. Brought up a Hindu, Chris became a Christian at 19 and has served in many roles in local churches, Anglican and Baptist. Chris writes for Christian publications and his blog www.7minutes.net has won multiple awards. Currently Chris is Associate Minister at Lymm Baptist Church in Cheshire.