as distinct from this one, who stars in the serial Lost:
For those of you with long memories, Matthew Fox 1 published a book back in the 80's called Original Blessing, and the 9 o Clock Service in Sheffield (NOS) got heavily into his thinking. NOS was a pioneer church, which nowadays would be called a 'fresh expression', embedded in youth and urban club culture, and completely unlike anything else in the CofE. It fell apart after revelations of abusive leadership started to come out. There's no connection between the abuse and Fox himself, but the adoption of Fox's theology was part of the way NOS distanced itself from mainstream worship and theology. There was very much a sense of 'you don't understand what we're doing so you can't criticise us' which the NOS leadership hid behind, and Fox's 'Creation Spirituality' was part of this. The first few minutes of the BBC's Everyman report on NOS is on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I9emFLBORY .
Fox was thrown out of the RC church for various misdemeanours, but then recieved into the Episcopal church in the early 90's. So he's a fellow Anglican, but that's one of the few points of agreement I probably have with him!
At the time there weren't any substantial critiques of Fox's work, so I spent 2 years ploughing through his many books and analysing it all. I dug out the floppy disks the other day, and have managed to translate most of the content into a Word file format, and the next step is to get it onto the web somehow. I won't publish large chunks of it here, as this blog has already become much more wide-ranging than I'd intended (!) but if you're interested in a copy, email me via our church website.
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