Stories from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart Mclean

Stories from the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart Mclean

Think of the thriving evangelical churches in your area, and the chances are they will be in the nice areas of town and their leaders will be middle class. I once attended a lecture at which the speaker showed a map of my city, Sheffield. The council wards were colored different shades, according to a series of social indicators: educational achievement, household income, benefit recipients, social housing, criminal activity, and so on. Slide after slide showed that the east side of the city was the needy, socially deprived half, compared to the more prosperous west. Where are the churches? Counting all the various tribes of evangelicalism, the large churches are on the west side. The working-class and deprived areas of our cities are not being reached with the gospel. There are many exciting exceptions, but the pattern is clear. According to Mez McConnell from Niddrie Community Church in Edinburgh, of the fifty worst housing schemes in Scotland, half have no church, and most of the others only have a dying church. Very few have an evangelical witness. This book is about reaching those unreached areas. The Industrial Revolution saw increased social stratification. It was during this time that middle-class and working-class identities began to emerge. And in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, evangelicalism appealed disproportionately to skilled artisans, according to historian David Bebbington. So why have we evangelicals been so ineffectual at reaching the urban poor, despite our origins?

STUART McLEAN was the writer and host of the popular CBC Radio show The Vinyl Cafe. He is the author of the bestselling books Vinyl Cafe Diaries, which won the short fiction award from the Canadian Authors Association; The Morningside World of Stuart McLean, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Awards; Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada, which won the CAA's award for nonfiction; and Home from the Vinyl Cafe, Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, all three of which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He received the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He passed away on February 15, 2017.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780140251029
ISBN 10	0140251022
Title	Stories from the Vinyl Cafe
Author	Stuart Mclean
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Penguin Random House Australia
Year published	1996-10-31
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable