ABSTRACT
It is a great honour for the author to take part in the inauguration of the new Centre for Ecclesiology and Practical Theology. A dramatic, distinctive and unexpected action takes place in the public square. Theology as such must, of course, be rooted in the narrative that is in scripture, and it flows from scripture, or it is flying under false colours. In western churches in general, and particularly perhaps in the author's, there is an obsession with statistics which is not far short of idolatry. If Practical Theology as an academic study has a central concern with practice it does not have a monopoly among the theological disciplines of this concern, any more than Biblical Studies has an exclusive interest in studying the Bible, or Dogmatics a monopoly of concern with doctrine. Fragments, of course, come from somewhere; they have been quarried.
