10 Marks of an Effective Church Plant
10 Marks of Effective Church Plants (10)
Prayer Stetzer’s 10th mark is ‘Appreciating & Participating in Ancient Patterns’ (p140) but I have gone with prayer. Without prayer we are lost. It is the engine room of any planting ‘strategy’. When I first arrived at NCC it did what all good churches do – it had a midweek ‘prayer meeting’. I say prayer but it was more…
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Leading Teams Teams are important for planting churches. The lone ranger approach just doesn’t cut it, particularly in council housing estates. Often, men ask me for my opinion on planting churches and one of the first questions I ask is this: ‘What is your main spiritual gifting?’ Almost 100% of the time the answer is Bible teacher, or preacher. Great gifts but wrong…
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Living Community I find the whole concept of ‘community’ fascinating. It’s suddenly become very fashionable in ‘forward thinking churches’ (as they very ‘forwardly’ like to call themselves) to throw this whole concept around like a big beach ball. The problem being that people like to bat the thing about but nobody wants to keep it hold of it very long because it is a bit…
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Connecting With technology ‘Technology is so much a part of our cultural experience that it’s not optional for a church reaching emerging generation’. (P141) Stetzer refers to a couple of churches that, in his mind, use technology to good effect in their services. One is www.cornerstone-sf.org who, apparently, like to project stained glass images on to surfaces where…
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Visualising Worship According to Stetzer, worship has become more visual. When we (at his church) sing of blood we show blood. When we sing of Christ, we use art from the ages to show Christ.’ (P140). I found this fascinating. In the conservative circles in which I was saved it was noticeable that I never found any images, crosses or anything remotely ‘religious’…
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Preaching narrative Expository Messages There is an increasing argument (in some circles) that the so-called ‘moderns’ of the last century responded well to more ‘concrete’ biblical messages (on passages like the Epistles, for instance). Whereas, the postmodern mindset responds far better to the story telling approach to biblical preaching. Certainly, when we look at the…
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Experiential Praise ‘A community that provides people with a dynamic and participative worship is providing a powerful apologetic to people open to the spiritual yet unaware of how to connect with the spirit. Those without Christ cannot worship God. However, through such worship, these “already religious” people can see true believers praising God in spirit and in truth,…
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Engaging in Service This is an important aspect of what we try to do here at Niddrie. Many of the care professions in the UK are now recognising (rediscovering) the importance of ‘connecting’ people with community. For example, we work closely with a local charity here that cares for people with mental and/or physical needs. ‘Clients’ who used to…
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Promoting Incarnational Ministry I wrote about this earlier in the week so I am not going to repeat myself too much. According to Stetzer: ‘Postmoderns are looking for people who are genuine and transparent. Their questions isn’t, is it true? But, is it real? They want to see Christ through people who’ve earned their respect and trust.’ (p137) Now,…
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BEING UNASHAMEDLY SPIRITUAL According to Ed Stetzer in ‘Planting Missional Churches‘, people in our postmodern culture are open to all sorts of ‘spirituality’. We certainly see this in Niddrie, particularly in our community cafe. People talk about all sorts of things: horoscopes, Ouija boards, tarot cards, spiritists, mediums (still trying to work…