Church Planting (Page 15)
Understanding the people we are trying to reach for Jesus
Research is a key component in any kind of church ministry. It doesn’t matter whether you are in a settled congregation, renewing a dying work, or planting from scratch, we need to research. What kind of church do we want to be? If we are going to answer this question with any degree of…
Are You A Pastor or a Planter?
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13 Ways the Church can Respond to the Needs of Bankrupt Britain!
I read a book this week called, ‘Bankrupt Britain: An Atlas of Social Change’ by Daniel Dorling. I, along with Ed Stetzer, have an unending fascination with statistics. I am also extremely sceptical of 95% of them at least 86.3% of the time. Some of the figures quoted are mind-boggling,…
The Rise & Fall of Housing Estates
This book is written by Lynsey Hanley and published by Granta books in 2007. This is quite a lengthy book (245 pages) given that it only contains 6 chapters. Is written by a lady who was born in a large housing estate in Birmingham, UK and latterly lived in the East End of London. She writes with a tangible sense of injustice at the way those of us who come from…
How do we help a generation damned by a lack of any work ethic?
Those of you who know me personally or have followed this blog for any length of time will know that I read a lot of books. A while back I read a book entitled, ‘Toxic Charity:How the Church Hurts Those They Help (and How to Reverse It)’. I will enclose a short review here, although…
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. These figures run from April – December 2011. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 28,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that…
All the 2012 Bible reading plans you could ever wish for (and then some)!
It’s that time of the year when everybody is posting a whole gamut of Bible reading plans online. I have listed some of my favourite ones below. 1. CrossWay offer a comprehensive list of plans here. They also offer a couple of interesting articles on how to prioritise what books we read.…
Replanting Dying Churches with Mark Dever
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Don’t work in schemes if you can’t use your brain!
By Andy Constable Biblical thinking can very often be in short supply among many young Christians who want to work in ‘poorer’ areas. They can be guilty of explicitly reasoning that ‘thinking’ is somehow unspiritual or implicitly believing that the people they are working with only need…
Youth Groups That Do What They Say On The Tin!
In the UK, there’s a product called Ronseal. It’s a popular varnish/wood stain product available in most hardware stores. Their advertising strap line is really well known: it’s supposed to be simple, straight-forward, and down-to-earth. “Ronseal: It does exactly what it says on the tin.” In…