Niddrie Community Church (Page 34)
The power of an invitation
by Mike Stark This past week we’ve had another team over from Champion Forest Baptist Church, Houston, Texas. This is the second team we’ve had over from the US this year. Its always a great encouragement to us as a church, as the Americans inject a bit of money, man-power, and enthusiasm to the work in Niddrie. On Saturday night we had an X-Factor style…
Wanted: Female Youth Worker
by Mike Stark One of my overall strategies for the future of the youth ministry at Niddrie Community Church is to have youth work shared between a team of committed leaders. One of the things I have become increasingly aware of in Niddrie over the past 2 years is that I’m incapable of having a significant impact in the lives of young people in Niddrie by myself. A…
Effective Discipleship For a Non Reading Generation
Great little post here on community-shaped discipleship in youth work by Josh Cousineau. He sets up 2 models of discipleship we might employ in our youth work; 1) giving them a chapter of a good book to read and discussing it together the next week, or 2) living life together in community, allowing…
Growing Indigenous Leaders
We’re really blessed on the ministry team here at NCC to have 8 individuals with different gifts, abilities, and backgrounds. We wouldn’t be so effective as a team if we were all the same as Mez. God intends for His church to be a diverse body of believers (Rom 12:4-10, 1 Cor 12:14-31), and the ministry team benefits from a similar diversity. It would be…
Children need time, not stuff
According to the BBC, British children are among the least happy in the developed world. This is the breaking news that we’re living in a materialistic world where parents are working longer hours to make more money, and as a result are spending less time with their children, which, according to the Unicef research, is the thing the children crave most.…
Win them with fun!
For the past few weeks I’ve been blogging about an evangelical documentary on youth ministry from the States, produced in association with the National Centre for Family Integrated Churches, called Divided. If you missed my previous posts, you can check them out here: PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 So far I’ve been quite critical about the film but, as I’ve…
Is youth ministry biblical? PART 3
Hopefully by now you’re familiar with the American short film called Divided. It comes from the NCFIC (National Centre for Family Integrated Churches) and it makes the case against segregated youth ministry as it has no basis in scripture and is founded upon pagan evolutionary principles. If you missed my first two posts, you can find them here: PART 1 and PART 2.…
Showcasing Niddrie Community Church
For the past 10 days, I’ve been putting together this short video that showcases some of the work of Niddrie Community Church. It includes: What Niddrie’s like What the church is doing How the gospel is impacting lives What our plans are for the future It’s 5½ minutes long. I’m pretty sick of the video by now, but I hope you enjoy it!…
Is youth ministry biblical? PART 2
A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to an American short film called Divided. If you missed it, here’s the first post: ‘Is youth ministry biblical?‘ As promised, I’m going to take the opportunity over the next few weeks to reflect on some of the issues raised by the movie. According to the movie, ‘youth ministry’ has no basis in Scripture,…
Is youth ministry biblical? PART 1
My name’s Mike Stark, I’m the lead youth worker at Niddrie Community Church. Mez brought this interesting little video to my attention. Here’s the trailer (3 minutes long), which gives you a flavour of the argument. The movie is called ‘Divided’ and was produced in conjunction with The National Centre for Family-Integrated Churches. The…