'NiddriePastor' Tagged Posts (Page 22)
Thirsting for God!
I am reading a new book – Thirsting for God – by Gary L Thomas. The subtext is ‘Spiritual refreshment for the sacred journey’. It sounds painfully emergent and uber cool and comes with a big fat recommendation from one Mark Driscoll. The problem is that it seems to have elicited a very caustic response from within the ‘conservative…
10 Marks of Effective Church Plants (1)
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…
Parenting 101
My Thanks to my mate Steve Utley (my second favourite charismatic after CJ Mahaney – all he needs to do is send me 21 books and he will go back up the pecking order!) for posting this on Facebook. I suppose I better mention Andy Constable for sending me half of it in an email in an attempt to make himself appear more humorous and cutting edge than he really is! As…
Is it our job to make the gospel less offensive?
Consider this quote from Tim Keller: ‘ The church has got to become such that every part of its life is hospitable to people who are not believers or don’t know what they believe. So they can come into the groups and into worship, into virtually everything we do and not feel confused or…
Do we need worship leaders?
Many may argue against it (and do) but for me the rise of this ‘ministry’ is a very modern and ‘large church’ phenomenon. Interestingly, in Ed Stetzer’s book, he says that church plants should not consider opening their doors without having recruited a worship leader. Sorry to disagree Ed, but I just can’t see it as a necessity in the…
Leave me alone I know what I’m doing!
‘Church planters tend to be self starters and often think of themselves as self-sufficient. That personality test is often resistant to the advice of others – thinking, “If I’d listened to other people, I would not be planting the church in the first place”. So goes the quote in Ed Stetzer’s book. In context he is talking about the…
Incapacity Blaggers?
I have just read this article on the BBC website. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-13152349. What is interesting for me working in Niddrie is that we are dealing with practically every person categorised on their list of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants. I am unsure what they mean by the term ‘unknown causes’. It is a little troubling given that 130,000…
Reflections on Chicago’s Gospel Coalition Conference 2011
I just spent a week in the ‘windy city’ so called (according to R Kent Hughes) because its politicians of long ago were infamous for their long, drawn out speeches and not (as I had thought) because it was simply windy (which it was)! Anyway, during my time there I was privileged to…
The Mission Café
This is a video we made to let people know about our church café. The Mission Café is one of the bedrocks of our ministry here in Niddrie. We open nearly every day of the week. Some days are busier than others but more often than not the conversations will turn to spiritual things. Mary, the lady in the clip, was recently saved after going through the ‘Soul’…