Church
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The Only Way Forward Is to Remember Who We Are
The future of the church won’t be found in preserving buildings or replicating past models—it will be found in recovering the heart that shaped them. Mary Ann Gibson’s faith, courage, and hospitality lit a fire in Tasmania. The question for us is: will we follow that same Spirit today?
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Lessons for the Church Today: Insights from Revelation’s Seven Churches
The letters to the seven churches in Revelation are not simply historical documents preserved for a bygone era. They offer timeless lessons that speak directly to the heart of the church today. Each letter addresses specific issues within the church, but together, they present a powerful picture of the challenges, temptations, and opportunities facing every Christian community. Central themes such as love, faithfulness, endurance, truth, repentance, and victory emerge from these letters, calling us to reflect on our own spiritual condition. Jesus walks among His people, fully aware of their struggles, victories, and failures. He praises faithfulness, condemns moral compromise, and offers hope to those willing to repent. These letters…
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Is it time for Baptist churches to shine?
If we can recover the DNA that was the impetus for our founding, Baptists might have something particular to bring to this cultural moment.
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Should Christians tithe?
Our church is raising funds to repair some chairs, which are badly in need of it. The different responses to the need got me thinking, so I wrote about it in our church newsletter and thought I’d re-post it here along with the video I did about tithing a while ago. I was encouraged and challenged when I heard in yesterday’s executive meeting that our Nepalese congregation had raised enough money to restore 43 chairs at Lenah Valley. Last I heard, the Aussie congregations had raised enough for 19. I was pondering the different levels of response. Part of it can be attributed to the fact that our Nepalese congregation…
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Do you know what Eternal Life is?
This is another draft chapter from the book I’m working on… I’d appreciate any feedback. I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.Then the world will know that you sent meand have loved themeven as you have loved me.John 17:23 NIV Do you ever feel powerless? Do you ever feel like you don’t have what it takes? Jesus understood that his disciples simply would not have the capacity to glorify God, which is why he prayed what he did in John 17:23. His prayer points to another much-misunderstood aspect of Christian teaching: Eternal Life. My Father, Mal, often told the story of a…
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The cover-up that has robbed you of precious truth.
I have been gradually posting excerpts from the book I am working on about Jesus’ prayer for the church in John 17. In my last post on this (The wrong Gospel and wrong mission) I pointed out that Jesus seemed to believe the main thing the church needed to do in order to help the world believe in him was to love each other. In this draft chapter I unpack what Jesus said he gave us so that might be possible, and it leads to an exploration of what Eugene Peterson calls a “cover up” by Modern Christians of a central biblical truth. Here’s what I’ve got so far: So,…
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The WRONG Gospel and the WRONG Mission
Like it or not we have been deeply shaped by our cultural context and our cultural context is deeply shaped by consumerism and that consumerism has shaped even our approach to church and the gospel. We confused goals and outcomes. We heard Jesus’ heart that “the world may believe” through our consumerist lens and assumed he had given us a product to sell. We interpreted his great commission at the end of Matthew, to “go and make disciples of all nations,”[1] in the same way. This led to our understanding of mission as primarily the communication of ideas, as Donald McGavran put it: “an enterprise devoted to proclaiming the good…
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We will need a miracle
We have all had experiences of groups trying to be ‘one’. I like watching sport and I think part of the reason team sport is an important part of the human experience is that it gives structured opportunities for human beings to experience a taste the kind of oneness we crave. When a good basketball or football team is playing well it is almost magical. Players somehow intuitively know where each other are on the court or field and pass the ball, not to where their teammate is, but to where their teammate will be when the ball arrives. It is a beautiful thing to watch and can give a…
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A North Star from which to find our bearings
What is the Christian church meant to be? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think. Christians (mostly) agree that some parts of the New Testament are not directly relevant to us because they were written to a specific group of people in a particular cultural context. There are now very few churches that, based on 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, forbid women from cutting their hair, men from having long hair, and direct women to only come to church if they are wearing a hat. Most churches don’t follow this biblical instruction because a woman with short or uncovered hair was as shameful as a man with long hair in…
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How do we build community online?
While we all look forward to the day we can meet in person once more, we will continue to explore what it means to build community in a digital world, because we must.
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There is a tidal wave coming… it is time to prepare
We are at the start of a long and complicated journey that the church could either be a great source of comfort and hope in, or else we could find ourselves as helpless bystanders.
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The Coronavirus Reformation
Matt is talking about how the Coronavirus is asking the church to reform in a matter of days to respond to the reality we now face.
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You don’t know it, but you need a Kingdom Cell.
You might not have heard of a Kingdom Cell and you may not think you are missing one. Let me explain how it will change the trajectory of your life.
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Have we forgotten the three questions of friendship?
It seems we have forgotten how to make and keep friends. New research indicates that one in four people feel lonely at least once a week. Apparently, experts are declaring that loneliness might well be our next public health epidemic. I am convinced that the reason this is happening is that we are losing our understanding of the nature of true friendship and also the art of relationship negotiation that is an essential part of any healthy friendship.
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You are not my enemy. You are my neighbour.
I have come to see that our church needs to be ready to relate to people at seven different levels:
