• I love this story (via Kent, our son teaching in South Korea) about James Kim who loves the people of North Korea and has talked that government into allowing him to open an English speaking university which offers an MBA. His primary allegiance is to God. This guy is so out of the box that he is contagious.
• USA Today has a story on the largest churches in America -- Lakewood (43,500 avg attendance); LifeChurch.tv (26,766 avg attendance); Willow Creek (23,400 avg attendance). Is anyone else concerned that the largest church in America is characterized by a health and wealth approach to the gospel?
• Quotable:
...Having said all this, the “great halls” (stadiums) of preaching distribution will not connect to the lost souls of post-Christendom. Post-Christian people are not attracted to the sermon as the first place to go in their spiritual distress. We must help leaders understand that if you spend 35-40 hours a week in your office preparing a good sermon on Sunday, making it not only theologically competent (which is worthy) but slick, you are ministering to the dying vestiges of Christendom. ~ David Fitch• Become one of the first "fans" of MasterPiece Church on Facebook. ~ link
• Church in Brazil where the people intentionally throw punches and inflict pain -- fight night at Reborn in Christ (not even a congregational business meeting). ~ link
• Peter, Paul, and Mary is now missing Mary. Mary Travers has died of leukaemia.
• Here is Keith Williams introducing the new Mosaic Bible -- which appears to be a cross between the NLT & the BCP. I received email from Tyndale today and they've mailed out the review copies. I'm looking forward to writing about it. This Mosaic blog tour will stop here on November 11th.
2 comments:
IMHO we need to do more interactive stuff on Sunday morning if we want to be relevant. I am convinced that sermons of the future must be question-answer in which the pastor prepares by knowing the Word, but also knowing intimately what his people are dealing with so that he anticipates and is prepared to make biblical, relevant answers to their questions and comments.
You know my "mantra" Brad - that this is all based on a blind dependency on an M.O. we refuse to see and break away from. The paradigm is the old church as a big block of ice sitting at one location never to move. The institutional church is hooked on invitation/attraction and all it is really doing is shuffling a small percentage of society from ice block to ice block. So we persist with the poor stewardship of pouring our resources into the block and expecting someone to sit within it for several hours per week to dazzle the shuffled masses.
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