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Dave Black (Friday, May 7, 2010 at 9:15 pm) issued this challenge to students. I think it would be helpful for more to read: Jesus is not looking for spectators but participants. Don’t be an onlooker when it comes to the Great Commission. Don’t be up a tree when you could be down in the crowds serving Jesus. Frankly, I’m tired of bloggers and others who do nothing but criticize and pontificate. Secure in the cyber-trees, they ...

My friend Adam at “Adamic” has asked four very good question in his post “In my mind.” Here are his questions: Should churches be smallish, totally participatory, and more “organic”? Or does the Bible teach a more structured church gathering, with a preacher and (mostly) without verbal participation from the congregation? Or does it teach neither and allow for either? How much “liturgy” is unhelpfu...

Here are a few of the posts that I enjoyed in the last few das. I think you’ll enjoy them too. My friend Eric at “A Pilgrim’s Progress” has written several times about the descriptive/prescriptive question. His post “Sola Scriptura: The Protestant Position on the Bible” mentions this problem as well. Another friend, Dan, has started blogging again at “Hollow Again.” You should read his posts “...

Art, from “Church Task Force,” once again left a comment that I think needs to be shared. He wrote this in response to my post “Church in a coffee shop“: Deb and I lived on Okinawa for 3 1/2 years, living in a small village for most of that time. Different languages, customs, dress, food, values, etc. We were always “gaijin”–foreigners, outsiders, no matter how much we made friends, no matter how well we fit in. It w...

Sometimes I like to read Dave Black’s blog posts. Sometimes I don’t. I haven’t decided how I feel about one of his latest entries (Today, Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 4:30 p.m.): I realize that many of my readers are committed to following Jesus and His model for the church, yet we seem to get bogged down in the practical application of biblical truth. What would happen if we went back to square one? What if we recalibrated our ...

Jack at “Flight Level Musings” has written a great post called “What is Community?” It’s hard to find just one part to quote, but I’ll start with this paragraph, where Jack talks about Jesus exchanging blood family for God’s family: Here Jesus broke with the blood family and established God’s family. Since people of that time already understood strong-group family culture, it was not a difficult s...

Yeah, it’s true. Some people need to lighten up. Did you read what Dave Black said about the Great Commission? (Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 7:57 a.m.) The Great Commission is the church’s marching orders. Period. It sums up the mission of every individual follower of Jesus and every believing family and every church and every Christian organization. It even sums up our marriages. The first task of every Christian is to extend the kingdo...

Wes at “a mission-driven life” has written one of the best homeschool posts that I’ve read in a long time. It’s called “Homeschooling and Classical Education: What are you doing to your kids?” Primarily, I like that Wes has removed the Christian, holy, godly, etc. rhetoric that some add to the idea of homeschooling. Read the post. It’s worth the time. We decided to homeschool our children 7 years ago. The...

I couldn’t help but chuckle at some of the church names listed in the post “A Church by Any Other Name.” I also find it funny when people name their churches after biblical locations: Corinth (are they really that divisive and immoral?), Philippi (they sing songs in jail?), Bethel (oh… so that building is the house of God?), etc. What happened to the true biblical designations for churches? You know… the church in X ...

Bill at “NT/History Blog” has written an excellent post called “Walking Distance Ecclesiology.” He says that the cities of the first century (Thessalonica, even Rome and Jerusalem) were small enough (about 1 square mile) that people could easily walk anywhere within the city within a few minutes. This means that the early Christians were easily accessible to one another. And, that’s a good thing. Why? This is what Bi...