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God has placed me among some awesome people – brothers and sisters in Christ. For example, whenever someone is hurting or in need or had a baby or had been in the hospital or had been sick, someone begins to organize meals. The elders don’t tell them to do it. There is no benevolence committee or ministry director to control it. Instead, whenever someone is in need, someone else sends out an email and begins organizing meals. Tonight,...

A friend on facebook sent me a link to this interview with Steve Timmis, one of the authors of Total Church, a book that I’ve recommended before. Here is part of the interview: “We take seriously the Gospel word — we are confessional evangelicals. We have a number of values and a statement of faith that reflects that,” said Timmis, who also serves as Western Europe Director for the Acts 29 church planting network. “We believe the Go...

I just read this in an old comment on one of my posts: I think the best thing that could happen in the Church is if the “leaders” had to sit for a good extended period of time among all the others in the pews. They would quickly see why so many Christians are tired of their Church experience. What do you think? Related Posts:Knowing About or ExperiencingChristian community vs. personal religious experienceTheological Sources – Intro...

Okay… not really the wildwood… but in a few weeks, our church will be gathering together at a local campground. We’ll be camping together beginning Saturday, May 15 through Sunday, May 16. I always love camping with the church. We get to spend so much time with one another, and I always get to know one or two people better than I had before. I think one of my favorite times camping is the evening camp fire. Just about the time i...

There is a very interesting interview with Dallas Willard at Out of Ur called “Dallas Willard on How We Assess Spiritual Growth.” The interview begins like this: How can churches know if they are being effective at making disciples? Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people...

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...

Two years ago, our family took a vacation to the mountains of western North Carolina. While we were there, we stopped by several waterfalls. These waterfalls helped me think about our community in Christ. I wrote about it in a post called “Man-made or (super)Natural Community?” ——————————————- Man-made or (super)Natural Community? Last week, while we w...

Lionel at “A Better Covenant” wrote an excellent article called “Components of the Gathered Saints?” I left this comment there, and I thought I would put it here as well: I do think there are “components” (if you will) for gathering together with other believers. I don’t think these “components” are specific activities though. Instead, I think they are things like loving one another, considering others as more im...

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...

Last week, I quoted Tim Chester and Steve Timmis’ book Total Church: A Radical Reshaping around Gospel and Community (see my post “Another Word About the Sermon“). When I found that quote, I also found that I had marked these two passages from the same book: James says, “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says” (James 1:22). We must not only listen to the word – we must put ...