Savedthroughfaith.com

Five years ago, I wrote a post called “Spiritual Gifts and the Gathered Church.” God gifts all his children in ways that he can work through them to build up others. Think about that a moment: “to build up others.” That assumes that God’s children are given opportunities to speak to and serve others when they are gathered together. It seems simple and straightforward, but it’s a...

Last week, Ed Stetzer published an interview with Jason Dukes, the author of a new book called Beyond My Church: Thinking and Living So That the World Might Know. (See his post “Beyond My church: A Book Interview with Jason C. Dukes.”) I like the idea of the book – encouraging followers of Jesus Christ to look beyond the fences created by their “local church” in order to interact with...

Arthur at “The Voice of One Crying Out in Suburbia” has written an excellent post about community called “Compulsory Community.” The point of Arthur’s post seems to be that we do not live in community with one another because we do not think we need community with one another, that is, we do not think we actually need one another. He begins by talking about the church in areas of the ...

Ironically, two years ago, I wrote a post called “Looking forward to a Super Bowl party.” And, guess what I’m doing this weekend? I’m looking forward to a Super Bowl party again! I think I know which teams are playing this year, but I’m not certain enough to type it here without looking it up. I love football – mainly college football. I don’t watch much professional footb...

On this blog, I primarily focus on the gathering of the church… that is, times when believers gather together with one another. These times are extremely important to the life and maturity of the children of God. We need one another, and we need to spend time with one another – or, as I like to say it, share our lives with one another. I believe this is part of the mission of God – seeing his chi...

My son, his girlfriend, and I were running on the roads in our neighborhood. There is one point where a new cul-de-sac comes very close to a middle school near our home. We stepped off the road and ran down a path through the woods to the parking lot of the school. We ran around the parking lot, then headed back to the path to our neighborhood. But, it had gotten darker, and I missed the path. We ended up running ...

My friend Eric at “A Pilgrim’s Progress” is in an interesting situation. He’s written about it before, but he explains more in his post “No Time for Organic Church.” You see, Eric quit his job as a full-time, vocational pastor for a local church organization several months ago. He prayed for employment for a long time (at least, a long time being unemployed), and God provided a ...

I’ve invited several people to write “guest blog posts” for this blog. There are several reasons for this: 1) To offer different perspectives. 2) To generate even more discussion and conversation between blogs. 3) To introduce other bloggers to my readers. (If you are interested in writing a guest blog post, please contact me at aknox[at]sebts[dot]com.) Today’s post was written by Robert. You can follo...

Three years ago, I wrote a post called “Teaching in the context of living.” The post was inspired by a conversation that I had with a young man who I had recently met. The young man loved to listen to his pastor teach/preach, but also recognized that something very important was missing. Since he did not actually know his pastor, he had no context for what was being said. The “teaching” was...

In my post “People want real examples of organic church life,” I linked to a post by Dan at “Cerulean Sanctum” called “Is organic house church a myth?” In that post, Dan expressed his frustration at not being able to find “organic house church” in his city like he sees described in Frank Viola’s books. In this post, I’m going to try to answer the question...