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God has surrounded me with some great brothers and sisters! I thought I would introduce you to two of them through something they’ve written recently on their blogs. Jason at “Fight the Good Fight” wrote about “The Importance of Meeting Together.” First, he tells about a man he knows named Manesh who lives in a section of India that is hostile to Christians. Then, Jason says, On Sunday we spent our meeting time talki...

Felicity at “Simple Church” wrote a very succinct, but thought-provoking post called “The One Key Skill in Simple Church.” She begins with this: One of the main paradigm shifts within this movement of simple churches is the belief that ordinary men and women hear God.  They can be entrusted with the affairs of the Kingdom.  It does not need specially trained people to manage the church.  The Holy Spirit is able to ru...

Art from “Church Task Force” left the following as a comment on my post “The weaker are indispensable“: At what great cost have we gained so little. We have ruled out 95% of the life of a family in our formality and in our quest to keep up appearances that meet the world’s approval. I think we need to look past sizing up the importance of contributions–and the methods of these contributions–based on how they make us ...

Last week, I wrote a short post concerning 1 Corinthians 12:22-25 called “The weaker are indispensable” in which I concluded with the following questions: Who are the people with “weaker” gifts, and how do we demonstrate that they are indispensable and worthy of greater honor? Now, Andy at “aBowden Blog” has written a similar post called “Unequally equal?” in which he considers how some people are “gi...

“Should we worship when the church meets?” I believe that’s the wrong question. For a follower of Jesus Christ… someone who is a child of God… all of life should be lived in a way that brings glory to God. Thus, every thought, attitude, and action should bring worship to God. This happens when we allow the Holy Spirit to live through us, when we do not hinder the work that the Holy Spirit desire to do in and through ...

If we read the narrative of Scripture as a whole (Old Testament and New Testament), we’ll see examples of God’s people gathering together and examples of God’s people going out. I’ve been wondering lately, where should our focus be? Obviously, both gathering and going are important to the individual follower Jesus Christ and to the church. I agree with the Anabaptists that every disciple is both an ordained missionary and ...

I was surprised to find that three posts on the topic of “preaching” were my most read posts for the month of January 2010. I rarely write about preaching, so I thought I would take the opportunity to clear up some possible misconceptions. First, I do not make a distinction between “worship services” (church meetings) and smaller subgroups (i.e. Bible studies, Sunday School classes) when it comes to speaking to the church....

Dave Black wrote this on his blog today concerning Hebrews 10:24-25: Wow! Does this not suggest the character of our church meetings? Does this not teach us that we are to come together for the purpose of mutual edification? Does this not challenge our deeply entrenched views about “worship”? Should we not suspect The Message of a bit of eisegesis when it renders “let us not neglect our meeting together” as “not avoi...

It seems that Andy from “aBowden Blog” is thinking about spiritual gifts. He has recently written two posts on the subject: “Speaking and Serving” and “Romans 12, continued.” I’m glad to see that more and more believers are considering ways of allowing more believers to speak and serve when the church meets. This is one of the questions that I asked Andy: How would you like to see other speaking and servi...

I originally published a series of posts three years ago dealing with implications of meeting together to edify one another (“Individualism,” “Leadership,” “Excellence,” “Reverence,” and “Activities“). I decided to combine this series into one post. —————————————————— Implications ...