What we measure determines what we think success is.
Most churches still tend to measure by the ABCs:
ATTENDANCE, BUILDINGS and CASH (Offerings)
These are useful, but not optimal – or even biblical!
Being BIG, WEALTHY and INFLUENTIAL does not necessarily mean a church is healthy (as we have seen so graphically and too in recent years).
HOW Does God measure success?
What does ‘success’ in ministry really look like?
How do we keep the main thing the main thing?
What devotional practices can practically help us to stay the course?
What guardrails and what do we need to pay attention to that might prevent us from failing and spoiling a leadership legacy?
It’s not just about me dying and going to heaven. The gospel is God is showing up here and now in broken places, in hard times in lives, in sickness… this is what the kingdom looks like. For everyday people in all sorts of ways!
‘What God gives you is his gift to you, what you do with your gifts is your gift back to him.’ Dave Holden
The commission was directly given to the apostles but indirectly given to the ecclesia in every generation. After the early apostles died, the commission remained – and so does the authority, until it is fulfilled it will remain in force.
So they had a commission and were sent to fulfil it. In their generation the church grew like crazy and changed everything, everywhere. We have the same commission and we are sent to do it. That’s the key, they went, because they were sent. That’s an apostolic church.
INTIMACY with Jesus.
PROXIMITY to Jesus and
DEPENDENCY on him.
SHUT THE GATES!
It’s struck me as this year opens up like never before just how good the good news is that it really is possible for me and you to be more and more like Christ.
Rather than come up with another TO DO (or not to do) list for 2024, there’s a more important question – and it’s not about doing
As I stood there on Tuesday praying in the waters of the Jordan where He was baptised I reflected that Jesus did not just drop down some divine dictat from the safety of heaven for us to try to follow. He chose to come into the midst of the mess in the Middle East as the Prince of Peace by revealing himself as the friend of sinners, the one John the Baptist saw is ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ God got his feet wet in the Jordan. God got his hands dirty. He is the answer.
RETHINK the ACT of Evangelism Think of a line, scale of 1 to 10. The person of yesterday in the 1950s, they would have had a positive view of Christianity and a sense of guilt or conviction when they broke the tenets of the faith. Based on that context, unchurched people who were at 7 or 8 on the scale already worked easily because they were nearly there already. Just a tract or a talk again. AN EVENT. Now; the contemporary unChristian might be on what – a 3? So how do we talk to them. We need PROCESS and Event. Pay attention to the process that helps them progress to a 5, to get them forward. CS Lewis said the gospel was first of all to people who were conscious of sin, and aware of the supernatural. But ‘I sometimes wonder other we shall have to reconvert people to real paganism’, before converting them to Christ. Move To Explanation We have moved from Acts 2 (When Peter told them – who were God fearing Jews, monotheists and had the […]