Tag: Ivy Manchester

Quick Video – My New Book ‘Work It Out’

I wrote Work It Out to help Christians understand and explain their faith better, and so people who aren’t following Jesus yet will understand why we believe it’s the best decision you’ll ever make. The video summarises the main messages. Please watch it, and if you’re a social media type Tweet or Facebook share it to help me. All proceeds from the book go to Ivy Church. Available on Amazon in the USA and UK J. John says it’s,”Readable without being shallow, wide-ranging without being overwhelming and challenging without being threatening.” If you’ve read Work It Out already (and really liked it!) I’d be so grateful for you to share a positive review on Amazon.   

How the gospel can go viral like the Ice Bucket Challenge

This is my talk from our recent baptism service at Ivy, where I looked at the Ice Bucket challenge and drew out its lessons for leaders and churches committed to helping people find their way back to God. It followed 5 scheduled baptisms; some breathtaking stories of life change with Jesus as the star of every story – after the talk a number of people indicated that wanted to follow Him too, and then 3 more people were baptised too! (If it was good enough for the Ethiopian eunuch and Phillip…) I blogged some of the thoughts from my notes of this already on what has been one of the most read blog items I’ve ever done here if you want to look at that too, but there is more on the talk than that item. Thanks for dropping by and I hope you enjoy the talk.  Let me know your thoughts?    

Blah Blah Blah Preaching

You get no credit for looking in the mirror and knowing you’re a mess. What will you DO? You can memorise 12 great principles of successful marriage and still be instant messaging behind her back to that young girl in the office. It’s the same with money, parenting, or business. The blessing doesn’t come because I know. Or don’t.

Sheep and Shepherds

Preparing for next Sunday’s Video talk, which we’re filming later today, I found a great deal of interesting detail from this source, reproduced at www.baptistbiblebelievers.com Manner And Customs of Bible Lands by Fred H. Wight Copyright @ 1953 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN – Shepherd Life; The Care of Sheep and Goats SHEEP IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL LARGE NUMBER OF SHEEP IN PALESTINE From the days of Abraham down to modern times, sheep have abounded in the Holy Land. The Arabs of Bible lands have largely been dependent through the centuries upon sheep for their living. The Jews of Bible times were first shepherds and then farmers, but they never abandoned entirely their shepherd life. The large number of sheep in the land can be understood when it is realized that Job had fourteen thousand sheep (Job 42:12), and that King Solomon at the Temple’s dedication, sacrificed one hundred and twenty thousand sheep (I Kings 8:63). Fat-tailed sheep the variety mostly in use. The fat tail provides reserve strength for the sheep, much like the hump does on a camel. There is energy in […]

Leadership Network Interviewed Me…

about our experience of connecting to their High Capacity peer learning group for Europe, which has been fantastic; their notes from our telephone interview have just been posted widely and I reproduce it below.   In September 2014, Leadership Network will launch a High Capacity peer learning group in Europe. Anthony Delaney, Team Leader of Ivy Manchester (UK), tells his story of participating in Europe’s Rapid Growth Leadership Community. When Anthony Delaney took over as leader, Ivy was known as ‘Ivy Cottage’ and he reflects, “I saw great potential, but we needed to move out of the cottage and into the city.” With the help of Leadership Network, that’s where Anthony has been leading Ivy over the past five years. In this time they’ve planted three churches and started several missional projects. For Anthony it began when his friend Andy Hawthorne (founder and director of The Message) invited him to join a Leadership Network Leadership Community. Within a few months Anthony was at his first meeting. It was at these meetings that he began to make great friendships and was introduced […]

No Such Thing As Private Morality.

Tomorrow we finish a series I have loved us going through at Ivy, all about David. We’ve been in his life for months and learned a lot. But as we draw a close on his life, I’m left wishing he finished better – and praying that I will finish well. David was a man after God’s own heart. But as we track through his life we know that David’s heart was often broken. All of our hearts are broken by sin. By wrong things we’ve done and things done to us. Last week we saw how at times, temptation won and sin reigned in David’s heart and controlled him. If you want to check out my video teaching on that fall with Bathsheba it’s available free on ‘Ivy Player’ on www.ivymanchester.org now Now while David was forgiven of that because he turned to God in repentance, consequences came back to bite him. That’s something we often forget ahead of our sin, or even post confession. Consequences. There were consequences with regard to how much God could bless him, because that […]

Why the Great Commission has stopped me ‘Evangelising’ and ‘Discipling’ people.

I’m disturbed that the church has made DISCIPLING a new kind of industry in the last 5 years or so. Everyone’s doing conferences or writing books with plans and formulas to ‘disciple’ people. As if it’s a verb – not a noun.

‘COULD YOU NOT WATCH ONE HOUR?!’ – (My struggles with learning to pray. part 2)

Occasionally I’d have a bit of an energy burst and do some journalling (ever done that?). Some of the conferences I went to had experts saying if you didn’t journal every day you had to doubt your salvation. I got a journal. The ‘MAN’ type, leather, with a cross on the front, not the girls one with flowers. Some time later I got another one because I’d hardly written in the first one. It had ‘MY PRAYER JOURNAL’ written on the front. But there’s still not much written in it. Actually though, Jesus didn’t journal. It really wasn’t me. I love writing, I hate journaling. I’m not even sure journalling is a word. How many ls should it have if it is? Spellchecker doesn’t like either. I read somewhere that CS Lewis STOPPED journaling when he became a Christian, because he’d done it for years before, and found it made him too self centred. I was doing really badly from the outset at how I thought you were supposed to be growing spiritually. It never got better. It’s not like […]