#revitalisation

One of the driving points in the recent correspondence to Evangelicals Now was that we needed pastors willing to go into small churches and commit to preaching twice on a Sunday and once midweek. The suggestion was that there was a reluctance on the part of younger  potential pastors and that this was primarily because they were unwilling to sacrifice themselves for the gospel and preferred to…

If you are committed to seeing your church plant new churches but are not sure how you will ever reach that point when you can/will plant, then it’s helpful to know that there is more than one way to church plant. The conventional approach requires a sending/mother church to commission a substantial proportion of its congregation to begin an autonomous church in a new locality.  It is this…

I recently exchanged some correspondence via Evangelicals Now’s letters to the editor with John Brand, the Principal of Edinburgh Bible College). You can read his original letter here, my response here and his comeback here. I was tempted to respond in detail  and in fact, drafted something but realised there was little benefit in a letter war where views were no doubt already entrenched. Suffice…

This first appeared as a letter in Evangelicals Now here. Evangelicals Now have recently published an open letter from John Brand, principal of Edinburgh Bible College. It’s addressed to “church leaders training men for ministry.”  Well, that kind of sounds like me, so I hope that John and EN will accept an open letter in response from those of us seeking to train future pastors.  First of all,…

My first real experience of Christian ministry was  in the context of church revitalisation.  A little Pentecostal Church between Bradford and Leeds had fallen on hard times, suffered a split and was down to its last half a dozen elderly members.  My dad had preached there regularly after they first approached a larger church for help.  I started to preach there too and then began to do some door…

Had quite a terrific experience in November 28th - performing a ritual, i would say.

Almost there...

As promised, here are some follow up thoughts from my article about how to help churches without pastors.  In that article, I suggested that it is likely that you will find yourself in a wider conversation about the need for revitalisation.  Whether the conversation starts with an intentional request for this kind of help, or whether it starts with a request for help covering for the lack of a…