Photo credit: Gravitywave (Creative Commons) Over the past few months, we have had several people from a more traditional church background and who are in the process of leaving for the mission field visit the church that meets in our home. The exchange has been valuable. Our “Jesus family” has rubbed shoulders with people sold out… Read More
Category: Church planting
"The dirty little secret of missions is that we are sending missionaries all over the world who have not demonstrate the ability to make disciples who can make disciples. Most have not seen or participated in effective models of church-planting or discipleship at home, but we send them out in the hope that going cross-culturally… Read More
Photo credit Stijn Vogels (Creative Commons) Tony and I have been privileged to travel to various countries in all five continents and to see missions at work first hand. First the good: I was brought up, in a Christian sense, on the biographies of those on the mission field. I learned from Hudson Taylor… Read More
Photo credit: Abdallah (Creative Commons) For some time now, I have been pondering the question, "What does it look like for simple/organic churches to get involved in mission?" I'm referring here to the role of what is usually known as "the missionary"–one who is called to leave their own culture and live in another nation,… Read More
Photo credit: alles-schlumpf (Creative Commons) God has used house churches in many nations to avoid persecution–think China, the Middle East. Thankfully, here in the West, we are not in that same persecuted situation. But maybe there is another reason for the rise of simple/organic/house churches. The world situation is becoming increasingly uncertain. Questions and confusion… Read More
Photo credit: SMBCollege (Creative Commons) We love to start churches with people who do not yet know the Lord. I’m often asked, “How do you do that? How do you transition a normal conversation into one about spiritual things?” The last two posts have been guest posts by John King on Discovery Bible Studies,… Read More
John King trains church planters in the use of inductive Bible studies called Discovery Bible Studies. This is proving to be an extremely effective church planting tool in many different cultures. I read his blog regularly. The first part of this post, the story about how a group trained in this pattern has been able… Read More
John King trains indigenous church planters to teach others to do simple inductive Bible studies. This approach has been used throughout sub-Saharan Africa and has contributed to the planting of thousands of new churches there. His blog can be found at: http://johnkking.wordpress.com/ I asked John to write this guest post to help people to understand Discovery… Read More
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How big is your vision? (part 2)
Photo credit: rightee (Creative Commons) Vision is one of our greatest challenges here in the West. We think too small, and act accordingly. Our dreams are limited by what we believe we can accomplish. This post is the second part of a vision statement put out by an apostle from Asia who is constantly seeing… Read More
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How big is your vision?
We often hear stories of the extraordinary things God is doing in other nations. “Why doesn’t this happen here in the West?” we ask ourselves. Part of the reason is that we don’t yet have the vision and passion that many in other nations do. We get distracted by so many things that we think… Read More