Continuing the discussion on skills for the Kingdom: inner healing A girl came to me with depression. When I asked why she was depressed, she was quite clear it was due to her family situation. Although she was in her 30s, she still lived at home, basically because her parents had somehow manipulated her into… Read More
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Healing: our choice?
Continuing the series on Kingdom skills–inner healing There are some interesting verses in Proverbs 15. Verse 13 says, “A glad heart makes a happy face; a broken heart crushes the spirit.” And verse 15 says, “For the despondent, every day brings trouble; for the happy heart, life is a continual feast.” The implication, especially from… Read More
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A physician’s perspective
In a former life back in the UK, I was a physician. Patients would come to me with various physical problems. I would take a history of their symptoms, examine them and make a provisional diagnosis that I would confirm if necessary with diagnostic tests, and then treat whatever condition I had diagnosed. The treatment… Read More
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Where do our problems come from?
Like it or not, we were born into a world at war. As we might say in England, "Satan does not play cricket by the rule book!" In other words, he doesn't play fair. He is an opportunist, taking every opportunity he can to gain a foothold in our lives. A paraphrase of John 10:10… Read More
Jesus defined his ministry in Luke 4:16-18: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released, that the blind will see, that the oppressed will be set free, and that the time of… Read More
A few months ago, I asked people which topic they would prefer, "inner healing" or church planting. The majority chose church planting, but a significant number asked me to cover healing. So I'm taking a break from topics specifically related to church, and will be looking at inner healing for the next few posts. Part… Read More
For some years I have pondered the question of discipleship. I have to confess, discipling others has been something of a mystery to me. I know the theory, but have always had questions about it. Discipling someone is usually portrayed as helping a baby in Christ towards maturity. Maybe my questions are because I became… Read More
Aaron Snow of Intentional Gatherings recently posted this on his blog (http://bit.ly/cae2Jh). I use it here with his permission as a great example of the kind of thing I've been blogging about recently. “…Can you imagine what it would look like if college students who claim Jesus as Lord were equipped and released to lead… Read More
No discussion of discipleship within the organic/simple/house church movement would be complete without pointing people towards Life Transformation Groups (LTGs). Many years ago the Lord posed a series of questions to Neil Cole: What would you do if 100 people came to Christ this week? What would you do if 1000 people came to… Read More
Having written the last post on how Jesus trained his disciples, yesterday I came across a key point that I had missed. I discovered it on the blog of Paul Watson (http://bit.ly/cqS21C ). His premise is that "Jesus discipled groups." Obviously he had one-on-one interactions with individual disciples, but most of his training was done… Read More