For a moment, suspend everything you think you know about doing and being church. Pretend, for argument’s sake, that you’ve been transported back to the first century… even before the birth of the church. As of this moment, there is nothing that “looks like” church. There are no traditions, no creeds, no history, no […]
For the week of September 26, 2005
Some People Never Change
By: Bill Easum
The Time- The 16th Century
The Place- A monastery in Europe
The Setting – Two monks discussing the Gutenberg Bible
One monk says to the other one:
“I don’t think it will ever catch on. It is too hard to use. I find the old scrolls much […]
By: Jeff Patton
I just spent a weekend with a Church discovering this congregation’s purpose. To accomplish this we spent the weekend studying Scripture and coming to term with the underlying principles that ought to govern all we do.
We spent Friday night discovering our values. We came to the conclusion that Love, Forgiveness, Hope, Grace and […]
The pastor was sharing his frustration about one of his executive team members during a recent consultation. “No matter what I do, Cyndi finds a problem with pretty much anything I suggest. She either tries to fix what’s not broken or she sabotages the idea completely. I wish I’d never invited her onto the team, but now […]
Learning Occurs in Community
The first is the pioneering work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. Working among the poorest of the poor in Brazil, Freire developed the practice and theory of Critical Education. He demonstrated that people who had never learned to read could quickly develop skills of literacy and complex reasoning if those skills […]
If you’re a pastor, you’ve likely heard it. “We need a pastor who is more of a shepherd!”
What does that mean? I interpret that to be the 20th century American fallacy that we pay people to do things on our behalf, including pastors to do the primary ministry activities. Go visit members in need. […]
Nobody will argue that mainline denominations are in decline. It doesn’t matter if the decline is 80 percent or 65 percent as suggested by a recent Barna study, mainline denominations are seeing fewer and fewer people in the pews. This decline begs a question – “What will it take to turn this decline around?”
Like […]
Where does innovation most often occur? Innovation most often happens on the edges and because of that we need to stay close to those on the cutting edge.
Our NewThing Networks has gone from one network to three networks and doubled the number of churches in the last year. And because of our investment in resources and […]
1. We ask this question of everyone, and the (diversity) in the answers (is) wonderful – how would you define the “postmodern movement?”
I define the postmodern movement by what it has caused to happen rather than trying to describe it. Postmodernism seems to have caused three things to happen. We live in a time […]
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