A very Sola Panel survey (Scott Newling)

Review

One of the things we’re doing as we wrap up the year here at Sola Panel is to ask our contributors to share some of their highlights for the year from the world of reading and the web. Here’s Scott Newling’s contribution:

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Who is the ‘experienced’ church planter?

Pastoral Ministry

Anyone who knows me knows that, in God’s manifold grace, I’m very much on the ‘church waterer’ end of things, rather than on the church planter end! So please forgive me for dipping a toe into something I don’t know too much about. Nevertheless, while I’ve not kept up with all the discussions and conferences and so forth, in the things that I have read, a question has been slowly developing in my mind—a question that I’d like to ask by way of clarification. It was raised again for me by Ben’s recent post on the Acts 29 conference.

Maybe the answer is already out there and I just haven’t seen it (which is very likely). Whatever the case, what are your thoughts on the following: what makes someone an ‘experienced’ church planter? And, to that end, who is a ‘church planter’?

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Does your church believe in the clarity of Scripture?

Pastoral Ministry

I’ve noticed in recent years that, although we can make good and well-intentioned ministry decisions, when combined with other good ministry decisions, these decisions produce a poisonous gas that threatens the wellbeing of our churches. In other words, the way we’ve chosen to work out the implications of our theological commitments can come at the expense of other theological commitments. (more…)

FlashForward, or guidance and the grace of God

Life

Over the last few weeks, Emma and I have enjoyed watching the new TV show FlashForward. In the first episode, the entirety of humanity blacks out simultaneously for exactly two minutes and 17 seconds. During this blackout, everyone has a ‘flash-forward’, and experiences a snapshot of their own life six months in the future.

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Christ and culture re-thought

For the last 50 years or so, H Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture has dominated most Christian thinking on the relationship between Christ and culture. Scott Newling examines two books which seek to break away from this paradigm.

Culture Matters: A Call for Consensus on Christian Cultural Engagement (more…)