In recent months, Col Marshall and I have been running some workshops based on The Trellis and the Vine, and during the workshops we spent a bit of time talking about small groups—about why we have them (or don’t), the part they normally play in church life, how we train our leaders (or don’t as the case may be), and so on.
Tag Archives: Bible study
Talking with people from a Catholic background about Jesus
Everyday Ministry
When you finally receive the gospel, you can’t help talking with other people about it. The Christians in Thessalonica had this experience: “For not only has the word of the Lord sounded forth from you in Macedonia and Achaia, but your faith in God has gone forth everywhere, so that we need not say anything” (1 Thess 1:8). (more…)
Diary of a ministry apprentice (Part 2): March 2008
Everyday Ministry
Guan’s story so far in four sentences: Guan likes self-deprecation, but isn’t very good at it. He is ever so slightly obsessive about his iTunes collection, he is married to M,1 and at the time of writing (2008), he has just started ministry training (MTS) at the University of New South Wales (hereafter known as ‘the Uni’). So far, the year has begun with a whirlwind staff conference and recruiting students at the human flood that is the Uni’s Orientation Week (see Briefing #375). Now things begin to settle into a rhythm, but life is not without its challenges. (more…)
Sick of Bible study? Read on.
Resource Talk, Sola Panel
Are you sick of reading the resource talk column each month?
I know I’m sick of writing it. Here we are again with another 800 upbeat, encouraging words on some aspect of Christian ministry and the resources we produce to support it. It’s tiresome to write and (I feel sure) a bit of a drag to read. (more…)
The Swedish Method
Everyday Ministry
For 19 years, I worked in Argentina in a context where many university students were unaccustomed to reading. Bible studies in that country (with its strong Catholic influence and practices expressed in the current evangelical style) were often an exercise in glancing at a text and then using ‘authorities’ to prove a point. For example, a youth group would typically read a passage of Scripture, close their Bibles to discuss it, and then one student would then say, “My pastor says ‘X’”. Then another would reply, “But my pastor says ‘Y’”. The argument would then escalate as one and then the other would pull in higher authorities from around the evangelical world to justify their points of view. From rallies, television or radio programmes, they would cite evangelical ‘celebrities’ such as Yiye Avila, Carlos Annacondia, Luis Palau, and then, to clinch the argument, Billy Graham. What they were doing was a Protestant version of Catholicism: they appealed to a higher human authority to win an argument. (more…)
Windex for ministry
Resource Talk, Sola Panel
Of the many funny and endearing things about the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, one of my favourites is Gus’s habit of solving every problem with Windex. Pimples, backaches, grazes, smudges, stains—according to Gus, there’s very little that a squirt of Windex won’t fix.