Tag Archives: Featured full-text

The strategy of God

Pastoral Ministry

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Just what should we be doing in Christian ministry? Do our churches need a vision document, a mission statement or a strategic plan? Phillip Jensen says that strategy is important, but our job is not to work it out; God has already done that.

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Matters of indifference?

Life

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When Christians disagree, often it is helpful to sort the important from the unimportant, the essential from the indifferent. But what criteria should we use to do this? Mark Thompson investigates.

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Fight the good fight (part 1): A time to break down and a time to build up

Life, Sola Panel

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Are Christians these days too critical of each other, too ready to oppose and too ready to be negative? You could certainly find plenty of evidence to support this claim. Then again, are Christians these days so polite, inoffensive and unwilling to stand for the truth, they end up being nicer than Jesus? A fair-sized dossier could be assembled in support of this contention as well. So which is it be, nasty or nice?

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The perfect gift of right now

Life

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If we live, we will suffer. But how we suffer, as Eddie Larkman points out, depends entirely on us.

I’d like to share with you something of how God has been teaching me through my personal circumstances. Your circumstances will be different, and they may include many things you would like to change, but we all have to follow Christ where we are. For me, this has meant following Christ in very different circumstances than I envisaged when I was a student over 20 years ago.

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Firing up for evangelism

Pastoral Ministry

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All pastors want to see their congregations become more ‘evangelistically minded’. Gordon Cheng outlines one simple strategy for making progress.

How can a pastor get evangelism going in his church? To ‘evangelize’ literally means to ‘proclaim news’. Thus, when the President of the IOC stands to say, “The games of the 33rd Olympiad in 2012 are awarded to the City of London”, he is evangelizing. To do Christian evangelism is to tell the news that “Jesus Christ is Lord”.

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Planting the Café Church

Pastoral Ministry

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How to turn a languishing evening service into a lively, welcoming service with a bit of creativity and a lot of help from God, by Bob Burnett.

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Sons laid down their lives

Thought

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Something heartbreaking happened to a family at Black Point at Easter two years ago.

Black Point is an isolated place, accessible only by four-wheel drive, on the south coast of Western Australia, and the Stallard family travelled there to fish. The parents, Ron and Debbie, lived in the south-west of the state, but their two sons, 25-year-old Paul and 19-year-old Andrew, lived in Perth. So the fishing trip was something of a family reunion too.

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Leaving it all behind

Everyday Ministry

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For many of us, the idea of leaving the comforts of home, friends and family to serve God as a missionary overseas is an idea we find impossible to consider. It stubbornly remains, year after year, in the box labelled ‘Things I’m not ready to trust God with yet’. In this article, Philip Nicholson gives us his candid reflections on what life has been like for him since he took ‘mission work’ out of the box.

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Hope for all the world?

Thought

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Christians claim to believe that Jesus is Lord, and that his love is for all people. But if that is so, asks John Woodhouse, shouldn’t we be ambitious for our children to become philoxenes when they grow up?

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Just a matter of opinion? Straight answers to curly questions #3

Everyday Ministry

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In this series, we have been developing robust and creative responses to some of the most common objections to Christian faith heard today. The first was that all religions are the same, for which we developed a logical response. The second was that religion is just cultural, to which we developed an empirical response. The third idea many people today have is perhaps the most difficult to respond to: it is the idea that religion belongs entirely in the domain of personal opinion, and that one person’s opinion is as good as another.

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The porn problem

Life

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It’s official: smoking in films influences teens. Newspapers around the nation on 11 June 2003 reported a new study—published online that day in The Lancet—that surveyed 3500 adolescents who had never smoked, and assessed their exposure to smoking in movies. A follow-up survey some time later found that those who had watched ‘hard-smoking’ movies were up to three times more likely to take up the habit themselves. Health groups have called for an ‘R’ rating on all films with frequent smoking scenes.

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