It’s 7 am Thursday, and I am sitting in a café on York Street in the central business district of Sydney. This is my hometown. The coffee, in case you were wondering, is okay. The Suncorp building towers above me, Grosvenor Place tall behind me, and every bus coming off the Harbour Bridge stops outside this café. (more…)
There are lots of leaders talking about their visions and strategies for ministry. Paul Harrington encourages churches and their leaders to be thinking about God’s plan before making their own. (more…)
Christians and soldiers have a lot in common, or at least they should (2 Tim 2:3-4). Firstly, they both know that submission equals survival. The wise infantryman always awaits the order to advance—especially when the machine gunner next to him is laying down cover fire. Secondly, both Christians and soldiers know that suffering is par for the course (2 Tim 3:12). Members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), on exercises in the outback, don’t get up in the morning, stretch and declare, “Man, I really miss my flannel pyjamas”. (more…)
If we are going to develop people-focused ministries, certain shifts in our thinking must occur. The fundamental shift consists of moving away from an institutional view of gospel ministry towards a personal view of gospel ministry. We need to stop thinking how to build ministry around structures and start thinking about how to build ministry around people. (more…)
Have you ever had the experience of reading something you’d written a long time ago and being surprised to meet yourself again? It might be a letter you wrote to your grandmother that she kept and then returned to you (grandmothers do these things), or a diary you scribbled in as a teenager that your mother dragged out of the shoebox in the storeroom, or an impassioned essay you wrote at Uni which you discover as you’re cleaning out the filing cabinet.