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Thought provoking blogs on church, family, discipleship and volunteering

This is my last blog for the year as we lead up to Christmas and afterwards have a time to rest and abide in the first part of January (see here for what is planned).

As we go into this break here are some quotes from articles on the web (follow the links to read them in full)

Church and Family

RED CHURCH
We live in a non-committal culture, where you can turn up to Church when you want, expect to be entertained and still keep all of your options open. This is not what Red (a church in Melbourne) is about. Red is a Church which is unashamedly about re-centering our lives around Jesus; the man who was God and who spoke about a life that costs and a faith that is sacrificial. (see here)

MIKE BREEN

You see, I am absolutely convinced that 100 years from now, many books will be written on the phenomenon that is the late 20th Century/early 21st Century American church. And I am fairly certain that it will be with large degree of amazement/laughter that people, in reading about it, will say to each other: “You must be joking! Seriously???! People actually thought it was a good idea to structure the Church as if it were a business? Honestly?!”

Perhaps we don’t have the perspective necessary to see how funny or strange this really is, but I promise you, if you run your church like a business, it’ll never be a family and families are what have changed the world.......

Efficiency has replaced effectiveness. Many churches are organizationally efficient, but we aren’t affecting the lives of people the way in which Jesus imagined a family would do. (read the full article)

Discipleship vs Volunteering

ERIC PFEIFFER
In the hustle and bustle of trying to promote, maintain and multiply good church services and programs, we find ourselves pressed for time, energy and resources, therefore enlisting folks into our volunteer armies to fulfill our vision. Somewhere along the way we exchanged Jesus’ vision of a discipling culture for a volunteer culture. We’ve become experts in mobilizing volunteers and have lost sight of our responsibility to make disciples. (read the full article)



David Wanstall, 16/12/2011