Friday 13 May 2011

simple church

Another busy week, but yesterday provided an interesting day. We'd invited Pete Farmer down for a day exploring some of the practices around 'Simple Church'.
I guess there's a number of things which have struck me since yesterday:

As Baptists, we are generally fairly narrow in our expectations about how God might be at work in engaging the vast majority beyond the kingdom.
We remain fairly locked into a perspective on church planting, which is dominated by a paid leader, congregational model.
Our idea of movement is, on the whole, just that - an idea.
Our experience, or lack of it, in seeing people come to faith and seeing anything remotely approaching multiplication, has constrained our imagination.

Now, this could sound really negative and despondent, but far from it. The day was really encouraging and, I hope, opened sufficient eyes to the beginnings of possibilities in a variety of new directions.

Our next 3-in-1 is this Sunday in Gloucester. These are designed to nurture the idea of multiplication - albeit in a very modest way. My hunch is, at present, only a small minority have twigged this, but that's the thing with multiplication, you don;t need many to really catch on before the effect grows significantly. Jesus sent 12 in Luke 9, 72 in Luke 10 ....

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