In the last year, our church community has started a venture called The Money Clinic. It isn’t a debt counselling service, but rather a place for budget coaching and money education. An analogy that helped me when we setting this up was the difference between surgery or A&E (ER to my US friends) in a [...]
This has landed in my inbox from Brian Donaldson, and Neil has also posted it. But for completeness, here it is on this blog.
I found myself cringing, as I recognised how excruciating is can be for people who are not used to church culture, arriving in something that anyone who has been around church [...]
Another post on Welcoming, as we are exploring what happens when someone comes to our church (community) for the first time. It is a daunting prospect, new people, new language … but how can we help people get drawn into our community. We’re following the story of a (fictional) person turning up at our Sunday [...]
I am winding up for some down (holiday) time, so a distinct lack of blogging. But here is the next post of welcoming. We are thinking about how we can welcome new people into our community: this time looking at the first time you come to our church building. Comments welcome, even appreciated! Once again [...]
This was an aside and not the main point of the post that was written, but it highlights the desperate need to move away from what Colin Symes calls "decisionism"…
I became a follower of Jesus. I was always a Christian, by which I mean that I always trusted in Christ to avoid hell. But, in [...]
This is part 2 of a series on welcoming people into our church community. We are exploring what is working well, and what we can do to improve what we are doing. If you are part of our community, we would love your comments. If you aren’t part of our church, any comments that can [...]
Continue reading about Welcoming 2 - Getting them through the door
It has been a busy week or so. So no blogging. One of the reasons for being busy last week was a "vision day" we had at church on Sunday. I will blog about that in a day or two (hopefully!).
I intend to continue with my series on Lakeland and Toronto. But just for now [...]
It is all too common for Christians to attempt to do justice to the scriptural narrative by listening to it, learning from it, and attempting to extract a way of viewing the world from it. But the narrative itself is asking us to approach it in a much more radical way. It is inviting us [...]
This starts a series on welcoming people into our church community. We are exploring what is working well, and what we can do to improve what we are doing. If you are part of our community, we would love your comments. If you aren’t part of our church, any comments that can help us would [...]
Continue reading about Welcoming 1 - Mystery shopper, mystery worshipper
Following my last couple of posts (1 & 2), reflecting on the Lakeland Outpouring, and trying to learn some lessons by contrasting to the Toronto "blessing". This post I move on to the role of the media…
Media
Toronto, in the early 90’s, was pre-internet, and in the UK at least, pre-Christian TV. News spread of [...]
