July 2nd, 2009 by Tim Chester
Posted in Justification, N.T. Wright | No Comments
June 29th, 2009 by Tim Chester
If you’re looking for an affordable alternative to residential Bible college that integrates training with work and ministry then the Northern Training Institute could be for you. NTI trains people for church leadership through:
- guided reading and short assignments
- two week-long residentials each year
- seven seminar days
The residentials and guided reading allow us to cover the ground with a focus on biblical, missional and pastoral implications rather than academic debates. But the real genius of NTI are the monthly seminar days. Each seminar day we take a theme for the day and students prepare papers on that theme – some looking at biblical issues, others coming from an historical or systematic perspective, and others looking at the missional and pastoral implications. It means that through the day we really wrestle with the topic while all the time students are learning to think theologically and apply theology to practice.
Because students can combine NTI with ministry and work, NTI is much more affordable that residential alternatives. But it also means the interplay between theology and practice happens naturally.
I think it’s great, but then I’m the Director! So here’s what current students say:
If I’d set out to design a training programme ideally suited for me it would be NTI.
The monthly seminar days have been invaluable to my learning and applying learning to my context. I have very much enjoyed leanring alongside fellow practitioners. NTI is great!
I’d recommend NTI to anyone.
NTI could be for you if …
- you want to be a church leader or a church planter
- you want affordable theological training while remaining in ministry or work
- you can commit 10-15 hours each week to study
- you’re a graduate or have experience of Christian ministry
- you have the support of your local church
- you’re based in the UK
For more information go to www.northerntraininginstitute.org.
Posted in NTI, Training | No Comments
June 28th, 2009 by Tim Chester
Posted in Justification, N.T. Wright, john piper | No Comments
June 27th, 2009 by Tim Chester
More for the latest edition of LICC’s magazine EG …
Mark Greene tells the story of a church who started talking about everyone’s ‘frontline’. ‘Everyone had a frontline – a place, a context where they felt that God was calling them to minister, so everyone could be involved.’ The church leader, Paul Pease, says:
A saying we frequently use here at Hook is ’surviving and thriving on the frontline (and the frontline is where we are most of the time).’ We are still totally convinced that the action is on our frontline, and we retreat twice a week behind the frontline for fellowship so as to encourage one another to get back out to the frontline once again to win people for Christ. I am really passionate about this and am convinced this is the purpose of the church and the best way to reach people with the glorious gospel.
Mark Greene comments: “The team here at LICC now uses the word ‘frontline’ in all our teaching on mission. It’s a term that honours every context and binds people together in shared endeavour, even if that endeavour is pursued in different places.”
Posted in Everyday Life, Mission | No Comments
June 26th, 2009 by Tim Chester
The latest edition of LICC’s magazine EG is available to download from their website. It includes the results of a survey of UK Christians. Asked what issues have affected your personal spiritual life, the top two responses were fatigue (55%) and time pressures (also 55%).
Reading the Bible, prayer, guidance, witnessing, conflict, ethical issues all came after those two top issues. It reinforces the reason why I wrote The Busy Christians’s Guide to Busyness 
. In The Busy Christian I said:
Our Christian lives can be full of good intentions to do more for God, but time and again those good intentions are sapped by the pace of our lives. Sermons, conferences, talks, books all urge us to spend more time praying, studying the Bible, sharing the gospel, building community, caring for the needy, campaigning for justice – and on it goes. But most Christians feel their lives are already over-full. Some Christians, because of ill-health or unemployment, struggle with the opposite problem. They wish they had more to do. But everywhere you look in the church today there are busy Christians … There are many challenges facing the church today. But alongside all of them is this problem of time and busyness. Whatever new ideas we come up with for church or mission, we need to find the time to do them! In his book, The Tyranny of Time, Robert Banks (1983) says: ‘Our attitude to time is not an extra commitment or idea. It is the medium in which everything else is done. It affects everything.’ There’s so much we want to do; so many issues; so many opportunities. But so little time. We could argue about what the most crucial concerns are facing Christians today. But unless we sort out a Christian view of busyness, we might not find time to debate them, let alone do anything.
In the same survey people were asked which context they found most challenging. The top response was the workplace (43%) followed by their neighbourhood (34%).
Posted in Books, Discipleship, Everyday Life, Grace, Spirituality | No Comments
June 23rd, 2009 by D. Goodmanson
If you have been following the Church Web Strategy Cooperative you are aware that we have been involved in a market research project for church websites. The research staff at ChurchWebsiteGuide.com has been working feverishly for four months on cutting-edge market research that seeks to answer the question, “What are churches doing on the Internet right now that are best practices for effective online ministry?” Well now data is slowly being released.
Here is a list of the current articles released:
Introduction
1. Church Website Market Research
2. Google Analytics: Why Every Church Needs To Use Google Analytics
3. Setting Up Google Analytics
Church Website Visitors
1. New Visits vs. Returning Visits
2. Church with Highest % of New Visitors to Returning Visitors
3. Getting a High New Visitor % to your Church Website
4. Getting a High New Visitor % to your Church Website (part 2)
5. Top Visited Church Website Pages
Member Surveys
1. Survey of Church Website Use by Attendees
2. Top Rated Church Website Features
New articles are posted frequently, so follow the Church Website Guide RSS Feed to stay updated on the latest Church Website Research.
Posted in Church Technology, Church Websites | No Comments
June 22nd, 2009 by Pastor David
Street Survey 4 from David Fairchild on Vimeo.
The fourth episode in the series of street surveys for Kaleo Church, asking people whether or not humans are inherently good or evil.
Produced by Jay Reimer for Kaleo Media; music by Brian Thomas/Bezalel. Copyright 2006 Kaleo Media; all rights reserved.
Like - Dislike
Posted in General | No Comments
June 18th, 2009 by D. Goodmanson
Today I received an email from a pastor on Gospel Intentionality. In this email he requested help for his church family to gain a better understanding of what gospel intentionality looks like. What exactly is gospel intentionality?
Steve Timmis posted a series of Tweets on this: Living ordinary life with gospel intentionality means …
… buying from local shops.
… frequenting a local coffee shop or pub.
… playing for a local sports team.
… always tipping generously in local restaurants.
… being the kind of neighbor everyone wants to have as a neighbor.
… volunteering at a local charity shop along with a couple of others from church.
… doing ordinary things in community.
… opening your home to, and sharing your food with others.
… walking the same route to work at the same time or catching the same train each day.
… we do EVERYTHING for the sake of the gospel!
These ideas are fleshed out more in the book Total Church. “Total church” is their way of capturing the idea that church is not one activity in our lives. Church isn’t a meeting you attend or a building your enter. It’s our identity, our community, our family. It’s the context for the totality of the Christian life.
In a post on this gospel intentionality at Edwards blog, Jonathan Dodson comments: “We need not only to do these things, but also understand how they are an expression of the gospel…or they will devolve into meaningless practices or legalistic works.”
This is the ’stuff’ we go through at Kaleo. Recently, in our missional community we have had two families begin the process of searching for a home. Both were considering a location farther away from the community where they could get more home for the money. In our gospel intentional way we asked them what were the motivations behind this. If we are called to be a community on mission with the gospel at the center of everything we do, wouldn’t our decision of where we live profoundly be impacted by this? If we are gospel intentional we make decisions with what is best in mind for our witness, our faith and God’s glory. What motivates us to move outside the city to buy a bigger home? Comfort? Investment? Safety? If the answer isn’t calling than ultimately this decision is not being made with the gospel at the core. The good news of who God is tells us our comfort, value and protection reside in Him not in our home. We ultimately need to get down to the heart issues of what motivates people in all our decisions, because if we are not walking in line with the gospel we are worshiping something other than God.
These two families have begun to re-consider what they want to prioritize. They recognize that if they moved 20 minutes away it would impact their ability to be gospel intentional. Certainly, if God was calling them to move and their motivation was the gospel at the center, we would embrace this and help them move but our missional community doesn’t see this as the case. These people have been willing to submit this decision and heed the counsel of the community because of the gospel intentionality they desire. (Note: This is not gospel ‘intensity’ these conversations are not heavy-handed or us trying to make decisions for them.) All of us seek to expose our lives to each other and the community around us so that when any decision or circumstance is brought up we examine it through the idea of God’s calling on our life to live as a redemptive people who are servants of our great King. To the world this may sound crazy but to us it is a beautiful mess of sinners celebrating a life under the reign of a God who loves us and has adopted us as His.
We are calling our community to process this in how they dress, where they live, what activities they participate in and how we interact. It is all of life.
Posted in Church, Culture, Faith | No Comments
June 17th, 2009 by Jeff V
My friend and Acts 29 brother, Bob Thune, who planted Coram Deo in Omaha, NE just released a great resource for developing people in living The Gospel Centered Life. I highly recommend this resource and encourage you to check it out.
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments
