Deus Misereatur

Church Unique: How Missional Leaders Cast Vision, Capture Culture, and Create Movement by Will Mancini My rating: 5 of 5 stars There are lots of programs out on the market to make your congregation hot, hip and huge. The unfortunate side of these approaches is that (1) they function mechanistically, "Our product worked on the East Coast in an upscale New England city, it'll work wherever you are. Just follow our twenty-seven DIY steps exactly." (2) And each project also promotes, or assumes, a specific theology about Church, Christian Sacraments, Worship, and even Eschatology. You can read more about these two downsides here if you are so inclined: ( http://mphilliber.blogspot.com/search... ). That's what makes "Church Unique" unique. Will Mancini, a former pastor and now founder and consultant of Auxano, takes a fresher and healthier stance in this 271 page hardback. He has pulled together some helpful tools and strategies that respect particular cong...

I was doing some “bid-ness” yesterday, rummaging about to find a quotation about baptism, and tripped over this. Read it slow and steady, and before you argue with it, disregard it, or dump it, think it over. "...faithfulness is different from and more important than effectiveness. But numbers are also important, not so much in the sense of the unsaved who need to be reached but in the sense of the baptized we let get away. ( . . . ) As much as the church needs to see how the techniques of contemporary church growth alter the content of the gospel, believers need to recognize that God has ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth. The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents" (D.G. Hart, " Recovering Mother Kirk ," 46). Mike