“What the church urgently needs are men and women capable of leading others toward missional transformation for a future church which has not yet been imagined.”
Flexational Leadership and Pagan Mission
“What the church urgently needs are men and women capable of leading others toward missional transformation for a future church which has not yet been imagined.”
“Conversion is not the smooth, easy-going process some people seem to think….it is wounding work …. this breaking of hearts - but without wounding there is no saving” And without saving there is no Kingdom Growth!
Standing in the shopping mall, those tomb-side words on that chill first Easter morning came to me, “They have stolen Him away and we don’t know where they have put Him”, words true for most contemporary Australians. But worse, society’s degraded state of spiritual desiccation is now so far advanced that most don’t even know there has been a theft!
Early Christianity was a Movement that took on and conquered the all-powerful Roman Empire. Roman society was Pagan, largely amoral and pluralistic, everything the Christian world view was not, as well as being actively hostile to Christianity and Christians who were seen as ‘weird and depraved killjoys’. This hostility resulted in persecution, sometimes severe particularly in the reigns of Emperors Nero and Diocletian Nevertheless, by the early 4th century AD, Rome was, at least officially, a Christian Empire. So how did the Roman Empire go from being thoroughly pagan to Christianity becoming the state religion?
Essential to the nature of God is that He is Truth, that is a singular noun, not Truths. However, to use the words of Daniel, in our society ‘Truth has been cast down’ (Daniel 8:12). Indeed, the West is now largely a people ‘who suppress the truth by their wickedness’, and being that God is Truth, the retreat from one singular Truth, is a retreat from God himself.
As we celebrate receiving the benefits of the exquisite love-borne agony of the Cross, we should remember that the reception of that gift requires signing up as a ‘Soldier of Christ’, and soldiers must fight!
Easter is a certainly is a time to laugh and dance with joy in what Jesus did for us, but it is also a time to weep Jesus’ tears for people like Jack, our family, friends, colleagues who have rejected Him.
The Road to Heaven is Strewn with Missional Roadblocks
How many are there in the church today, who have been members for fifteen or twenty years, but have never done a solitary thing for Jesus Christ? . . . . they cannot point today to one single person who has ever been lifted up (to heaven) by them.’
Standing in the shopping mall, those tomb-side words on that chill first Easter morning came to me, “They have stolen Him away and we don’t know where they have put Him”, words true for most contemporary Australians. But worse, society’s degraded state of spiritual desiccation is now so far advanced that most don’t even know there has been a theft!