Tag: church planting

A vision for your church?

The other day, I wrote about mission statements and value statements. I also mentioned that it can be helpful to draft out a slightly longer statement describing what you might call the vision for the church. This is not about arrogantly making grand claims about what you are going to achieve. Everything will be in… Continue reading A vision for your church?

Breaking up the hard ground (more reflections on Mark 4:1-20)

At Bearwood Chapel, we had a partnership with OM and over several years hosted a number of teams.  As part of that partnership I was involved in training OMers in aspects of mission.  One of the things I would sometimes do is take the team members into our car park.  I would say to them:… Continue reading Breaking up the hard ground (more reflections on Mark 4:1-20)

Building myths

This article is a guest article from Bob Sharples.  Following on from my article recently about the myths around assuming that getting a building is a solution to your long term problems, Bob highlights to further myths that churches can believe about owning their buildings. This is not a case for or against owning your… Continue reading Building myths

Buildings, buildings, buildings  -short term and long term thinking

There’s been a bit of a discussion over the past few days about church planting and the importance of owning your own building.  There have been two big prompts for this. First of all, the FIEC posted this article from Adrian Reynolds discussing the pros and cons of not owning your own building: Secondly, David… Continue reading Buildings, buildings, buildings  -short term and long term thinking

Thinking about church planting but don’t know where or how to start?

I recently asked a couple of questions on twitter about church planting. One of the questions I asked was about the kinds of barriers that people experience that make it less likely for them to consider getting involved in church planting. Now, for a lot of people, it’s simply that they have no sense of… Continue reading Thinking about church planting but don’t know where or how to start?

Don’t let your church try to rebuild Babel

I’ve shared a couple of articles over the past few days about giving space to grow and permission to grow to a church. However, I want to spend a bit of time here focusing on one of the downsides and risks with a focus on growing one single congregation.  In Genesis 11, the descendants of… Continue reading Don’t let your church try to rebuild Babel

Local Church Matters

I’ve just been reading a few things about the importance of local churches serving their communities and the benefit of being part of a church which gathers within walking distance of your home. There’s nothing controversial there and I’m not seeing any body arguing for non-local church. I’m not about to attempt to make that… Continue reading Local Church Matters

Guest post – Training, pastoring and planting in Tanzania

One of the aims of Faithroots is to encourage training and planting in harder to reach and unreached places. Here in the UK this means a lot of our focus is on urban contexts but in some parts of the world the picture is reversed in terms of where the hard to reach places are.… Continue reading Guest post – Training, pastoring and planting in Tanzania

Faithroots Training – take a tour

One of my aims in starting Faithroots was to provide a teaching and training resource for those who wanted to dig deeper into aspects of Bible teaching, theology, practical pastoral care and leadership. I believe that there are a lot of people who would both welcome and benefit from further training for Gospel work but… Continue reading Faithroots Training – take a tour