Starting and leading a local church
By Pastor David Cox
Seven Marks of a Good Sermon deals with using or engaging Scripture, connecting to people’s lives, emphasizing the gospel etc.
Seven Marks of a Good Sermon is my reaction from reading this article from Lutheran Seminary of the same name. It is written by Homiletics Professor Michael Rogness and Assistant Professor David Lose. I greatly dislike the reference to the preacher as a “she” since 1 Timothy 3:2 requires a bishop or pastor to be a man.
See also Pastoral Covetousness by Pastor David Cox
Summary: This post Minister’s Riches Rejection explains how a minister must reject riches as a foundation of his spiritual mindset towards the ministry, the people of God, the church, and what his part is within all of that.
When it comes to a pure discernment ability, most believers have a very hard time understanding what is a false prophet from what is a man of God. They both “sound the same”. Often the false prophet actually sounds more convincing that the real man of God. The issue here is simply this, if you are a consumer of doctrine or a teacher of some doctrine. If you are a teacher of a doctrine, you are studied enough to know what is good or not. But if you are not at that level, then you are a consumer, and you are following other people’s teaching because you “are not there yet” yourself.
Keeping your Focus Clean is an essay about distinguishing between bad and good people in the church setting.
I must repeat, and insist that God has given us the precept of “Church,” and we are not at liberty to set what God has given us aside to do some other thing we want to do. If we examine the New Testament, we see what a church is, and we see it functioning quite well. (“Well” in the sense that the NT church does what God wants it to do. We have no right to insert our desires and purposes into what is God’s work.) A typical church in the New Testament has various service elements which we would do well to understand and imitate. As this series goes on, we will come back to these service elements and re-examine them and meditate on them. For now, we start by defining the Service Elements briefly.
Click on tag: Church-Definition to see the entire series.
In a previous post (Church Work’s Governing Principles), I explained how church work or the ministry should be governed by some “working principles”. These principles are rules, internal yes, personal definitely, but none-the-less established procedures for doing what you do in the ministry. These rules should be based on biblical principles explicitly understood and stated by the pastor as the how and why we do what we do.
I want to expand on this concept and apply it to various areas of the ministry, not-the-least being ministry ethics. But I will wait until a later post to develop ministry ethics.
This commentary explores the development of your own personal philosophy of the ministry. How you do it, why you do it, what it is that you do.
