Church

Things that ruin a Church: Events that Decay pt 1

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Things that ruin a Church is about events that ruin a church, or decay its effectiveness.

Following the previous post of qualities in the church that ruin it, in this post I will look at events that ruin a church. Let’s broaden this to both events that happen that hurt the church as well as events that should happen and don’t. I think of the passage in Ezekiel 34:2-4 that speaks to the shepherds of Israel, where God rebukes the shepherds for scattering the sheep. There are ministers that draw the sheep into them by love and care, and there are ministers that scatter the sheep to the winds by startling them with brute actions. See my Tract Ch51 Cowboys or Pastors?




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Biblical NT Church: Service Elements

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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.

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Developing Your Ministry Philosophy

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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.

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