Friday, November 22, 2013



1. Let us appreciate the church but let us reimagine it. So I want each of you now to think of your church and mentally describe it to yourself. What is it like? I am sure it is full of good and earnest people. The work goes on faithfully week after week. And I have a pretty good idea of your church because most churches are the same; similar things go on in them. It is recognizable.. as the hymn puts it: ‘In heavenly love abiding, no change my heart shall fear, for safe in such confiding, for nothing changes here!’

So, if you and I want to start on a process of re-imagining the church perhaps we have to go back to basics and, for me, the starting point would be the Great Commission: ‘Go and preach the gospel’. What I notice from my study of the bible is that both the Hebrew word for congregation, qahal, and the Greek word for church, ecclesia, are not static words but active words....

My second affirmation is that: Our task is to nurture fellow Christians but also to grow authentic disciples. And this affirmation is about moving from encouraging fellow believers to moving them on into discipleship. Consider in your mind now, some people who come along to church but as far as you know are rather passive Christians. They are faithful in attendance but that is the extent of their involvement in church life. We might long to see them developing as a public Christian. How might that happen?

Read it all.

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