Tag: The Church

Contagious Holiness

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Last night I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at the revival service of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church.  Wayne, Trent, and the family there were exceedingly gracious and the good folks of FBCO offered an overwhelming and humbling show of support.  In the message I talked about the major solution to the major problem of the world.  To see what it is and what it means for how we do church keep reading.

 

Contagious Holiness

It is a good day to be a fan of comic book and superhero fare.  Never in the whole history of the silver screen or the small screen have we had as many offerings featuring one comic book storyline or another.  And it’s not just that the volume is high.  The quality is great too.  The comics giants Marvel and DC are in a growing competition for audience loyalty and while Marvel has so far dominated the games, the level of excellence they have achieved has set a high bar that DC is doing their best to clear which in turn simply spurs Marvel on to keep upping their own game.  Well, for a fan of this genre, the net result of this is a ton of great movies and tv shows to enjoy.   Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: 1 Corinthians 5:9-13 (Part 2)

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“I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people–not at all meaning the sexually immoral of this world, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. . . .For what have I to do with judging outsiders?  Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge?  God judges those outside.  ‘Purge the evil person from among you.'”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

So in the last note, we talked about the fact that there are times and situations when it is right and appropriate for the church to remove an incorrigibly errant member from its fellowship.  I said at the end that there is another part to Paul’s argument here.  Verse 11 (the focus of part one) is surrounded by verses dealing with this other part.  The ratio is 4:1.  Why so much more on this here than that there?  Because Paul likely understood that our temptation would be to get his intention in v. 11 backwards (boy was he right!) and he wanted to try and keep us from doing that.   Read the rest…

Morning Musings: Proverbs 18:17

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“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”  (ESV)

When we are on our own, our ideas almost always seem great.  We can convince ourselves of anything.  This does not, however, mean our ideas are always good.  In fact, if we are thinking entirely on our own, the likelihood that we are thinking off track runs pretty high.   Read the rest…

Being the Church

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This Sunday we continued our conversation about the church and how it was designed to work.  With the help of a summary of the church Luke offers in Acts 2, we saw that the church was designed to rest on four pillars.  Keep reading to see what those were and what we need to do about them.

 

While there have been very large churches at various times and in various places throughout the history of the church, the megachurch movement in this country began in the 1980s.  One of the first churches that was a part of this movement and in many ways came to define it, was Willow Creek Community Church.  Willow Creek was founded by Bill Hybels.  It started as a youth ministry meeting in an old theater in 1975 in Chicago, but under Hybels’ visionary leadership it quickly became the largest church in the country.  Today it averages 26,000 people a weekend.  It’s main sanctuary seats just over 7,000 people.  Read the rest…