Ministering for the long term
‘I don’t see much self care being practiced among pastors, which makes us hypocrites because we spend so much time encouraging others to do what we’re not doing. I also don’t see that much pastor’s care being undertaken by churches for their leaders or by elderships for their pastors. If we want pastors to stay fresh to be able to preach and teach and pastor well for the long term we need them to be vibrantly alive in Christ. But how do we do that?’
3 philosophies of sermon application
Mine almost always follow the second option here. But as the post says, there will be times we might want to use the others depending on the passage.
Why you still need the church even if you have been hurt by it
‘One would hope that words like coercive, corrupt, and manipulative would never be used to describe church leadership, but sadly that’s not the case. If you’re one of the wounded and you have turned your back on Christianity due to the experience, I want to plead with you to reconsider your response for three reasons.’
Know your place
‘One of the dangers for us as churches, pastor and people is that we assume our place is a generic place. That it’s the same as the places and people elsewhere or that we see via our media consumption be it social media or binge watching our favourite series. That it’s generically British. Generically middle or working class. Generically Northern or Southern. And so on. And so we end up preaching a generic gospel via generic sermons and meeting generic needs for a generic area and a generic people and guess what we get a generic response.’
Embracing cross-cultural incompetence
There is a lot to be said for this one.
When translators cross the line (Matthew 6:13)
I always enjoy Bill Mounce’s comments on Bible translation. They’re always short, helpful and insightful. In this one, he looks at when translations may go too far with the text (in this case, the NLT) and offers a couple of examples.
From the archive: Don’t let the Devil’s perfection be the enemy of Bible-reading progress
‘The Devil is so very clever and what sounds ostensibly like it can only be good (i.e. read your Bible lots) so quickly becomes a legalistic burden which, ironically, can have the very opposite effect of causing us to give up because – as Paul so often pointed out – the law does not bring life. Satan so quickly convinces us of the utmost importance of something good so that it becomes such a burden to us that we give up because we can’t do it properly.’