From the pulpit of Heritage Baptist Church, my dad often repeats a very simple purpose statement for their church: “to glorify God by developing fully devoted disciples of Christ.” There is a lot behind that, but it is a very simple, yet very challenging vision for a church. The more I work with my church in Philadelphia, liberti, the more I realize both the simplicity of this statement and the challenge.
Many younger churches that have been planted in the past 5-10 years can get caught up in the whole “rage against the machine” type of ministry style. For many reasons, such as being hurt by their parent’s churches or just being out-right bored of the way older, fundamentalist churches went about being the people of God, these churches have gone about re-writing how to “do church.”
I won’t get into all the details that go into re-writing church, but, instead, Read the rest of this entry »
