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Thought provoking blogs on church, family, discipleship and volunteering
 
This is my last blog for the year as we lead up to Christmas and afterwards have a time to rest and abide in the first part of January (see here for what is planned).
  As we go into this break here are some quotes from articles on the web (follow the links to read them in full)
  Church and Family
  
RED CHURCH We live in a non-committal culture, where you can turn up to Church  when you want, expect to be entertained and still keep all of your  options open. This is not what Red (a church in Melbourne) is about. Red is a Church which is unashamedly about re-centering our lives  around Jesus; the man who was God and who spoke about a life that costs  and a faith that is sacrificial. ( see here) MIKE BREEN
 You see, I am absolutely convinced that 100 years from now, many books will be written on the phenomenon that is the late 20th Century/early 21st  Century American church. And I am fairly certain that it will be with  large degree of amazement/laughter that people, in reading about it,  will say to each other: “You must be joking! Seriously???! People  actually thought it was a good idea to structure the Church as if it  were a business? Honestly?!” 
Perhaps we don’t have the perspective necessary to see how funny or  strange this really is, but I promise you, if you run your church like a  business, it’ll never be a family and families are what have changed  the world....... 
Efficiency has replaced effectiveness. Many churches are  organizationally efficient, but we aren’t affecting the lives of people  the way in which Jesus imagined a family would do. ( read the full article)  
Discipleship vs Volunteering
  
ERIC PFEIFFER In the hustle and bustle of trying to promote, maintain and multiply  good church services and programs, we find ourselves pressed for time,  energy and resources, therefore enlisting folks into our volunteer  armies to fulfill our vision. Somewhere along the way we exchanged  Jesus’ vision of a discipling culture for a volunteer culture.  We’ve  become experts in mobilizing volunteers and have lost sight of our  responsibility to make disciples. ( read the full article)  
 
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 David Wanstall, 16/12/2011 
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