What should the church pastor / staff team / church council or bishop do about the big drop in attendance?
The issues are not just external. We have internal issues. There are denominational and congregational factors at play. There are key church health characteristics that show internal health factors are lower in those regions - factors relating to congregational character and leadership.
Plus how the Tanzanian Church has been built through the labors and prayers of Australian Christians, and why prosperity gospel preachers are as wicked as witch doctors!
We are joined by Bishop Mwita Akiri from Tarime in rural Tanzania, Judith Calf who served as a missionary in theological education in Tanzania for 20 years, and Tim Swan who leads the Anglican Aid Ministry here in Australia.
What impact does growing up in a pastoral family have on ministry kids?
Valerie Ling from the Sydney Centre for Effective Living joins us to unpack the ‘Ministry Kids Wellbeing Survey,’ revealing what Australian ministry children, say about their upbringing.
They tell of heightened responsibilities and an acute awareness of adult realities plus concerns about feeling different from their peers.
One of the world’s leading New Testament Scholars Thomas Schriener is in Sydney for the Moore College Lectures on ‘The Battle for the truth of the gospel.’
At the center of his attention is NT Wright and the New Perspective on Paul, a debate that questions whether ancient Judaism was legalistic.
Religious Freedom leaders are calling on Australia's Government to quickly bring a Religious Discrimination Act to the parliament.
Mark Sneddon says the Religious Discrimination Act is not about granting unlimited freedoms, but about preventing adverse treatment of religious individuals and organizations.
He says there needs to be a fair compromise that the rights of all involved, which should be supported by both sides of politics.
What does Expressive Individualism mean for churches? And what specifically does it mean for church music?
Here is the expressive individualism worldview: ‘Truth comes from inside me. It’s important that I look inside to discover who I truly am’ and ‘I need to express my individuality and personal truth to the world around me to receive validation.’
That truth comes from within - is the unspoken assumptions of guests who come to our churches.
And it’s a worldview that has impacts inside the church, including inside our music teams and inside the heads of the songwriters who write the songs that we sing.
Disillusionment is one of the great threats to the Christian life and to Christian ministry
A wise man said the worst thing in ministry was not a pastor who quits, but a pastor who doesn’t quit, but who keeps going when they’ve given up.
Sydney Missionary and Bible College Karl Deenick shares his own experience of hitting a major wall after seven years of pastoral work.
We unpack how ministry challenges can lead to a sense of disillusionment, especially among millennials, plus a way back.
What would Dave Keun and Jon Kwan like to tell their younger selves if they could travel back in time before they took on the position of senior minister?
How has their sense of ownership changed?
What has been most difficult about the transition to the role? What mistakes have they made?
The chair of Gafcon Laurent Mbunda and chair of Global South Justin Badi Arama are to meet to work out a roadmap for the resetting of the Anglican Communion.
Global South Anglicans have endorsed the Former Sydney Archbishop Glenn Davies call for the communion to be reset on biblical foundations. The Global South have called on their Primates to work with the GAFCON Primates Council and other Orthodox leaders to reset the communion on its biblical foundations as a matter of urgency.
All the time in church there are unexpected things happening. We or someone else makes a decision to change something which then relationally or missionally impacts another area of church life that we didn’t expect.
Sometimes we put too much attention into one area of church - and now other areas are suffering.
Whatever size your church is - the church system is complex, interdependent and interconnected.
Sometimes the presenting problem won’t actually be the real problem, there’s something else causing it which is not immediately obvious.
How do you balance the instability and chaos of external ministry with adding a foster child or adopted child to a ministry family?
What are the implications of taking children in crisis into the ministry home? What motivates ministry families to become foster parents or to adopt? How do older children and the church respond?
What is it to be #likeaman ?
There are not many places in the New Testament where men are spoken to specifically.
Today we are thinking about being a Christian man.
In the ESV and NASB the translation of 1 Corinthians 16:13 has ‘Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong’. (ESV)
But what does that mean?
There are three different ways that the adult population of churches can grow:
Adults being saved.
Christians transferring from another congregation within your denomination of switching from another denomination.
Children of members growing up in the church and taking on their parents faith for themselves.
Most evangelical churches - even growing churches - are underperforming in the first and third ways.
In the Sydney Anglican Church parents report that an average of only 65% of their children who grew up in church are currently professing Christ. That number hasn’t changed in ten years - despite a targeted effort to increase it to 70%.
A new massive ethical question has risen up with the advent of artificial intelligence.
How will people decide what kind of morality to give to their artificial intelligence creations?
There will need to be a morality. But what should it be?
How can a senior minister best train junior preachers (student ministers and assistant ministers) in preaching?
There’s a tension we all feel: we want to be a training church raising up the next generation of leaders and yet we also want to make sure that the quality of what happens in our gatherings is high.
We don’t want a Sunday morning ‘plane crash in the pulpit’, where people at church that day think‘I wish I had stayed home today’ or ‘I wish I had gone to St Bloggs down the road.’
Artificial Intelligence is an oncoming tsunami that will catch all of humanity off guard.
It is a change more like a wheel than a typewriter.
But what will this do to our sense of self?
Stephen Driscoll, in ‘Made in our Image - God, artificial intelligence and you’ says artificial intelligence may do great harm - giving more power to sinful people, governments or companies.
He says artificial intelligence will likely trend towards people pleasing - giving each of us what we want now/a sense of heaven now or it may become more debauched.
It may even become an existential threat to us - because EITHER it lacks a wise moral system OR it righteously opposes our sin.
God wants all of me to love all of God all the time’ says Senior Pastor of Fellowship Dubai, Ray Galea.
We want our staff and leaders to live and serve in ministry out of an overflow of the love of God for them. Grasping this love properly lifts our service from duty to desire.
As pastors we are so committed and focused on encouraging our congregations to love God with all their hearts, souls, minds, and strengths. But do we stop to consider that our own love for God might be the limiting factor?
The pastor’s love for God will be a limiting factor for the congregation’s love for God. If we do not truly have hearts for God, how could we possibly lead others to the same?
“It may be that God is destroying the Church of England and who am I to stand in his way?
“The real tragedy would be if, in this traumatic, confusing time, if all of the evangelicals and the broader Orthodox group fall out with each other… if we can bear with each other in our different strategies, then that will be what we need (in whatever the future in England is going to be), whether that's within the Church of England or outside.
Charlie Skrine, the senior minister of All Souls Langham Place London, says his church (and other evangelical churches in the UK) are in a world of pain at the moment over the growing split in the Church of England.
Mr Skrine, who is speaking at the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion Conference in Sydney, says All Souls is united in it’s commitment to biblical teaching on sexual ethics, but divided on what the best response should be.
Australia’s former Prime Minister Scott Morrison releases a new autobiography this week where he speaks explicitly about his Christian faith, and there’s a bible quote on almost every page.
Akos Balogh of http://www.bluefoxmedia.com.au joins Dominic Steele to review Mr Morrison’s new book where the former Prime Minister writes of wrestling with whether to study at Vancouver’s Regent College, being helped by listening to sermons by Tim Keller and Rick Warren, being rebuked and encouraged by Christian pastors and friends, wrestles with forgiveness, and God’s goodness during a long struggle over infertility.
Plus we discuss how pastors can wisely interact with political leaders.
It is almost D day in the Anglican Communion.
Today we give the background for two highly significant meetings. One to take place next week in Rome. The second in June in Cairo.
The Rome gathering has been called by the rejected Canterbury leadership. The Cairo gathering has been called by the leadership of the Global South.
As background, The Church of England, the historic mother church of the Anglican Communion, under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury formally abandoned the historic Christian faith when the English General Synod voted to follow Archbishop Welby and his house of bishops in voting for same sex blessings.
In reaction, the majority theologically orthodox have drawn a line in the sand and parted company with the church of England.
