Sunday, May 31, 2015
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Ron Kelly
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Saturday, May 23, 2015
To Reach A Changing Culture Pt.1 -Rev.M.D.Rogers
The church needs to change.
Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need to change the message. Just
the method. One is sacred. The other is
not.
What isn’t as clear is what the future church will look like,
and what kind of characteristics will mark those churches.
However, I think a
few trends are becoming clear. Not all of these might be
correct, but I think the
following eleven traits describe the kind of churches that will have a
significant impact a decade from now.
Here’s what I see as hallmarks of the churches that will make an
impact in the next decade;
1. The ability to say no. One of the reasons churches don’t change is because leaders are
unwilling to say no to current members who prefer things the way they were. When
you learn to say no to the preferences of some current members, you learn to
say yes to a community that is ready to be reached.
2. Outsider focus. Churches that become passionate about people outside their walls
will be far more effective than churches that are passionate about keeping the
few people they have inside their walls. Better still, you will have a
healthier church. We call individuals who are fixated on their wants and needs
selfish and immature. Selfless and mature churches will have an impact because
of their passion for people God cares about.
3. Quick decision making. If you have a decision making process that’s slow and
complicated, you will not be able to keep up with the pace of change needed.
Having multi-level approval processes and having to get congregational approval
on matters will block innovation. I agree with Jeff Brodie, if you can’t make a
decision within 24 hours, your process is too slow .
4. Flexibility. You don’t need
to change your mission (for the most part), but you do need to change your
methods. Flexible and adaptable churches that can innovate around strategy and
different initiatives will have the freedom to make the changes they need to
make an impact moving forward.
5. A willingness to embrace smaller to become bigger. Mega-churches will continue to grow, but most of us won’t lead
mega-churches. When small churches stop trying to be mega-churches, good things
can happen. In fact, more and more larger churches will start embracing smaller
venues, locations and partnerships to keep growing. A greater number of smaller
venues might be a hallmark of future churches making an impact.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
RESPECT - Rev.M.D.Rogers
Respect has great importance in everyday life. As children we are taught (one hopes) to respect our parents, teachers, and elders, school rules and traffic laws, family and cultural traditions, other people's feelings and rights, our country's flag and leaders, the truth and people's differing opinions. And we come to value respect for such things; when we're older, we may shake our heads (or fists) at people who seem not to have learned to respect them. We develop great respect for people we consider exemplary and lose respect for those we discover to be clay-footed, and so we may try to respect only those who are truly worthy of our respect. We may also come to believe that, at some level, all people are worthy of respect. We may learn that jobs and relationships become unbearable if we receive no respect in them; in certain social milieus we may learn the price of disrespect if we violate the street law: “Diss me, and you die.” Calls to respect this or that are increasingly part of public life: environmentalists exhort us to respect nature, foes of abortion and capital punishment insist on respect for human life, members of racial and ethnic minorities and those discriminated against because of their gender, sexual orientation, age, religious beliefs, or economic status demand respect both as social and moral equals and for their cultural differences. And it is widely acknowledged that public debates about such demands should take place under terms of mutual respect. We may learn both that our lives together go better when we respect the things that deserve to be respected and that we should respect some things independently of considerations of how our lives would go.
We may also learn that how our lives go depends every bit as much on whether we respect ourselves. The value of self-respect may be something we can take for granted, or we may discover how very important it is when our self-respect is threatened, or we lose it and have to work to regain it, or we have to struggle to develop or maintain it in a hostile environment. Some people find that finally being able to respect themselves is what matters most about getting off welfare, kicking a disgusting habit, or defending something they value; others, sadly, discover that life is no longer worth living if self-respect is irretrievably lost. It is part of everyday wisdom that respect and self-respect are deeply connected, that it is difficult if not impossible both to respect others if we don't respect ourselves and to respect ourselves if others don't respect us. It is increasingly part of political wisdom both that unjust social institutions can devastatingly damage self-respect and that robust and resilient self-respect can be a potent force in struggles against injustice.
The ubiquity and significance of respect and self-respect in everyday life largely explains why philosophers, particularly in moral and political philosophy, have been interested in these two concepts. They turn up in a multiplicity of philosophical contexts, including discussions of justice and equality, injustice and oppression, autonomy and agency, moral and political rights and duties, moral motivation and moral development, cultural diversity and toleration, punishment and political violence. The concepts are also invoked in bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, workplace ethics, and a host of other applied ethics contexts. Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has overwhelmingly been focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations. This focus owes much to the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who argued that all and only persons (i.e., rational autonomous agents) and the moral law they autonomously legislate are appropriate objects of the morally most significant attitude of respect. Although honor, esteem, and prudential regard played important roles in moral and political theories before him, Kant was the first major Western philosopher to put respect for persons, including oneself as a person, at the very center of moral theory, and his insistence that persons are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity who must always be respected has become a core ideal of modern humanism and political liberalism. In recent years many people have argued that moral respect ought also to be extended to things other than persons, such as nonhuman living things and the natural environment.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the importance of respect and self-respect in moral and political life and theory, there is no settled agreement in either everyday thinking or philosophical discussion about such issues as how to understand the concepts, what the appropriate objects of respect are, what is involved in respecting various objects, what the conditions are for self-respect, and what the scope is of any moral requirements regarding respect and self-respect. This entry will survey these and related issues.
We may also learn that how our lives go depends every bit as much on whether we respect ourselves. The value of self-respect may be something we can take for granted, or we may discover how very important it is when our self-respect is threatened, or we lose it and have to work to regain it, or we have to struggle to develop or maintain it in a hostile environment. Some people find that finally being able to respect themselves is what matters most about getting off welfare, kicking a disgusting habit, or defending something they value; others, sadly, discover that life is no longer worth living if self-respect is irretrievably lost. It is part of everyday wisdom that respect and self-respect are deeply connected, that it is difficult if not impossible both to respect others if we don't respect ourselves and to respect ourselves if others don't respect us. It is increasingly part of political wisdom both that unjust social institutions can devastatingly damage self-respect and that robust and resilient self-respect can be a potent force in struggles against injustice.
The ubiquity and significance of respect and self-respect in everyday life largely explains why philosophers, particularly in moral and political philosophy, have been interested in these two concepts. They turn up in a multiplicity of philosophical contexts, including discussions of justice and equality, injustice and oppression, autonomy and agency, moral and political rights and duties, moral motivation and moral development, cultural diversity and toleration, punishment and political violence. The concepts are also invoked in bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, workplace ethics, and a host of other applied ethics contexts. Although a wide variety of things are said to deserve respect, contemporary philosophical interest in respect has overwhelmingly been focused on respect for persons, the idea that all persons should be treated with respect simply because they are persons. Respect for persons is a central concept in many ethical theories; some theories treat it as the very essence of morality and the foundation of all other moral duties and obligations. This focus owes much to the 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who argued that all and only persons (i.e., rational autonomous agents) and the moral law they autonomously legislate are appropriate objects of the morally most significant attitude of respect. Although honor, esteem, and prudential regard played important roles in moral and political theories before him, Kant was the first major Western philosopher to put respect for persons, including oneself as a person, at the very center of moral theory, and his insistence that persons are ends in themselves with an absolute dignity who must always be respected has become a core ideal of modern humanism and political liberalism. In recent years many people have argued that moral respect ought also to be extended to things other than persons, such as nonhuman living things and the natural environment.
Despite the widespread acknowledgment of the importance of respect and self-respect in moral and political life and theory, there is no settled agreement in either everyday thinking or philosophical discussion about such issues as how to understand the concepts, what the appropriate objects of respect are, what is involved in respecting various objects, what the conditions are for self-respect, and what the scope is of any moral requirements regarding respect and self-respect. This entry will survey these and related issues.
Friday, May 15, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
Monday, May 11, 2015
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Saturday, May 9, 2015
True Worship- Rev.M.D.Rogers
The Priority of True Worship (John 4:23-24)
Jesus’ words about worship to
this unnamed Samaritan woman occur in the context of His witness to bring this
woman to saving faith. We might not think that witnessing is the right context
to talk about the priority of worship. But Jesus takes her implicit question
(4:20) about whether Samaritan worship or Jewish worship is correct and uses it
to zero in on the aim of the gospel: to turn sinners into true worshipers of
God. We learn:
Since God is seeking true
worshipers who worship Him in spirit and truth, we should make it our priority
to become such worshipers.
Jesus tells this woman that a
significant transition is about to take place (4:23), “But an hour is coming,
and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and
truth.” Jesus’ presence began this change from the old covenant to the new.
Under the old way of worship, place was significant: all Jewish males had to
appear before God in Jerusalem for the three annual feasts (Deut. 16:16). But
in the new way which Jesus inaugurated, He is the new temple (John 2:19-21).
Believers are being built into a holy temple in the Lord (Eph. 2:21; 1 Pet.
2:5). Thus where we gather to worship is secondary. How and whom we worship is
primary.
Unbelievers, such as the
Samaritan woman at this point, often mistakenly think that if they go through
the proper externals of “worship,” then things are okay between them and God.
As long as they go to a church building and go through the weekly rituals, they
figure that everything is fine. But they haven’t dealt with God on the heart
level. They haven’t repented of their sins of thought, word, and deed. So Jesus
tells her that it’s not the externals that matter as much as the internal. We
must make it our priority to become true worshipers of God in spirit and truth.
Note three truths from these important verses:
God is seeking true
worshipers.
As Jonathan Edwards argued,
God created the world for His own glory (see John Piper, God’s Passion for His
Glory [Crossway Books]). Everything, including the salvation of His elect and
even the damnation of the wicked, will result in glory to God. So God now is
seeking worshipers who will bring Him glory, not just for an hour on Sunday,
but every day through all their activities. We can’t properly worship God on
Sundays if we’re not worshiping Him throughout the week. You begin that process
by repenting of your sins and trusting in Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord.
You grow in that process as you bring every thought, word, and deed under His
lordship. Note two things:
A. The fact that God seeks
true worshipers implies that there are false worshipers.
False worshipers either
worship something other than God or they may attempt to worship the true God,
but do it in ways that actually dishonor Him. But either way, sincerity is not
the only criterion for measuring true worship. All true worshipers are sincere,
but all sincere worshipers are not true. For example, there are devout, sincere
worshipers of Allah or Krishna or Buddha or the Mormon god or the Jehovah’s
Witness god. But they are sincerely wrong, because they are not worshiping the
only living and true God, who has revealed Himself in the Bible.
There are also Christians who
are sincere, but their worship is man-centered. Sometimes it’s patterned more
after the entertainment world than after the Bible. It draws attention to the
performers, but not to the Lord. Or, on the other end of the Christian
spectrum, some go through ancient liturgies week after week, but their hearts
are not in submission to God. They mistakenly think that because they went
through the rituals, they’re good for another week. They’re like the Jewish
leaders of whom Jesus said (Matt. 15:8, citing Isaiah 29:13), “This people
honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me.” So we need to
be careful not to fall into the category of false worshipers.
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