Thursday, July 19, 2007

Back to the blog

I'm not sure how much I have to say at the moment. Been processing a lot of thoughts about church recently and also been on holiday to the wonderful Greek island of Rhodes. So very peaceful and so very hot! I actually swam in the sea (some of you may remember that I only learnt to swim last year). I say swam, is was more like waving my arms around and going nowhere in particular as the waves lifted me up and down. I probably chose the day with the least benign conditions, but at least I got in the water and had a go. My efforts in our pool were more significant!

Anyway, got home to find two parcels, always exciting, one containing two books I'd ordered form Amazon sometime ago. One was Bill Bryson's The life and times of the the Thunderbolt Kid. The other a more serious book altogether called The Big Idea by Dave Ferguson, Jon Ferguson and Eric Bramlett. The subtitle of the book is focus the message-multiply the impact and in the introduction they talk about the increasing amount of information that is available to us through the media that we have around us. Of this exponential increase in information they say:

... more information is not bad... But more information that leads to less action is a big, big problem, particularly when the action we desire is to accomplish Jesus' mission.

The challenge becomes therefore, to focus less on information and more on action!

The chapter heading that caught my attention was this:

Communities of transformation, not information.

This is going to be a good read, at least I hope it is. You see I've been around church for a while now and one of the refrains I hear from church after church is: "We need more teaching." As if the only thing stopping the church breaking through into effective mission and ministry is more information. It seems the priority has become leaning as much as possible about what we believe without ever having to turn that understanding into action. For a long time now I've thought that what the church actually needs is more opportunities to serve not more teaching about stuff we should already know.

So I'm looking forward to at least one chapter in the book and I'll try to remember to blog some thougths as I go. On the other hand do you really need any new information, especially if sitting reading it is keeping you from actively engaging in God's ministry and mission to a lost world he made, sustains, loves and died to save?

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