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Measuring a community of disciples

July 22nd, 2010

As i think about planting a church i realize there are so many hurdles to this endeavor. I think one of the primary reasons i haven’t jumped into this venture of church planting is because i know how insanely hard it’s going to be. And more than just being hard i think i have a small idea of how much responsibility lies in starting a community, of pastoring a people in the way of Jesus, and in leading a people who are being apart of God’s redemptive movement in the world. I probably only understand these things a little bit but to be honest it scares me a bit!

I think part of my apprehension is because of the typical models of church success assessment.
We  calculate our success by how many people walk in the door or how much money we have raised. Those things seems to fall sort when it comes to measuring things by Kingdom of God standards. But never the less that’s how things are measured.

A friend of mine, Troy Hochstetler posted this link today and it really got me thinking about church planting, which i think about all the time anyway.

The link is to an article by Dallas Willard, a short Q&A. He’s talks about assessing spiritual growth and focusing more on making disciples than getting church attenders and finding new ways to measure success and growth.

Here is a link to the article :: How Do We Assess Spiritual Growth?

I think it’s right on.
I think there are few others ways of assessing discipleship and growth as well, things like measurable impact in your community with homeless, at risk youth, single mothers, etc. I think a measuring the impact your community is making around the world to do justice and love mercy is another. At least those are a couple things that come to mind that i would add to Willard’s idea of assessing discipleship.

But the bottom line is that a community that is focusing on the resurrected Christ is a community concerned with making disciples not entertaining the masses or concerning itself with the bottom line!

Just a few thoughts prompted by a little article that encouraged me as i think about planting a community!

Grace and peace
erik

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Community Planting & HOPE

May 13th, 2010

Well, it’s been awhile and nobody probably follows this blog anyway, i wouldn’t follow this blog if the author(s) was a slacker and never posted! CRAP, i’m the author and resident slacker of this blog!

The HOPE would be to post on this forum once a week or so. Cool tidbits about church / community planting, thoughts about how i dream of a community being formed and molded around the way of Jesus, things like that. But in reality it’s really hard to post once a week! REALLY hard.

We’ll give it a try though…

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Slacker!

June 4th, 2009

Sorry i have slacked on this blog! I am constantly think of things to post on here and running across resources that i think are interesting for the sake of conversation. But life is crazy! Working a couple jobs (kinda) and just running around i guess!

BUT i really am going to try and be more “regular” on this blog. At least once a week or so. So stay tuned and give us a shout. It’s always encouraging to know people are participating in the conversation.

Be Peace
Erik

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Coming soon…

June 13th, 2008

We are getting ready to roll with the community planting blog.

The plan is to start the conversation in August. Until then we will be thinking / planning / dreaming

We are excited for the conversation to come.
STAY TUNED!!!

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