Thursday’s Catch: ‘3 Steps to Reach Your Community’ And More
3 Steps to Reach Your Community
If your local church struggles to reach the community, let me encourage you to pause, pray, and participate where God is leading. By joining with the community, the church can reconnect with lost people and help the people inside the church to see and meet their needs through Christ-love.
Cal Thomas is the latest to promote false claim of evangelical church growth
Church attendance is falling in the U.S., but some evangelicals continue to comfort themselves with the false idea that their churches alone are still growing.
See Evangelicals Are Losing More People than Gaining for the First Time in 100 Years. To access this article membership in Church Answers is required.
4 Ways to Build a Groups Culture That Fuels Ministry
Would your church benefit from a groups culture that regularly releases people to serve? Begin by changing the culture to fuel ministries.
What is Your Signature Ministry?
In their book Small Church Check Up, Kay Kotan and Phil Schroeder say stable, smaller churches can remain vital by focusing on a “signature ministry,” providing one key ministry with excellence, rather than trying to be everything to everybody.
Do We Live Out Our Beliefs?
We are not called to a life of fame, worldly greatness, and fortune. Jesus is calling us to live what we know is right, to step out and do what we say we believe; to live our faith. One person who acts on their beliefs is worth more than 10,000 with beliefs they only chatter and babble about. We should be people of integrity and action, where what we say and what we do are synonymous. There should be no difference between what we say we believe and how we live.
Don’t Let Your Spiritual Senses Atrophy
In other words, use it or lose it.
Satan’s Four Snares
It’s extremely significant that in the one place in the Gospels we see Jesus and Satan do battle directly, the focal point is on identity.
What is the Mission of the Church?
The heart of the Great Commission is found in the command to “make disciples.
Have the nones jumped the shark? Maybe
Since the mid-2000s, the fastest-growing religious group in America has been the so-called nones. The percentage of Americans who claim no religious affiliation nearly doubled from 2007 (16%) to 2022 (31%), becoming a force in American culture and one of the largest segments of the religious landscape, according to Pew Research. But all things pass. And the skyrocketing growth of the nones may be fading.
Woman defrocked from UMC over same-sex relationship reinstated
A former United Methodist Church pastor who was defrocked about 20 years ago for being in a same-sex romantic relationship has been reinstated by the mainline Protestant denomination .The UMC Eastern Pennsylvania Annual Conference voted overwhelmingly during a closed session of around 200 clergy on Tuesday evening to readmit Beth Stroud.
See also: Defrocked pastor reinstated after LGBTQ bans lifted
UMC megachurch won’t host same-sex weddings despite denomination’s rule changes
A Texas megachurch affiliated with the United Methodist Church will continue to prohibit same-sex wedding ceremonies on its property even after the denomination recently voted to allow such marriages.
Historic assembly sets United Methodists on new path
General Conference brought big changes, particularly the removal of constraints on ministry with and by LGBTQ people. Now The United Methodist Church’s challenge is to remain a big-tent denomination that can evangelize in diverse communities and countries. United Methodists already are preparing to move beyond denominational infighting and reach people long disconnected from church.
How these changes will impact the United Methodist Church “only time will tell,” as the saying goes. If what has happened to other mainine denominations which have adopted similar changes is anything to go on, the changes have not arrested te decline of these denomination. How much they have accelerated their decline is open to debate.