Worship Audio from the evergreen community...
Love Like You
"When I spend time, time when I'm "on the clock", to create something for my community, I have been compensated. My time has been paid for. I create, and I give to my community the gift of what God has allowed me to create. However, when I turn around and market that, I, or my community, is making money off of what should be an act of worship.
That's where it starts to get dicey."
The Creative Commons Church
"I believe in the promise of the Holy Spirit to help us... but if even St Peter admitted that much of what St Paul wrote was "difficult to understand", shouldn't we do the same?"
Who can understand it?
"Say you had some reasonable solomon-like assurance that God would answer affirmatively ONE prayer that you prayed as a pastor/for your church community...
What would you pray?"
One Prayer... my answer.
"Why would this affect me like this?
I don't know.
It just does.
Damn that dark, sticky place deep down in the corner of my soul..."
the dark, sticky place deep down in the corner of my soul
"I want to differentiate between planting a service and actually planting a community. Planting a service is easy. You just need a bunch of dough, a few people willing to work themselves to death and voila'... and yes, that's all about the location.
Planting a community, however, is a bit more ephemeral... a bit harder to quantify into easy-to-follow steps. It's a partnership between the Spirit and desperate people trying hard to listen to that Spirit. It usually results in a Sunday morning (or other time) gathering, and often people are told about it/invited to it... but that's not the heart of a true community is it?"
10 Keys to Sane Church Planting
"In light of that, from the very beginning we decided to give away 10% of our offerings to the poor, to people who were not us. We started supporting another church in town called the Bridge that does a lot for homeless teens. We started giving to Blanket Coverage that feeds/clothes people downtown. And now, we've started seeing our own evergreen stuff for the poor springing up. We've also been able to help out some folks inside our community who were struggling financially.
This (instead of endless sermon series on giving) would be how we would teach on the subject. I hoped (and I think it's worked out pretty well) that people would intuit that what we did as a community, they should be doing as individuals. We also decided that as giving increased, we would raise the actual percentage we gave away."
Sane Planting pt 2- The Dough.
"Our relationship with the pub space is an interesting thing. We love it for instantly breakng down some barriers with some of the people we would like to see become a part of our community and (much more importantly) become followers of Jesus through belonging to our community. We love it for raising barriers with people (you know the kind...) that we'd just end up disappointing anyway. They tend to not want to go to a church that has a nice pale ale on nitro tap... and people that might, just might have some of that over lunch after.
By the same token we fear it... we fear becoming defined by, dependent on, distracted by those things. While we recognize the benefit of the pub space for us... it's not us. It's not our identity... our center. That place belongs to Jesus."
"Pub" Church... ugh Church...
"Advertising you do has a less than 1% effectiveness rate. Send out 1000 mailers and maybe 5-7 people might check out your community because of it. Considering the fact that less than 10% of your visitors are going to come back and be a part of your community, and when you consider the percentage of that small number that is likely to be either unchurched or formerly churched, well... It's seems as though you might be better off doing something besides the mailer thing. It's too expensive for the returns on the investment."
Evergreen and Advertising...
"Many of us who inhabit the sphere of “American Christianity” live in a world that doesn’t know when, how or even why to grieve. For us, Christianity is about victory, it’s about feeling better about ourselves. It’s upbeat, inspiring, short and peppy. I even know one pastor of a large church who has asked his worship leaders not to do any songs written in a minor key. Too much of a downer."
Don't Forget to Grieve...
Worship Audio from evergreen: Forgiveness
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