Not long ago, Drew Goodmanson wrote an article about what established churches can learn from church plants. Drew has several great points that can help both established churches and new churches as they think about how to keep their members active in reaching out.

Check out his post.

Christianity Today has a new article out this week that suggests that church planting has become the primary means of organized evangelism today. The article suggests that the model in the 70s was primarily through large scale crusades, a la Billy Graham. In the 80s trends like Evangelism Explosion led to personal evangelism become the primary means to grow the church. The article talks about how many denominations now see church planting as one of their primary means of evangelism, particularly in minority and marginalized groups.

I am not sure that the article grasps the full depth of what is happening in church planting, but it provides a good introduction to what many churches are doing, and some of the challenges involved.

I definitely agree that planting new churches is important. I am part of a church plant. I think that churches need to be careful to think through why the are planting churches. As long as churches are planting new churches to reach people who need the gospel, or to provide good teaching that is missing in an area, then I am all for it.

Through a site that I frequent I found a blog that I checked out. This guy wrote a post recently about being a Christian. His view of Christianity is as follows:
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Over at Church Marketing Sucks, guest blogger David Zimmerman has written a series of posts about how the church looks to first time visitors. It is not clear from his posts whether his view of these visitors is that they are believers or unbelievers, so I am assuming that he is referring to both.

In his most recent post, Zimmerman talks about the need to avoid what he calls Verbose Nomenclature. In short, his post is about the necessity of avoiding what some call “Christianese,” those theological or church language terms that are foreign to those outside the church. He talks about the expression “Have a blessed day,” being a turn off to someone who is not a believer. He also suggests in a comment that words like “fellowship” are simply not good to make people feel included.
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Another book that I have read recently is: Don’t Waste Your Life, by John Piper. Like Mark Driscoll, John Piper is one of those pastors that I like to listen to. Frankly, I have not been listening to Piper’s sermons recently. I found this book very thought provoking. At its heart, this book is an application of the themes that John Piper is best known for. His catch phrase is probably that “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” In this book, Piper tries to kindle the fire of applying this concept in daily life. Using an illustration from his evangelist father’s life, of a man late in life who finally accepted Christ, and realized that he had wasted nearly his entire life, Piper tries to encourage his readers to find out how to live so that Christ may be glorified in our lives.
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