I read the section on the decade of evangelism in Rob's book yesterday.
The startling statistic is that the evangelistice initiatives of 1994 - Jim, Minus to Plus and On Fire (which passed me by!) - cost British churches a staggering £8m. Add to that the costs to churches and individual Christians off flying back and forth to Toronto to get the blessing (one estimate I read put this at many millions) and it's clear that we've got money to burn...
When I was reflecting on the decade for Building a Better Body, my conclusion was that it was very fad driven, one initiative after another with no real idea of what we were trying to achieve. Over a million people left the church through the decade - which makes for an interesting definition of evangelism.
But I wonder if we've really learned the lessons of all that. As Barry Linney said 'Rather than listening to those outside [the church], we were still only speaking to them after listening to our own heartbeat.' Has anything changed?
And has anybody got any idea why the spell checker on my blogger has ceased working?
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2 comments:
Sadly Simon, the spell check is a known problem to Blogger but they don't seem to have a known fix yet!!
As to your other points, have you followed the "Jim and Casper go to church" adventure? I haven't followed it that closely, but it does seem quite interesting to consider getting the views of someone form the "outside looking in" rather than always relying on our ability to be "on the inside looking out".
And now we're doing the same with Hope08 etc. Maybe ;-).
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