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Church Planting

church birth control

By Church Planting
I like reading Ed Stetzer.  I first came across Ed's stuff when I was in the beginning stages of planting a church.  My wife and I had just been hired by Stadia and were sent back home with a stack of books to read.  One of those was a book on church planting by Ed Stetzer. Ever since then, I have tracked Ed via his blog and Twitter (@edstetzer).  Here are excerpts of a recent post entitled, "Church Birth Control." Seems to be that churches must be on some powerful birth control. They are not reproducing. And I don't get why.  It's natural. It's normal. It's essential. And we all know how to do it. But somewhere along the way, church reproduction and multiplication became unusual or strange in North America. And I am not happy about it. What's the most effective? Church multiplication movements. When churches plant lots of…
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church planting

By Church Planting
I enjoy being around church planters.  This morning at Mountainview our guest speaker was Todd Sinclair, a church planter who started Life Church in Aurora, CO.  Todd challenged us to think of our journey with Jesus as participating in God's story.  He also challenged us to think relationally. After starting a new church in San Diego (LifePoint!), I can honestly say that starting new churches is the single most effective way to reach people disconnected from God.  Those four and a half years with LifePoint were wonderfully challenging but wonderful nonetheless.  We saw people discover God for the first time sitting while sitting on one of our couches.  That's a thrill that's hard to describe but it's addicting. If you are a pastor of a medium to large church, I want to encourage you to begin praying about how God might use your church to start new churches.  It may…
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how do innovators think?

By Church Planting, Leadership
Read this morning an article entitled, "How Do Innovators Think?" from the Harvard Business Review.  Since I may never go to school at Harvard, at least I can read their journals.  This one paragraph struck me as important -- for business types, pastors, parents, etc: If you look at 4-year-olds, they are constantly asking questions and wondering how things work. But by the time they are 6 ½ years old they stop asking questions because they quickly learn that teachers value the right answers more than provocative questions. High school students rarely show inquisitiveness. And by the time they're grown up and are in corporate settings, they have already had the curiosity drummed out of them. 80% of executives spend less than 20% of their time on discovering new ideas. Unless, of course, they work for a company like Apple or Google. Flash back to the past: During my teenage…
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