I recently posted an article on my other blog about success. Have a read
What does a successful cell church look like?
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The Apostle Peter was sent by the Spirit to eat with Gentiles. Saul of Tarsus was a Hebrew of the Hebrews called by Jesus Christ to be an Apostle to the Gentiles. Who are the Gentiles in Britain today? How can the gospel reach those who are unlikely to ever make the cross cultural journey required to belong to the Church as we know it?
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About Me
- Ross Garner
- I am the Vicar of St. Mark's which is the Church of England Parish Church in Bredbury and Woodley. We have been a Cell Church since 1998. I am married with two sons at university.
2 comments:
Good work. Actually, my own concern about cell churches is that the focus can easily move from "Jesus" to Church growth or the model. The point is that models don't fit everywhere, and our challenge should be to understand what God is doing in our "small" churches, and be faithful to what He is doing. Do I make sense?
You do make sense indeed, my friend. The values are far more important than the models or the methodology. If we value obedience to the leading of the Holy Spirit and the importance of the Lordship of Christ then we should avoid the trap that you draw attention to.
A model can be a guide or a starting point, but it needs to be contextualised. By prayer and experimentation we can find out what will work in our context and what God is calling us to do.
It is worth noting that every church has a model, but some churches have not explicity identified what their model is. Usually it is an inherited model that is subconsciously believed to be "the way that church SHOULD be done".
Critical thinking is often needed to identify what values are embedded in our current ways of doing church and whether those values are completely obedient to what the Lord wants. Also we may say we value certain things eg Loving the Lost, but our practices don't always make it easy for the lost to feel loved when they try to join our churches.
The cell model is an attempt to structure church life around explicitly agreed values. The model without the values will not work.
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