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Thanks to Kevin for his comments on "More on Church Planting": Breaking free from our "isolated cultures" requires a lot of work and personal cost. It has been much easier to invest our time and money into a once-a-week gathering and then claim "over commitment" as an excuse to bow out of relationships that are…

My last post described three key starting places for "planting churches" which is really about planting Kingdom seed into the lives of people: Take responsibility for my own spiritual life. Carry others in intercession. Care for and disciple others. I would like to say a bit more about this last point. I am, again, suggesting…

I’m giving some thought to church planting, recently, because we have some people launching out to start new gatherings. However, for starters, I have to say that discussing the concept of planting churches is really starting on the wrong foot.  Scripture never talks about planting churches.  Churches (people-movement-gatherings) develop as Kingdom seed is planted into…

Chip Brogden, at Watchmen.net (thanks, John for pointing me to the article), has some strong words to say about "organized religion."  This is a short excerpt from a much longer article: What is Babylon? It is the marriage of church and state, religion and government; or to be more direct, it is allowing the leaven…

I find myself falling into the trap of putting too much focus on the church as a gathering and forgetting that the church, in its fullness, is more about going and being than about gathering. Yes, the church gathers to fellowship, break bread, and pray. But there is much more written in Scripture about the…

We are firming up plans for a House Church Conference on May 6-7 in Santa Maria, California with Tony and Felicity Dale and Neil Cole. I will keep y’all posted, but if you would like to receive details by email send me a note.

I would like to provide some context for the previous post’s discussion.  It seems to me that, in some ways, we are debating the question: "just how sinful are the institutional church’s structures" and thus "how harsh should we be in judging it?" I suggest we look at how we deal with "sin" on a…

Chris Miliken comments (with some enthusiasm) on a recent post in which I quoted a short excerpt from Tony at theoblogy.  I thought the original quote was worth repeating along with Chris’ comments… for the sake of dialogue… Tony said: "More and more of us are now convinced that something new cannot happen within the…

Here is a tip (not a yahoo promotion) to stay in touch with a handful of your favorite blogs.  Yahoo now has a blog reader (RSS) that can be personalized at www.my.yahoo.com.  You can subscribe to the blogs you follow and the current posts, along with summaries, will appear on your yahoo home page.  I…

Notes from an Anabaptist church planting conference: We may agree church is people rather than a building, but we need to remember it is not just people in services – it is people dispersed as well i.e. people both gathered and scattered. This requires a more holistic attitude. Church planters should not be aiming at…