What is a Church? Some thoughts on what should define and characterize any local church.
Evangelistic Character
Evangelistic Character explains a little about the requirements for evangelizing.
Pastor Mistakes
A brief discussion about mistakes that Pastors make, or pastor mistakes.
Leadership Development
As I reviewed Church planting issues articles, I find this mentioned often. The key issue here is that your church plant has leaders that are spiritual, Bible oriented and guided (working by Scripture principles), and mature. Unfortunately, this just begs the whole question of a church plant. We can easily take the leaders from some well-established church and transplant them, and we have a ready-made “church plant in a can”. Unfortunately, this sidesteps the whole question of church planting, which is to reproduce ourselves on 2 levels: 1) reproduce believers or evangelism, and 2) reproduce churches, which is church planting.
A Clear Plan of Salvation
A Clear Plan of Salvation
A Clear Plan of Salvation
By David Cox
There are probably hundreds of different valid presentations of the gospel out there. Looking into the actual Bible, we find Jesus presenting the salvation in various different forms. We cannot speak authoritatively about how Jesus witnessed because being God, he could very well discern perfectly the heart of the person that he was dealing with and emphasize what that person particularly needed. The best we can do is to imitate that as imperfectly as we can.
It can only be of Satan when God’s evangelists confuse and make salvation “hard”. The hard part of salvation is and should be belief. Belief is a coin with two sides. First one side is faith in the work of Jesus Christ as your personal Savior. The flip side of the coin is repentance, giving up all hope that anything else other than Jesus’ work on the cross before the Father can do anything to get you to heaven. This includes any idea of personal works. We are not saved by a work of “faith”, but because we believe God’s promise and work of salvation through Jesus on the Cross. It is not “in us” that saves us, but rather what Jesus did that saves us.
At the same time we must insist that election is not what saves us, but our faith, as the Bible repeatedly insists. We are saved by grace (God’s giving to us something we don’t “merit” somehow) and this is obtained by us through the means of our faith, our believing God.
Eph 2:8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Eph 2:9 Not of works, lest any man should boast.
While actual salvation is not within us, our faith is what God goes by in order to save us.