May 27th, 2010 by Ptr. Vince
There is no pastor or Church that doesn’t want to grow in numbers. All churches want to grow, and all churches want people to be coming to church. The big question however is “how?” I have here a video that talks about the current phenomenon in growing churches. I got this video while browsing the [...]
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March 16th, 2010 by Ptr. Vince
The issue of true love waits is a valid issue concerning of love. The big question however is, “How to wait?”
With the current shift of culture and moral standards of the world, I believe true love waits is an “on-time” seminar for our younger generation.
I do not believe to what the government is doing as their solution for the rising cases of HIV. I believe that it is still the revival of moral values is still the best solution for this, hence, religious groups can do indeed play a great role in this issue.
The article below was taken from the True Love Waits Manual published by Church Strengthening Ministry years ago. Thus, I find this article direct to the point and helpful to our younger generation.
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February 3rd, 2010 by Ptr. Vince
There is no Church that does not want to grow. And perhaps all pastors and all people inside the Church wants to see the growth happening in their Church. But what does it take and how are we going to grow our Churches? Master Plan Of Growing Healthy Churches In the Philippines was written to answer this huge challenge for every Churches.
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August 12th, 2009 by Ptr. Vince
I have seen this video in one of the websites of Organic Church people. Very funny, but there are really truths in it. Our Churches are like this and are now out of focus. Our Churches tend to attract people to come in. In contrast to what the Bible say, our churches is suppose to be emphasizing the going out and spreading the gospel.
There is nothing wrong in attracting people to come to Church. In fact, in our contemporary time, I believe that is also important that we will have a presentable Church. But to be imbalance with the emphasis of our programs and giving more weight in attracting people is getting out of focus.
The purpose of Organic Church movement is to go back to the original NT way of worship and being in the Church which I believe is good. However, still we need to be extra careful to not to fall in legalism especially if we are already doing Organic Church since the Bible did not gave us a protocol nor a step by step way of having a Church, and how to worship God. It only presented general things. Furthermore, most practices in NT Church are very applicable for them which might be totally or partially different to what we have now concerning the culture and traditions that we have.
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July 31st, 2009 by oggie
Several years ago, some co-workers dropped in without any warning at the weekly small group gathering for Christians in our company. We were pleasantly surprised, of course, and asked what prompted them to join our group. They shared about a Christian co-worker who had been their supervisor for a few months on an assignment in another province in the Philippines. They were amazed by the way this brother conducted himself — he was a person of honesty and integrity, he showed that he cared for his people and he pursued excellence in his work. They also noticed that he had been with our small group before they went together on that assignment and came to the conclusion that there must have been something in what we were doing together that influenced the life of this brother. They came to us because they wanted to be like him. They saw Jesus in and through his life.
When the subject of influencing the world for Christ comes up the first images that flash into the minds of many believers often include Christian celebrities who use their status to affect change, massive evangelism events and big churches with outreach programs. The Lord may use such highly visible means but He often works in many other invisible ways to reveal His Kingdom to a lost world.
We often judge the success of what we are doing by its visibility and size. But somehow God’s economy seems to work differently. Jesus often illustrated influence for His Kingdom using the picture of small seeds falling to the ground or being sown in a field, a lamp on a hillside or grains of salt on a plate of food (Matt. 5:13-16; 13:1-42). Perhaps Jesus is saying that it is in the small deeds of “ordinary” Christians in everyday life more than the big people, the big events and the big programs that He and His Kingdom will be revealed.
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July 31st, 2009 by oggie
Nowadays, when a well-meaning friend or acquaintance asks me,
“Where do you go to church?”
I often catch myself groping hard for a non-controversial answer. Because to me, this question reveals an almost unquestioned assumption that church refers to building or to an event held once a week, often on a Sunday, and normally called a “worship service.” But is that really the church?
In his book Organic Churches, Neil Cole says that this same question reminds us about the Samaritan woman’s question in John 4:20-24 to Jesus. The Samaritan woman’s concern was about the place of worship. Neil Cole says “where” is the wrong question to ask. The right question is “who?” We do not need to go and seek God in some special place. He has been seeking us right where we are. I have come to the conclusion that church happens where Jesus and His people are – not in one fixed location on a single day of the week.
In recent years I have tried to look at the New Testament church as described in Acts and the Epistles through fresh lenses – to try to understand it without the assumptions that accompany contemporary church practices. This was easier said than done and I still have much to learn (and unlearn). But life is a journey and with it the ongoing discovery and application of God’s plans and purposes for His people. We can only begin to act on what the Lord has revealed to us thus far.
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July 21st, 2009 by oggie
Interview with:
Neil Cole,
author of
Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens
by Christianity Today
Neil Cole is a pastor and the director of Church Multiplication Associates (CMA), a “growing family of organic church networks.” Cole advocates a decentralized, micro-church strategy to reach the growing number of people who will never be attracted to a worship service.
How did you come to faith, and how did that inform the type of ministry you do today?
Neil Cole: I came to Christ in college and grew at a very strong megachurch. I ultimately went on staff there. Later, when the senior pastor left, our church went from 3,500 people to 600. So I’ve seen the struggles of being part of a large church staff.
After finishing seminary and leading a small church in L.A., my denomination asked me to oversee church planting in Southern California and Arizona. We really wanted our first plant to succeed, so we poured in a lot of money. We paid for two full-time pastors, a sound system, worship teams, lots of publicity, consultants and toolkits. But a year later the church died.
What went wrong?
Cole: I think God wanted to teach us something. The parables about the kingdom are usually about starting with something small, like a mustard seed. We learned a church cannot be bought; it must be planted. And that means starting small.
I was trained —to create a church experience as an outpost and invite people to find Christ there. One of our early plans was to rent a coffeehouse to reach young people in Long Beach. We were getting ready to launch. But in the middle of one of our strategy meetings God spoke to us and said, Why not go to the coffeehouses where they are?
Rather than trying to convert people from their coffeehouse to our coffeehouse where we could then convert them to Christ, we decided to bring Christ to them. So we started hanging out at their coffeehouses, and things started rolling. People started coming to faith in Christ. That’s the difference between being centralized and decentralized.
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November 22nd, 2008 by Ptr. Vince
Starting a new congregation or let say a new church is not easy and may require lots of labor and lots of patience, not to mention all those people who needs to be involved in this task and the amount of money that is needed (depending on the method used).
An Organic Church is alive.
An Organic Church is alive.
Aside from all these, the main movement that we are pushing through right now is what we call the “Organic Church.” This is a kind of church that grows not just merely in numbers but in maturity and reaching out more people for the Lord.
Sometimes, we have the misconception that a growing church is based on numbers. But in Organic Church, we based the growth to the amount of workers and people who reaches out in the field. And this is being measured in the ratio of the church membership.
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Tags: church planter, church planting, churches, Discipleship, discipleship for the church, Evangelism, organic church movement
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