» 2005 » April

As a young boy I remember the men who used to go door-to-door selling the Encyclopedia Britannica. I don’t remember the exact price. But I do remember that it cost thousands of dollars to buy the set. You couldn’t buy them in any store. You had to wait for the salesman to come knocking on [...]

While women weep as they do now,

I’ll fight.

While little children go hungry as they do now,

I’ll fight.

While men go to prison in and out in and out,

I’ll fight.

While there yet remains one dark soul without the light of God,

I’ll fight. I’ll fight to the very end.

General William Booth
Salvation Army Founder

My sport in high school was [...]

History teaches us that eventually innovative organisations and movements drift into decline and conservatism. By 1909 the incredibly successful Limelight Unit of the Salvation Army was effectively shut down by incoming Commissioner James Hay, an austere Scotsman. Less than ten years before, the unit had produced the world’s first full-length film (see “Why should the [...]

You don’t graduate from the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Indonesia unless you have started a new church in an unreached village with twenty-five baptised converts. There are no exceptions.

Under the leadership of its principal, Chris Marantika, the seminary’s goal is to plant twenty thousand churches by the year 2015. One church in each of Indonesians [...]

It was January 22, 1882. The theatre in Worcester, England was so packed that even William Booth had trouble getting in. The overflow crowd, refused admission, broke down the door to gain entry. The music was lively and contemporary. After one song, Booth turned to his hosts and asked, “What tune was that?” That’s “Champagne [...]

What sets apart effective church planters? To find out Dick Grady and Glenn Kendall sent a survey to 100 missionaries chosen as successful by their boards. It was returned by 85 church planters from all geographic areas. From their responses seven strategy principles were developed that successful church planters follow, whether they work in responsive [...]

The Church must be forever building,
and always decaying,
and always being restored.
T. S. Eliot I grew up in a Baptist church. I came to faith in a Youth for Christ rally. In my teens and twenties the church I attended was shaped by [...]

Despite the devastation of the last thirty or more years (see “Disappearing nuns”), there are some signs of renewal and hope for religious orders. Those signs are evident among the newer orders that have remained true to their spiritual tradition and are still making the traditional demands of religious life. Those orders are successfully recruiting [...]

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its element is a very simple thing. It asks for no elaborate organisation, no large finances, no great numbers of paid missionaries. In its beginning it may be the work of one man and that a man neither learned in the things of this world, [...]

Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong stands in the tradition of modern clerics who have called for a new reformation in the church. A reformation, according to Spong, that will make the Protestant Reformation look like a Mother’s Union tea party. Spong argues that in the modern world, the idea of a personal God is [...]