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Four Weeks In Geraldine

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I recently returned from four weeks in Geraldine. I loved it and am very grateful for the opportunity. The minister, Alistair McNaughton, and elders of St Andrew's Presbyterian Church chose disciple-making as their theme for 2021 and they asked me to come and kick the year off for them. I preached for four Sundays, was involved in six of their home groups each week, met with individuals, led an elders and ministry team leaders' retreat and spoke at a ministers' cluster. The church bought 65 copies of my wee book, Making Disciples Like Jesus . These were distributed, primarily to members of the home groups. The preaching largely paralleled the topics in the book and I had prepared a series of Bible studies. The sermons can be heard here . Geraldine is a lovely town and St Andrew's is a good church. I really appreciated the warmth and hospitality, the number of young families in the church and the readiness of people to talk about their faith as something personal and rea
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A Disciple-making Movement In New Zealand

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Movements are, in many ways, the antithesis of institutions. Movements move! They are dynamic and growing and there are rapidly expanding disciple-making movements in many parts of the world. Steve Addison is one of the key players in describing and chronicling disciple-making movements. His site ( www.movements.net ) has masses of material on movements. See his books here . N ew Zealand prides itself on being very secular but that will not stop God. In fact, it is not. Here is a story of a disciple-making movement in the far north of New Zealand that is spreading to other parts of the country. NoPlaceLeft New Zealand from Steve Addison on Vimeo . Link to this page of the movements.net site . I have to confess to knowing nothing more about this movement than is what is contained here. I am taking it at face value. But, if you know more, let's share the information.
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How To Measure Success In A Church

  What we tend to measure When it comes to reporting the state of the church at your annual meeting (if you have such a thing) what do you measure? The traditional “measures” in church life are often identified as: Attendance Buildings  and Cash Others talk about “noses and nickels” i.e. numbers attending and financial health. To those we might add some common contemporary measures of success: Busyness  – how full is your programme? Staff  – even quite small churches now might have several paid (possibly part-time) staff. The number of staff is seen as an indicator of success. The problem is that those measures get scant, if any, attention in the Bible! Attendance, perhaps, gets a little although in the book of Acts, for example, the emphasis is on how many are converted and “added to their number” rather than the total number meeting. Many churches will, of course, also record the number of  baptisms . That is one indicator that seems to be much closer to biblical values. What does Go
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A New Start

 Hi. I have recently retired from parish ministry after 37 years. That raises the question of what God is calling me to do now. I am committed to disciple-making and want to resource individuals as they grow in their relationship with Jesus and resource churches to effectively make disciples. Central to that are some websites. I have one on discipleship i.e. on the many aspects of knowing Jesus and following Him. I have had some trouble with websites being hacked and am currently using google sites. This website can be found at  https://sites.google.com/view/knowing-jesus/home although I will use www.followers.org.nz when I figure out some of the problems I have been having. The other site is about disciple-making. You can find that at  https://sites.google.com/view/disciple-making/home . When the addresses change, I will let you know here. These are fairly ambitious projects. I would love any help or suggestions that you have. Let me know about other relevant websites, blogs, resour
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