10 Great Ideas from Church History: A Decision-Maker's Guide to Shaping Your Church
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
Tired of following the latest church-growth fad? In many churches, building vision means embracing the ideas of the latest guru and jumping from one program to another. Ministry decisions are made according to the crisis of the moment or the pressures of the bottom line. Long-term planning can seem like an impossible dream. This book offers something different. Here are ideas that have stood the test of time--ideas from the most significant Christian leaders of the last five hundred years. Your church can implement key strategies from the lives and writings of the reformers:Gain a vision for truth.Renew your quest for holiness.See how delighting in God will inspire your worship.Bring renewal with a biblical model of revival.Build leaders with a time-tested plan for discipleship.Energize your vision for missions.Grow together with key principles of Christian community.And who makes up the panel of expert consultants who will guide your vision for lasting change? None other than Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, William Carey, John Wesley, Richard Baxter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and more. Each of the ten great ideas found in this book provides a biblically based and historically rooted vision for your church over the long haul. Do you want to revitalize the work of your church? Here are ten of the best ways in history to make it happen.
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Top Highlights
“For Baxter delight in God is ‘a solid, rational complacency [satisfaction] of the soul in God and holiness, arising from the apprehensions of that in him which is justly delectable to us.’[9] What Baxter means is that delight in God is a state of complete satisfaction of mind and soul in God’s moral beauty and love. In simplest terms, delighting in God means being totally satisfied with God in every area of life.” (Page 100)
“Sometime between 1514 and 1516, through his studies of Psalms and Romans, Luther discovered that we are justified by faith alone. That is, God declares us to be perfectly righteous in his eyes, not on account of our actual righteousness (which is insufficient) but only on the basis of the perfect righteousness of Christ, which is transferred to our account and superimposed on our standing before God. In other words, we are right with God through what Christ does and not what we do.” (Page 22)
“John Calvin, a younger contemporary of Luther, spent a lifetime mapping out a spirituality that put the true and living God of Scripture at the center of the spiritual quest.” (Page 45)
“Delight is the most universal and most fundamental habit of the heart.” (Page 101)
“Luther called any theology based on human speculation and natural theology ‘a theology of glory.’” (Page 25)