Is your church too noisy before the service starts?
John Brand
Recently I had an all-too rare but most welcome experience in a church I was visiting, not as the preacher but as a member of the congregation. For about five minutes before the service actually began, there was complete and total silence in the building, broken only by the sound of a few people entering quietly.
It was such a refreshing change from the noise that often precedes worship. I must confess, I get weary of sitting in church, trying to gather my thoughts and hearing people talking loudly about the progress of plants in their greenhouse, the success or otherwise of their favourite football team, the latest antics of their grandchildren or whatever else it might be. I’ve been in church services where the person leading the service has to raise their voice over the hubbub of the congregation and call every-one to order so that worship can begin.
Honouring those who are ‘full of sap and green’
John Brand
We often comment on how much some people manage to pack into a relatively short life. We think of people like Henry Martyn, the missionary to India and Persia who died at the age of 31, or the Scottish minister, Robert Murray McCheyne, who died of tuberculosis when just 29 but whose life and ministry continues to be a challenge to us all.
But without taking anything away from these men, what I find even more remarkable is not what some have achieved in running what we might call a sprint, but what others continue to accomplish in what is more of a marathon. The Psalmist speaks of the righteous who “still bear fruit in old age; they are full of sap and green” (Ps.92v14).
How is your spiritual appetite at the moment?
John Brand
How’s your appetite? It’s a question a doctor will often ask to try and work out if something is wrong with your health, because there is a direct correlation between a healthy appetite and a healthy body.
Generally speaking, a healthy appetite accompanies a healthy body, and sick people tend to have a diminished hunger. But that is not only true with physical appetites but with spiritual appetites as well.
Donald Trump: lessons in leadership?
Over the years, I have become more and more convinced that, from a human perspective at least, the most important factor in determining the growth and fruitfulness of the local church is leadership.
I have studied and analysed a large number of churches that have split, closed or gone into maintenance mode, and almost without exception the problem can be traced back to a leadership issue – either a lack of leadership, the wrong people in leadership, the wrong exercising of leadership or the wrong attitude towards leaders on the part of the congregation as a whole.