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Please visit us at http://tellthestory.wordpress.com

What is Church? The STORY of the Book of Acts

Ken posted an instructional tool on his site about how to study the Book of Acts. I want to post an alternative twist to this study. My twist is that it is taught using story form. It may take me a while to get the entire survey up but here is the basic guide to doing the study.

Ideally this study is done using a group of 20-30 people. The person facilitating the training will tell the first few stories and model how the story telling and debriefing will transpire.

Once the large group is familiar with how to tell the stories, divide our group up into smaller groups of 4-6 people. Each group will listen to the Scripture read from different versions of the Bible several times, they will try to retell the story amongst themselves until a good retelling of the story is obtained from the small group. The small group will then tell the story a few times and identify principles of church planting in each story. As each of the small groups complete this exercise, they return to the large group to retell their story and to debrief it. Each group is given different sequential stories so that as the stories are retold in the big group, they hear the entire story.

Now, let's back up. The facilitator will need to tell at least the first four stories (I am including a list of stories at the bottom). He will also lead the discussion of the stories in the big group. While the participants are in their small groups, the facilitator will go between groups to make sure that they are staying on task and to make sure it is storied, not preached.

Here is the list of stories. I will try to post a story a day so that you can see how this works and what would be the different Church Planting characteristics to pull out from each story.

Text Story
Acts 1:1-26 Jesus appears to disciples, is taken up into heaven
Acts 2:1-13 Coming of the Holy Spirit
Acts 2:14-47 Formation of church in Jerusalem
Acts 3:1-4:4 Peter heals a paralytic
Acts 4:5-33 Peter & John before the Sanhedrin
Acts 4:32-5:16 Ananias & Sapphira
Acts 5:12-42 Apostles in jail
Acts 6:1-7 Choosing helpers
Acts 6:8-7:60 Stephen martyred
Acts 8:1-25 Phillip in Samaria
Acts 8:26-40 Phillip & Eunich
Acts 9:1-31 Conversion of Saul
Acts 9:32-43 Peter heals Aneas, raises Dorcas
Acts 10:1-48 Peter & Cornelius
Acts 11:1-18 Peter tells Jerusalem church of Gentile converts
Acts 11:19-30 Gentiles in Antioch believe the gospel
Acts 12:1-19 God frees Peter from jail
Acts 12:20-24 Not in CPM training
Acts 13:1-52 Saul & Barnabas go to Cyprus & Asia
Acts 14:1-28 Paul and Barnabas in Listra y Derbe
Acts 15 Decision of the Jerusalem church
Acts 15:36-41; 16:1-10 Macedonia vision - second missionary trip
Acts 16:11-40 Paul preaches in Phillipi
Acts 17:1-34 Paul & Silas travel together
Acts 18:1-28 Paul meets Priscilla and Aquila

American go home... but leave your money behind

We have all probably read the articles and books written about rejection of the American. Any of us who have lived overseas for any length of time have certainly seen this sentiment. This isn't a post about foreign policy or sociocultural domination. No, this post arises out of a conversation that my wife recently had with a believer on our trip back home. As she was visiting with a dear friend, our friend M commented that she wished that US volunteers would stay away.

There is another local church that has been utilizing hundreds of volunteers each year to "build" the Kingdom. They have built an incredible compound and are currently building a church building that will hold several hundred people, when the membership is only a couple dozen. M is one of the members of this church and she commented that while they are well meaning volunteers, they are causing problems within their small church. The amount of foreign "investment" that has flowed into this little congregation is probably now well over a hundred thousand dollars.

She said that when the volunteers are present, hundreds of people will come to the activities to receive the free stuff that is brought but that when the volunteers leave, so do the people. She said that she is frustrated that their church has not made any decisions but that everything is decided for them.

I wish that I could say that M was the first person I have heard make a comment like this. Often I will hear, American stay home, just send us the money. In M's case, it was more just let us do what we need to do. We can do it without the money and without the "volunteers". It isn't always expressed vocally, sometimes it is said with actions instead of words.

When are we going to learn that God is the ultimate owner of everything.

God has placed resources in the harvest. Why is our temptation so often to look somewhere other than the harvest for resources?

When we introduce outside resources to the equation, most certainly we introduce control. We introduce our influence, for better or for worse. Most of the time, outside resources send the message to the unbelieving world that the main reason most of those "Christians" are part of the church is because they are getting dollars for being there. Too often, the testimony of the church is not one of dependency upon God but instead, dependency upon the American.

Homecoming and reproducibility

I recently had the privilege to take a short vacation back to where our family began our missionary work. A place where I made lots of mistakes but also a place where I learned a great deal. A place where we tried many things and finally saw some results. As I went back to visit, I did not know what to expect. We have maintained contact the best we could but considering none of them have email and phone service is... well, unreliable, it hasn't been as much as I had hoped. This is the story of our trip...

We arrived and had a wonderful time visiting with old friends. We were excited to see how God had blessed the small group of believers that we had worked with. At times, their journey has been frustrating but God did provide workers from the harvest of believers. The church is growing rapidly. In the past few months they have baptized many new believers (over 30) and plan ocean baptisms 1-2 times per month. They have a vision for reproducing and reaching others locally and around the world!

All that the church has, they have done it. They built a small building that they meet in, they have started a new church (still developing) in a nearby barrio, they have identified four small towns where they want to start churches this year. In two of these locations, they already have new believers.

The pastor was one of the first young men to come to Christ in the area. How was he chosen? They decided that time had come that they needed a pastor. One of the ladies prayed that God would lead them to the right person, God told her that this young man should be the pastor. Soon after she received this message from God, the young man stepped up and said that God wanted him to be pastor. It was confirmed when the lady shared her story of prayer. Where are the resources? The harvest!

What does this have to do with reproducibility? None of the believers in this church have come as a result of quick and easy efforts. None of the believers came in a showing of Jesus film, a children's carnival, door to door evangelism, or a medical clinic. They came through building relationships and spending lots of time with them. God has provided us many in-roads into communities by just living amongst the people with whom we are working.

Now that there is no long-term ex-pat missionary presence in the area, what does the church have to do to be able to reproduce? Do they need children's carnivals to draw a crowd? Do they need medical clinics? Do they need saturation evangelism teams to come in? Do they need a video projector, generator, and sound system? The answer to all of these is NO. Since they did not have access to this previously, it is not seen as the only way of reaching people. None of them were reached using those methods. They just need to follow the model of reaching those that they know and identifying the man of peace where they are unknown.

That is all for now but I will put more up about my visit this week.

George Klineberg - resurrected

Well, George Klineberg has been resurrected. My travels and other responsibilities meant that I had to put George on the backburner for a while. I hope to be more consistent with George's posts.

Don

I'm Back

Hi all!

Sorry for the month long break from posting but I have been quite busy over the past month. First we did two weeks of training on Church Planting using the book of Acts. If you haven't heard of the OneStory project of the International Mission Board, Wycliffe Bible Translators, Campus Crusade for Christ, YWAM, and Transworld Radio, check out the site! After that training I had a few days home before doing a training for YWAM. This training was for many organizations but the purpose was to see how Latinos could be moblized to work in Latin America and around the world using oral methods to do church planting.

I will post more later but having been away from home and off-line most of the past month means I have lots to catch up on. I hope to share more about our Church Planting training soon.

Preaching What We Practice?

I encourage all of you to subscribe to EMQ (Evangelical Missions Quarterly). You can read all of the archives from .

Today I want us to look at an article written by Paul Johnson way back in April of 1998. The article, Preaching What We Practice: Not Always the Answer is a great article dealing with subsidy and the role of Missionary vs. the Role of Pastor/Elder.

Perhaps the best paragraph in the article is,

I believe there's often a lack of delineation between pastors and missionaries. As Wayne points out, they are two distinct entities. Evangelist and missionaries carry Christ to where there is no church, with the objectie of establishing one. Pastors and elders minister where a body of believers is already established. Biblically it seems the ways in which they are sustained also differ.

The article goes on to discuss how missionaries are supported over and against how local church leaders are supported. One of the criticisms that the author finds is that too often, financial renumeration is the "calling" from denomination to denomination. We find some pastors going to the highest bidder. Also, he points out how the catalyst usually comes from the outside but that in order for new testament principles to be carried out, leadership must be grown from within the body.

Let us join together to pray that God would clearly present His vision for us and that we would be able to work together in order to assure that He is praise everywhere, all the time.

Oh yeah, go subscribe to EMQOnline and read this yourself!

The Tithe - how clear cut is it?

Having grown up in a small Southern Baptist Church, there were three things that were certain, death, taxes, and several sermons a year from the pastor on tithing. When I was in college, I began to look at the Biblical basis for tithing and when I asked our college Sunday School teacher (the pastor's wife) about the issue, it was as if I was a heretic. My questioning the written in stone 10% rule was not looked upon very highly.

Can we open a discussion on tithing here? I think it would help me work through the issue. BTW, even before I get started. I don't want to be accused of not being a tither. Our family gives beyond the 10% amount so we are safe :)

Here are some of my comments, would you care to opine as well?

I guess the most used verse for tithing is Malachi 3. I know that I have heard dozens of sermons on how we Christians are robbing God if we do not give our 10%. Perhaps when everyone were farmers, it was easy to identify the 10%. What about someone who owns his own business? Is his 10% of everything he sells, is it after expenses, is it his taxable income (if so, most would never need to tithe again)? Tithing is interesting in the modern world, especially if we become legalistic about it.

Viola, in his book Pagan Christianity, makes the point that the tithe was sort of like the income tax. He also points out that every third year the tithe was 23.3%, not the 10% that we practice.

How do we reconcile the modern day tithe with the New Testament example of sharing everything in common with other believers in need?

I could go on for a while, but I will allow some of you to jump in on this one.