and a good one at that, I think. WorldNetDaily's Jim Rutz takes a look at church growth in China and suggests that dispensing with most of the visible characteristics of the traditional church--buildings, programs, etc..--is greatly responsible for the wonderful growth of the church in China.
Perhaps he's going a bit beyond what he can actually prove, but consider; when the Roman persecution stripped the church of all but the Bible and love, the church grew to conquer Rome. When the Bible was re-released to the people in the 1500s by Tyndale, Luther, Hus, and others, it spread despite the attempts of great powers to supress it. Joel Rosenberg has sources that claim that underground churches are growing rapidly in Muslim lands.
Maybe we need more of a bunker mentality in the church, not less.
Know Your Lifts: The Romanian Deadlift (RDL)
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In the Know Your Lifts series, we’ve covered the high-bar back squat, the
low-bar squat, the power jerk and split jerk, and the overhead press. It’s
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13 hours ago
2 comments:
I remember hearing a speaker one time talk about some underground churches that he encountered in Russia. They would have just a couple of pages that were ripped out of a Bible, and they treasured them like gold. They would pass them around, probably like the early churches did with Paul's letters. The thought is definitely convicting when you consider most of us have numerous Bibles lying around our homes; but we don't cherish The Word as much as these people do.
We still get this idea that we need a big and nice place to worship. There are so many churches in Europe that are magnificent yet empty inside. There are many big churches in the U.S. and people are always wanting more. At the same time, China is one of the fastest growing churches and it's illegal to meet unless officially designated by the regime which then forbids it's official churches from preaching the Gospel.
Jesus reminds us that he grows the church by unconventional means. May we build real churches, the people, rather than buildings.
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