The Anatomy of Church Growth Pt 2
It’s time that ‘Healthy things grow’, yet there’s a point that a tree stops growing vertically, yet never stops reproducing laterally. To judge a tree...
The Anatomy of Church Growth
‘Healthy things grow’ is a slogan all of us have grown up with and while the gist of it is true, the application of it...
The Ten Gates
Between Heaven and Earth are 10 gates, symbolised by Nehemiah repairing The 10 Gates of Jerusalem after their destruction by The Babylonian Empire. If we can clear the debris and open the gates we could be a part of an unprecedented move of God.
The Hit Factory
Every Church needs to be a Hit Factory – a place where you inner tunes are discovered, detached from the discords of fear and doubt, placed together with rhythms of grace and united with the X Factor of Heaven.
Relevance – How to be so Engaging, it’s Exhausting
The more relevant you become, the more access you get granted to people’s hearts and souls. If your mission is to see hearts and souls transformed by The Gospel, getting an ‘all access’ card is essential. In this article, I discuss how preachers can upgrade their card to ‘all areas’, making it easier to see all they dream to see come to pass.
Jesus Wept
If you have wondered where your God may be leading you to, it’s a place called Bethany. It’s a place where ‘Agape’ love collides with ‘Phileo’ love – where unconditional love meets brotherly love to create a sense of family that all of us are deeply longing for. And it’s from a bond of brothers that strength comes and the future is won.
Beat the Blag: the 7 greatest lies in church life
When does a blag become a lie? We live in a world of blagging. We all do it. It’s the art of spin. It’s when...
Why Love Languages Don’t Work
Usually, depending upon our personality type, each of us has a ‘love language’ that means the world to us. It’s a way of communicating, not necessarily through words, that leaves us feeling valued and incredibly special. However, it’s when your demand for your ‘loved one’ to speak your own particular love language increases that the relationship usually begins to unravel rather than strengthen.
The Next You
The mantra of our age is not only ‘be yourself’ but ‘find yourself’. Yet the imprint of the New Testament is not to find yourself but to define yourself. It’s not what the Word of God says about you that ultimately counts, it’s what YOU say about you. Your definition of yourself will either align you with God’s truth, and release its power upon your life, or alienate you from truth and render it redundant to your life and world.
My Letter to the Generations – Jenny Gilpin
As featured in the latest edition of the Hope City Magazine, Jenny Gilpin writes from the heart to the generations.
The Third Culture
Have you ever baulked when someone has asked you ‘Where are you from?’ For so many the answer is complicated! Your normal response is, ‘then we moved to…then we moved to…’. You are probably what they call a ‘Third Culture Kid’ (3CK)!
Hope City Magazine 2015
Take a flick through the pages of the brand new Hope City Magazine. Packed full of inspirational articles, real life stories, updates from our locations and a generous measure of quirkiness.
Shake it Off (Players are Gonna Play)
“Players gonna play…Haters gonna hate…I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, I shake it off, I shake it off.” Leadership lessons from Taylor Swift.
If You Chase Two Rabbits
I made up the Albanian reference, but the two rabbits bit is true of your life. Once, a whole lot of whales got trapped and died in a Canadian inlet while chasing a school of sardines. The papers the next day said that they ‘prostituted vast sums of power for insignificant gains!’ We need to be on the on guard so that that doesn’t become the caption of our lives.
Jesus was an Introvert – Expelling the myth of macho
In recent times there’s been a movement within the church luring Jesus into the category of alpha male. They cite that many men stay away from church because they view it as a ‘ladies club’, prompting a number of church leaders to attempt to take Jesus out of the limp wristed, semi-geeky and semi-camp imagery and more into a macho, ‘carpentered up’ image of ‘who he really was and is.’ But, is it based on scripture or is it a misdiagnosis of the reason why there’s more women in church than men?