Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Leveling the Church: Multiplying Your Ministry By Giving It Away - by Micah Fries and Jeremy Maxfield is attacking the notion of, what they call, the "super pastor", the idea that the pastor is in charge of everything in the church and pretty much meets everyone's personal spiritual needs. Instead, they believe that the biblical model is for the pastor and elders to train men to be able to do various tasks that many think the pastor is solely responsible for. I wasn't quite sure what I thought of this book at first, but I've concluded that I like it overall, though with some caveats which I'll mention in a moment.   The premise is very interesting.   As I mentioned above, the case is made that the pastor's job is not to take on everything himself, but to build up others to be able to take on ministerial tasks, like visiting the sick in the hospital, counseling, and visiting in general. As the authors put it:   "…while the pastor ough...

The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church by Roland Allen is a rather short but very thought provoking book.  In it, he somewhat implicitly asks the question, Who builds the Church? Leading to that thought, he critiques our method of Evangelization, are we doing it right? Do we need to organize the expansion of the church?  Do we need to establish mission stations, do we need missionaries who depend upon appeals for money for their support.  Will the Gospel spread if we don't purposefully come up with a plan to spread it? Allen warns that what we are trying to do in our methods is to organize the work of God, to dictate where people will get saved and a time period in which their salvation must happen.   But as Allen points out, " For spiritual work spiritual organization is necessary; but can we create a spiritual organization of spiritual forces?   Only a divine intelligence can do that.   But we attempt to do the work of that divine intelligence;...