Monthly Archives

September 2017

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I got this flyer today for a new church plant in Carbondale. Having just preached Sunday about how new churches help provide vigour, enthusiasm and “young blood” to established churches, which in turn provide wisdom, resources, funding, experience, etc. and how the two can have a symbiotic relationship which blesses each other and their community for the Kingdom, part of me was excited to see a new work happening “in our backyard.”
As a Carbondale pastor, who heard nothing in advance about this new work (launch day is Sunday), I have to confess I felt a little slighted, even as someone on my way out-of-town. A recent church planter who came to Carbondale made a point of reaching out to the other pastors in town while he was laying groundwork, and it went a long way to getting us “established” pastors on-board with, excited for and supportive of his new work (they are now using our old building as a worship space). I think I’m going to go look up churches in our target area and make some new pastor-friends…

 

Thomas Hooker on the pastoral task

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The scope of [the pastor’s] Office is to work upon the will and the affections, and by savoury, powerfull, and affectionate application of the truth delivered, to chafe it into the heart, to wooe and win the soul to the love and liking, the approbation and practice of the doctrine which is according to godliness… his labor is to lay open the loathsome nature of sin, and to let in the terrour of the Lord upon the conscience, that the careless and rebellious sinner may come to a parley of peace, and be content to take up the profession of the truth.

–Thomas Hooker (founder of the Connecticut Colony), A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, 1648.