The conventional wisdom is that Christianity reinforces the oppression of women. Elizabeth Brusco, a feminist Marxist scholar conducted fieldwork in Columbia from 1982-1983, and found that pentecostal conversion transformed traditional gender relations by giving women a moral authority in the home to challenge their husbands’ drinking, gambling, or adultery. She wrote up her findings in [...]
Monthly Archives: April 2009
The epistle of Silas
27 April, 2009 – 7:21 PM
An emailed prayer update arrived today from a worker under cover in a restricted field. We’ll call him “Silas”. He has avoided overtly Christian terms for security reasons. CPM = Church planting movement and pr = pray. You should be able to work out the rest. How you can pray I’ve shared the gospel with [...]
Training down under
26 April, 2009 – 1:17 AM
There is some serious momentum building in Australia for church multiplication. Here’s an opportunity to get some training and connect with church planters from around Australia. Smart Planting. Right Planting. Sydney June 25-26, 2009 The organizers are building a national network of church planters.
Death by discussion
23 April, 2009 – 6:16 AM
Last month some of us met with Barney while he was visiting Oz. He gave us the bread and butter of church planting movements. We wanted meat and gravy with roast potatoes. He wanted action. Tim heads up a national ministry of church planters and evangelists. He went back to Sydney, recruited a business manager [...]
British churches grow smaller and larger
23 April, 2009 – 12:21 AM
Peter Brierley reports on trends in the size of British churches. Here are a few of the findings. The average size of a church has dropped from 123 people in 1989 to 84 people in 2005. Take out Roman Catholic churches and the average size for Protestant churches has dropped from 87 in 1989 to [...]
Christian Mission by Dana Robert
22 April, 2009 – 8:28 AM
This looks interesting. Some of the reviews: “Attentive to theory, but not consumed by it, and sharply aware of the significance of gender in the dissemination of Christianity, Dana Robert distils a quarter of a century of her research into an erudite and accessible single volume account of the how Christianity became the largest religious [...]
7 Laws of Leadership Selection
15 April, 2009 – 7:12 PM
Leadership selection was so important that Jesus spent a whole night alone in prayer before he chose the twelve. Floyd McClung reflects on the lessons we can learn. The law of harvest based leadership training. The law of discerning prayer. The law of selection. The law of inspiration. The MAWL law – the law of [...]
Faith in America
15 April, 2009 – 5:39 AM
Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar have released the American Religious Identification Survey 2008 (ARIS). Highlights. . . The American population self-identifies as predominantly Christian but Americans are slowly becoming less Christian. • 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008. • The historic Mainline churches and denominations have experienced the [...]
Why Easter matters
13 April, 2009 – 3:41 PM
John Dickson defends the message of Easter. . . In recent years the Easter slogan that “Jesus died for the sins of the world” has been ridiculed beyond belief. Richard Dawkins, former Oxford University professor and author of The God Delusion, scoffs that “it is vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent”. And, in a daring piece of [...]
