by Martin Luther King Jr

We must face the fact that in America New Zealand, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America New Zealand. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing in Christ there is no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this. Now, I’m sure that if the church had taken a stronger stand all along, we wouldn’t have many of the problems that we have. The first way that the church can repent, the first way that it can move out into the arena of social reform is to remove the yoke of segregation from its own body. Now, I’m not saying that society must sit down and wait on a spiritual and moribund church as we’ve so often seen. I think it should have started in the church, but since it didn’t start in the church, our society needed to move on. The church, itself, will stand under the judgement of God. Now that the mistake of the past has been made, I think that the opportunity of the future is to really go out and to transform American society, and where else is there a better place than in the institution that should serve as the moral guardian of the community. The institution that should preach brotherhood and make it a reality within its own body.

from Post-Congregational Christianity

Many people have told me that it would be great if we could combine the elements of house church and boring normal church. And i think I've found it.

I must confess that our family has been back sliding a tad for the last couple of months in regards to planned (or unplanned) Christian activity. I have just had a promotion, which has made me busier and still working half the weekend, and Kim running our cleaning contract on Saturdays and Sundays, gathering as a Simple Church / House Church has gone out the window a bit. Even gathering organically has been incredibly limited. I am not sure what the answer is as we still need to go and worship the mighty dollar.

I think my personality is always to get bored after a while and look forward around the corner which I know drives those around me to distraction.

This clip is a send up of Christian Author and Speaker Rob Bell

by Christian Smith

1. God doesn’t intend such a profession to exist. There is simply and unequivocally no biblical mandate or justification for the profession of clergy as we know it. In fact, the New Testament points to a very different way of doing church and pastoral ministry.

2. It crushes “body life.” We can see in the New Testament that God doesn’t intend church to be a formal association to which a rank-and-file membership belongs by virtue of paying dues and attending meetings, an association which is organized, guided, and governed by a professional leader (and, in larger organizations, by an administrative bureaucracy). Yet that is exactly what most churches are.

3. It is fundamentally self-defeating. Its stated purpose is to nurture spiritual maturity in the church-a valuable goal. In actuality, however, it accomplishes the opposite by nurturing a permanent dependence of the laity on the clergy. Clergy become to their congregations like parents whose children never grow up, like therapists whose clients never become healed, like teachers whose students never graduate. The existence of a full-time, professional minister makes it too easy for church members not to take responsibility for the on-going life of the church. And why should they? That’s the job of the pastor (so the thinking goes). But the result is that the laity remain in a state of passive dependence.

4. What it does to the people in that profession. Being a member of the clergy as we know it is difficult. Doing it very well is almost impossible. Yet good-hearted men and women, convinced that they are serving God in this way, admirably pour their lives into this task. What they encounter as professional clergy, however, is stress, frustration, and burn-out.

Got this from an awesome blog called Post-Congregational Christianity

A Missionary friend involved with House Churches in Thailand sent me these pix of sign's near his house

Theologian Dr Russell Kelly disagrees with Paul de Jong's tithing theory. Read about it here