Articles

Our first challenge in grasping what God intends church to be, is to stop looking at it through the lens of our background and through the lens of 2,000 years of "church" as a formal institution.

You are church before you do church. This is one of the fueling insights of the missional church movement. This isn't a new idea...but it is pretty provocative, especially when one considers its implications. If we take Jesus at his word when he says (as recorded in John 20:21) "as the Father has sent me, I am sending you," then we realize that our being sent is the basis of our "doing" church. In other words, missiology precedes ecclesiology.

Organic Church. I've been using this term for around fifteen years now. Today it's become somewhat of a clay word, being molded and shaped to mean a variety of different things by a variety of different people.

Years of sitting in traditional church has not prepared us to do church in the manner described in the New Testament. We have been taught to come. To sit. To watch and listen to what others have prepared. (Someone described it as "sit, soak and sour".) This is Spectator Church. And it is no way to train believers to be priests!

By contrast, the churches described in the Bible engaged in Participatory Church. This kind of church requires preparation on the part of all of it's members. This is new. We haven't been taught how to do this.

The promise of the New Covenant is this: “„I will put My laws into their minds, I will write them upon their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be My people. And they shall not teach every one his fellow-citizen, and everyone his brother saying, „Know the Lord,‟ for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest. I will be merciful to their
iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.‟”

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Dear Nicolay,

It has been a long time since I heard from you.  I know that spring is such a busy time in Ukraine.  I remember fondly driving through all of Ukraine and watching the people planting their gardens.  I would often say, “Ukraine is one big garden”.

In one of your last emails you asked if we in America also faced similar problems as you do in Ukraine.

Many people are finding the church planting training done by David Watson to be very helpful. We know of several people that have recently began to use these principles and accompanying materials effectively in Russian-speaking countries. You can find the video teachings for this training under the resource section on our site-Video Training
(//simplechurch.com.ua/en/resursy/video-teachings.html).

You can also find the written materials and tools that David Watson speaks of under the resource section- E-Books and Other Written Material:
-Discovering Jesus Bible Study
-Discovering God Bible Study
-Obedience Based Discipleship Bible Study ( //simplechurch.com.ua/en/resursy/e-books-and-other-written-material.html)

Please share your stories, as well as struggles and questions, concerning using this principles with others on the site. Thanks!

I was born in Ukraine in Mariupol city in 1975, in period of the Soviet Union. I had very various intereststs in my childhood. A couple of years I was interested in Biology, I even reared different animals at home. But in the age of 12 I took a great interest in Physics. I was very interested in the world structure and it's origin. I took part in different physics contests pretty successful. I was also interested in math. In the age of 14 I wrote a small research about the solution of differential equations. In general I was interested in everything that was logical, everything that slightly opened a curtain of mystery over how everything was organized. I almost didn't attend school in my last years, I had an individual schedule. I entered university on a physical faculty without any exams. I was interested in programming since my childhood. During my last years of school I was usually sitting at my mom's work and programed. At that time the most cool processor was 8086. When I was on my first year of University I wrote a valid debugger on Assembler. That was my first really big program.

Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind (Rom.14: 4-5).

Oh, come on Paul; give it to me straight, should we worship on Sunday or not? Can we eat meat sacrificed to an idol or not? Don’t hem and haw, just give me the rule and I’ll obey. But he doesn’t; why not?