Neil MacMillan's Blog
Ayr Time
Friday, October 16, 2009
The best laid schemes….
Robbie had it richt. What we plan is not always what happens. Yesterday was Ayr time for me. I was to visit the Free Church congregation there and talk with them about outreach and evangelism. The last couple of weeks I have been feeling pretty fatigued, something I put down to my colitis. But yesterday I was absolutely wiped. A migraine had decided to join the foggy utopia that was my brain. I gave it to lunch time and then phoned the Ayr people to cancel my visit. I hate doing this.
We have a number of churches like Ayr in the towns in and around the central belt of Scotland: Kilwinning and Saltcoats, Paisley, Coatbridge, Cumbernauld, Lennoxtown, Dumbarton, Greenock, Livingstone, Falkirk, Dunblane, Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy and even further afield, Perth to the north, Dumfries to the south. Some of these churches are doing not bad, others are really struggling. But none of them are really thriving. I cannot remember any of them having regular congregations of over 100 in the last 20 years. This raises lots of questions. Why do these congregation grow to 60 or 70 and then begin to plateau? What would it take to help these congregations to keep growing and growing and being able to plant new churches around them? Now I have had two comments on my blog I want some more. If you have any great ideas about how we can help these churches grow then get in touch. Have our best laid schemes gone wrong?
Buzzing about the gospel
Monday, October 12, 2009
Acts 29 video on my church planter coaching in Sheffield
Follow this link to get an update on my time in Sheffield. Check out Dai at the end of the video clip who is a legend himself. http://www.acts29network.org/acts-29-blog/uk-church-planters-are-buzzin-about-the-gospel/
The Crucible
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
A shift in Sheffield
Sheffield: football, snooker and stainless steel cutlery. I’ve never been to Sheffield before but here I am being coached to coach church planters. (By Acts 29) Hopefully I can use the skills I pick up to help our own church planters and redevelopment ministers in their work. There are five of us being trained and we are strange mix. Dai is a hard core church planter from a housing scheme in the Welsh valleys. Johnny is a church planter with the Crowded House in Loughborough who has a phd in philosophy. Carl is a softly spoken English gentleman who is planting churches in Brighton. Steve is a veteran church planter from Sheffield who has thought deeply on church planting and written some great books about it. Its been a joy to hang about with a group of godly men who are passionate for the gospel. It’s been humbling to see what gifted and wonderful men are working for the gospel in the UK. I hope to return to Scotland with the gospel more deeply embedded in my heart and mind and with new skills to help church planters.
Church Multi Clipation?
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Planting churches that plant churches
Church multi clipation. These are the words on everyone’s lips, or at least that’s how they sound on my lips. Everyone else says church multiplication. Church multiplication is the conviction that the best way to evangelise is by church planting as it reaches more new people than any other form of evangelism. And given that we have to a huge task in re-evangelising our nation (evangelical Christians in some our largest cities probably number less than 1% of the population,) we need to plant as many new churches as possible. To achieve this we need to plant churches that will plant churches. And we need our current congregations to become church planting churches as well.
Last week I was in Surrey talking with the leaders of our church plant in Cobham. David Miller has done a great job there of drawing together a group of Christians from a wide variety of backgrounds and cultures. How has he done this? By focusing very intentionally on the gospel as the thing that binds them all together. Over the last year the Cobham congregation has been working to lay the ground for another church plant - in Maidenhead. It is not clear how this will work out, but the Cobham leadership is on the right track. They are a church plant that is already seeking to church plant.
On Tuesday I was in Dundee. There we have a church replant. A small and declining congregation has been enabled to redevelop and prosper. Dundee also moved on to become a church planting church initiating the work in St Andrew’s which has prospered under the ministry of Alasdair I Macleod. In another and more beautiful part of Fife the Kirkcaldy congregation was redeveloped and then moved on to begin a church plant in Dunfermline. There was no grand theory behind that move. It just seemed the right way to go.
We must plant many more churches if we are to evangelise Scotland and beyond. We need a process of church multiplication where we plant churches that plant churches that plant churches. Start asking how your church can be a church planting church. (You don’t need big numbers to do church planting.) And have a strong commitment to pray for our current church plants in St Andrews, Dunfermline, Cobham and South Uist.
