One of the first people I ran into this afternoon at Anglican 1000 was Matt Kennedy (from Stand Firm in Faith).  He’s here live-blogging.

This morning he wrote this fantastic article on the gathering we are here for.  Here’s a snip:

So why are we here and what is Anglican1000?

Three years ago Archbishop Duncan called North American Anglicans to plant 1000 new churches in 5 years. The first Anglican1000 Summit was designed to support and equip leaders to meet this call.

Back then, many people, myself included, were dubious.

How could a new church-body boasting less than 700 congregations, many of which were beaten, bloodied, and depleted after long, painful and often losing legal struggles with the Episcopal Church, possibly hope to more than double itself in less than half a decade?

The congregation I lead, Church of the Good Shepherd in Binghamton New York, newly departed from The Episcopal Church, had only five months earlier lost our church building and the rectory (home to me, my wife, Anne, and then four children) in a lawsuit filed by our former diocese. My people were reeling. Anne and I were heartbroken and embittered. We were fighting for survival. Planting a new church was something far beyond the realm of what we considered possible.

Good Shepherd’s story was far from unique. Anglicans across the country had lost buildings, left homes, suffered church splits, and lost leaders. It was dark.

Three years later, things feel a lot different. David Roseberry, rector of Christ Church Plano, writes: “Inside the Anglican 1000 office, we can barely keep up. Churches are being planted, congregations are launching satellite works, seminaries are retooling their curriculum, students are being trained, and the Gospel is going forward church by church, life by life, heart by heart.”

The Anglican1000 website provides tangible evidence of this forward movement with story after story from the field of new congregations and new networks emerging across the continent.

I don’t know the numbers—I’m not sure if anyone does—so I can’t say how many new congregations have been planted in the last three years nor how many are in the works now (that’s a number I hope to be able to report at some point) but, what three years ago seemed an overambitious, improbable, even absurd goal, appears now to be within reach . . . .

 Read the rest.

I’ll be in Plano,TX the next few days participating in the Anglican 1000 church planting gathering.  I’d welcome your prayers for safe travel and health.  I’ll post updates both here and on Facebook.

Here’s the website for Anglican 1000.

What is your “compelling purpose?”

(h/t: Elizabeth)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “U.S. Congregational Life Survey – Key Findings,” 29 October 2003, <www.uscongregations.org/key.htm>.

[2] This statistic comes from Barna’s figures on male/female worship attendance, overlayed upon the Census 2000 numbers for adult men and women in the U.S. population.

[3] I came up with this figure by taking the U.S. Census 2000 numbers for total married adults and overlaying Barna Research’s year 2000 percentages of male vs. female attendance at weekly worship services. The figures suggest at least 24.5 million married women attend church on a given weekend, but only 19 million married men attend. That’s 5.5 million more women, or 22.5%. The actual number may be even higher, because married people attend church in much greater numbers than singles.

[4] Barna Research Online, “Women are the Backbone of Christian Congregations in America,” 6 March 2000, <www.barna.org>.

[5] Ibid.

[6] “LifeWay Research Uncovers Reasons 18 to 22 Year Olds Drop Out of Church,” PowerPoint presentation accompanying study, available at the LifeWay Web site,http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_main_page/0,1703,A=165949&M=200906,00.html, accessed 12 September 2007.

[7] Barna, “Women are the Backbone of Christian Congregations in America.”

[8] I get an e-mail message about once a month from a pastor overseas whose congregation is almost totally female.

[9] Camerin Courtney, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Christianity Today, Single Minded. View athttp://www.christianitytoday.com/singles/newsletter/mind40630.html.

[10] Based on a show of hands at the National Coalition of Men’s Ministries meeting in 2005. The consensus in the room among hundreds of men’s ministry experts was that less than 10% of congregations had any ongoing ministry to men. Compare this to the 110% of churches that offer women’s and children’s ministries.

[11, 12] “Why Religion Matters: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability,” The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, 1064, 25 January 1996,  <www.heritage.org>.

[13] Penny Edgell (Becker) and Heather Hofmeister, “Work, Family and Religious Involvement for Men and Women,”Hartford Institute for Religion Research, <http://hirr.hartsem.edu>.

[14] Christian Smith and Phillip Kim, “Religious Youth Are More Likely to Have Positive Relationships with Their Fathers,” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 12 July 2002, findings based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997).

[15] C. Kirk Hadaway, FACTs on Growth: A new look at the dynamics of growth and decline in American congregations based on the Faith Communities Today 2005 national survey of Congregations. Hartford Institute for Religion Research, http://hirr.hartsem.edu.

Joe Carter, an editor at The Gospel Coalition, has this report:

The Story: After the Obama administration’s announced that health insurance coverage would require the inclusion of contraception and abortifacients, several Christian leaders—including Chuck Colson, Richard Land, and Rick Warren—called on Evangelicals to stand with Catholics in civil disobedience to this law.

Read the rest.

Ran across this article to which I replied, AMEN!  It has cross application to both child-rearing as well as to parish life and leadership:

A while back, I had a student with a serious attitude problem. Let’s call her “Sue.” On the first day of an art course in which I first encountered Sue, my antennae shot up. At the end of my opening presentation, when I asked for questions, Sue responded by launching a missile. Due to her internship obligations, she would be late for several classes. I reiterated my policy on lateness (it’s strict) and suggested it might be best for her to drop my course. To this Sue responded that she needed to take my course to graduate (translation: “Your course is the course that suits my schedule”).

See how it turned out.

Spectacular article by Eric Metaxas:

In the last century, many serious Christians have fallen into the trap of striking an anti-elitist attitude, and often an anti-intellectual attitude, too. We can see how this happened; after all, it was the educated elites who, in the late 19th century, undermined the Scriptures, embraced Darwin, and soon thereafter came to champion a social Gospel at the expense of true biblical theology. Many Christians felt themselves besieged and, in reaction, retreated into a kind of defiant, populist stance, one that had its dukes up, as it were, and was often prideful, rather than humble. In this process, many of the most theologically serious Christians abandoned the mainstream culture to the secular elites, who were now alone on the cultural field, with no real opposition. So, of course, the culture got worse, as we have said, and the unchallenged secular ideas of the elites and intellectuals came to dominate more and more, flowering, one might say, in the Sixties, in whose secular and socially liberal “Boomer” shadow we all still live. Which, of course, made serious Christians yet further hostile to the mainstream culture, and certainly to the elites and intellectuals who dominated it.

One result of this hostility to mainstream culture, and to the secular elites who dominated it, is that Christians more and more abandoned “worldly” centers of cultural influence, taking their salt and light with them like peeved children taking their marbles and going home. So the cultural centers like New York City only slid farther into secularism, and farther from the values of the rest of the country. And because of the rise of the media culture in the last fifty years, the influence of these increasingly secular cultural centers only increased. People who thought they could hide in small towns far from places like New York – found that their children were going upstairs to watch their own tv’s, and getting the values of New York and Hollywood elites anyway.

So Christians have become particularly hostile to cultural elites, whose unchallenged ideas were destroying the culture. And we have often behaved as though we somehow had God’s permission to hate these elites, because not only were they especially wicked, but also wealthy and powerful and famous. We have little difficulty bringing the love of the Gospel to exotic people groups, but elites are something else. Whom does Jesus love less? Which deserves hell more? Or is it that, like the Prodigal son’s elder brother, and like Jonah, it is God’s grace that we most fear? Have we seen the Pharisee, and is he us? If that’s true, then it turns out we are sinners, too, in need of God’s grace. Or did we think we could get to heaven simply by not watching HBO?

Of course Christians aren’t alone in their anti-elitism. Hating elites is as American as George Washington. The idea that they might hold the ideological keys to our culture is as distasteful as paying taxes to King George III. But scholars like James Hunter at the University of Virginia have shown it to be true, and the example of Wilberforce has proven it true at least once. But saying it’s true today is lonely and difficult, something like being a westbound ibex trapped in an endless herd of eastbound sheep. “The little people of history have been forgotten and stepped on and overlooked,” they bleat, “and it is their voice that must be heard! History has been written by the powerful few, and that must be changed!” And so we applaud Ben Franklin, the precocious candlestickmaker’s son who through sheer Yankee ingenuity rose to become an international celebrity and helped found this country. But we forget that only after he had risen was he able to help those who had not risen along with him.

Our history of anti-elitism explains much of why we’ve had little difficulty ministering to down-and-outers – or our own social equals – via evangelism, but have sneered at the elites who sneer at us, and at engaging the culture over which they have so much sway. But we should stop and ask ourselves what the world would be like if Wilberforce had done that. Among the most crucial moments in history was when Wilberforce, newly converted, went to talk with his old friend, John Newton, the slave trader turned pastor. Wilberforce was sure that becoming a Christian necessitated retreating from the world, and his elite circles. He knew that his friends in high society and politics would now mock him and his beliefs, and he knew that the temptations of the world were powerful, too, and would be easier to avoid if he retreated from the world. But Newton famously told him not to do this. Newton suggested that perhaps God would use him in politics and high society. Perhaps God had given him his talents and position for that reason. Wilberforce’s assent to Newton’s advice led to all that followed, led to the Clapham Circle, and to the end of the slave trade and slavery, and to the improvement of life among the poor, not just in Britain, but around the world. The social conscience we think of as a given among most people in Western societies can be traced back, in large part, to that conversation and that decision.

Read it all.

St. Andrew’s member Dr. Bill Sasser first began doing short term mission trips over 15 years ago.  Bill and his wife, Susalee, have traveled all over the world, offering dental care to those least able to care for themselves. Their travels have taken them from the jungle highlands of Southeast Asia to prisons in Rwanda to the squalor of Haiti. After serving solo for many trips, they felt led to reach out to students at MUSC’s Dental School.

Ten years ago, they helped organize Dental Community Fellowship (DCF – DentalCommunityFellowship.net). This is a student chapter of a national  organization called the Christian Medical and Dental Associations. DCF organizes yearly mission trips where students play an integral part of the care given in these locations. Students who go on these trips are responsible for covering all associated costs for their trips. These include airfare as well as incountry expenses. The trips not only benefit the patients but the students as well as they are able to provide hands on care at a rate and under circumstances that they will never see if their learning was confined to the school and its clinics. In addition, they are exposed to missions and serving those who are many times forgotten.

This Saturday,  January 21, they will hold two events to raise money for scholarships. The first event of the day will be a golf tournament at Stono Ferry. In the evening, they will have a banquet here at St. Andrew’s beginning at 6:30 pm. The DCF Banquet will feature a silent auction, bar-b-que dinner and a speaker, Dr. Stan Cobb. Stan is known as the Cowboy Dentist and hails from Spearman, Texas. He is a dentist, artist, writer, and occasionally, a cowboy.

I invite you to come and be a part of the banquet and hear the incredible stories of what our Lord is doing through and with our local dental school. To purchase tickets to the banquet, please visit the DCF’s website.

Found this very nice article over the weekend.  Quite a bit to think about.

When John Wesley was born in 1703, four million out of Britain’s five million people lived in absolute poverty—unless they found enough food for that day, they would begin to starve to death.

When John Wesley launched a Church Planting Movement in this context, he not only changed the eternal destinies of an estimated one million people who came to Christ through his ministry, he changed their economic status as well. Not only did the Methodists he led get saved, they got out of poverty and became a powerful influence in discipling their nation. Wilberforce and other “spiritual sons” of Wesley honored him as the “greatest man of his time.”

The Methodists made such an impact on their nation that in 1962 historian Élie Halévy theorized that the Wesleyan revival created England’s middle class and saved England from the kind of bloody revolution that crippled France. Other historians, building on his work, go further to suggest that God used Methodism to show all the oppressed peoples of the world that feeding their souls on the heavenly bread of the lordship of Christ is the path to providing the daily bread their bodies also need.

Could Church Planting Movements of our day apply these same teachings with similar impact?

Read the rest.

St. Andrew’s home grown missionary, Jean Berler Pereira, and her husband Pastor Francis Pereira are stateside for a brief visit.  Francis and Jean and their children, Esther (4) and Andrew (2), serve in Mumbai, India.

Jean was sent to India from St. Andrew’s in 2005.  There she met her husband Francis who has been pastor of Metro Church since 1998.  Together they are pastoring a growing network of churches which currently comprises eight congregations.  Metro Church is part of a larger Indian church planting movement called New Life Fellowship.

Jean and Francis would love the opportunity to spend some time with their friends and supporters from St. Andrew’s and the Charleston area.  You’re invited to join them for India Night on Friday, Jan 13th 2012 at Sams Hall, St. Andrew’s Church, Mt. Pleasant 6:30pm.  Indian dinner will be served.

Francis and Jean will be sharing about life in India, the incredible ways God is moving there and how you can actively participate in building the kingdom around the world.  Please feel free to invite friends and anyone interested in learning more about missions and our global God.

If you’d like to come please email us at jimnear@gmail.com so we know how much food to order (dinner is free).