The folks over at the Acts 29 Blog continue to post helpful material for husbands and dads. The articles focus on church planters/pastors, but the material is equally applicable to any Christian husband.
Today Dustin Neely writes about the “Family Dashboard”.
If we will keep our eye on the “Family Dashboard,” we will spend more time on the road for the Gospel and less time in the ditch looking helplessly at a burned out engine.
Read the entire article here.
Watch – Dr. Sinclair Ferguson delivered the 2010 den Dulk Lectures in Pastoral Ministry at Westminster Seminary California. Download or watch all three lectures or listen to the audio.
Listen – Tim Challies and David Murray have started a new podcast named “Connected Kingdom” in which they discuss living the Christian life in a digital world. Subscribe to the RSS feed.
Read – The latest edition of Themelios, a theological journal edited by D.A. Carson, is available at The Gospel Coaliation website. I plan to check out Martin Salter’s article on the relationship between circumcision and baptism in Colossians 2:11-12.
Audio from the 2009 Matthias Media conference is available to download at peoplegrowth.org. The conference was titled “Gospel Growth = People Growth” and focused on how gospel growth happens in people and through people. Below is a list of topics addressed at the conference.
Tim Chester has written a review of The Trellis and the Vine, a new book on church ministry. Some of my fellow elders have ordered copies and I’m looking forward to borrowing the book from them when they’re finished reading it.
Make sure to watch the video below of Mark Dever recommending The Trellis and the Vine.
(If you’re reading this in an RSS reader you may need to click through to the blog to see the video clip)
From The Cross and Christian Ministry by D.A. Carson,
Western evangelicalism tends to run through cycles of fads. At the moment, books are pouring off the presses telling us how to plan for success, how “vision” consists in clearly articulated “ministry goals”, how the knowledge of detailed profiles of our communities constitutes the key to successful outreach. I am not for a moment suggesting that there is nothing to be learned from such studies. But after a while one may perhaps be excused for marveling how many churches were planted by Paul and Whitefield and Wesley and Stanway and Judson without enjoying these advantages. Of course all of us need to understand the people to whom we minister, and all of us can benefit from small doses of such literature. But massive doses sooner or later dilute the gospel. Ever so subtly, we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements — but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning. Again, I insist, my position is not a thinly veiled plea for obscurantism, for seat-of-the-pants ministry that plans nothing. Rather, I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry (25-26).
