Sentences with phrase «local congregations need»

But the question is: What do local congregations need most today, agitators or negotiators?

Not exact matches

It will require that we turn more of our attention homeward, away from raging national controversies and toward the everyday lives of our living moral communities — toward family, school, and congregation; toward civic priorities and local commitments; toward neighbors in need and friends in crisis.

This corporate thrust is made through the direct effort of innumerable local congregations and through the thousands of varied denominational institutions, all of which constitute a manifold witness to the Lordship of Jesus Christ as they set forth the fact that there is no human need and no human concern which is not His concern.

Smaller and more flexible than most government bureaucracies, local congregations and charities can also spawn creative social innovations that benefit those in need.»

By this he means the tendency to center both practical theology and theological education on the skills that professional ministers need in order to run local congregations effectively.

The demand for higher standards needs to come from denominations and through the hiring practices of local congregations.

To trace how Volf identifies the church with the local congregation, one needs to unpack these shorter and longer criteria.

What emerges is a new ecclesial identity as a «household» of local congregations, defined as Christians together meeting the needs of a particular place.

Within most local congregations, the «environment» still lies outside the scope of concern, as though distinct from «needs of people».

We also need readers, and much of the energy in encouraging them needs to come from local congregations.

Well, Marty tells us, that phrase — which is not found in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights but comes from a letter that Thomas Jefferson sent to a group of Connecticut Baptists — will not be of much help to a congregation that needs to challenge a local zoning ordinance, or to ask the city police force for help in keeping the neighborhood noise level down during Sunday morning worship hours.

Volunteers, local congregations and the web can do the job, if and when needed.

«What we discovered was that the local church had a culture of its own and that seminary graduates needed to be prepared to cope with the congregation as a very complex social reality with deep structures and metaphors by which it lives and moves, a social reality which is affected by forces and dynamics of which we know almost nothing.»

A consultation convened by the WCC in cooperation with the Innere Mission of East Germany's evangelical churches issued this statement: «We affirm the continuing need for institutions in which the most severely disabled experience help, protection and care, even while at the same time we call for the integration of the disabled and the able - bodied within the local congregation.»

Theologians such as Joseph C. Hough have since insisted that the congregation needs to be analyzed «in the light of the universal theological dialogue in the church about the mission and ministry of the church as the body of Christ in the world» (in Dudley, Building Effective Ministry, 112), but most theological studies of the church since 1970 do not analyze the local church.

How is it that some congregations turn their concerns away from their own survival toward the needs of their local situation, mount credible programs of education and retain an ecumenical spirit to the point of dialogue with Jewish and other faiths?

A survey of the local congregation determines what members or neighborhood people are housebound, needing companionship or more detailed attention like Meals on Wheels, grocery shopping or transportation to the doctor.

This way of doing college and university ministry will require rethinking not only by campus ministers and their boards,, but by local congregations and judicatories, all of which need to understand that the church on campus is an extension of — not an annoyance to or a competitor with — the local church.

But many persons firmly believe that the majority of local congregations, though moribund, are constituted by mission - oriented Baptists; probably the only way to awaken them is to offer them new responsibilities, authorities and powers at the most immediate locus of need.

The new organization — called East Brooklyn Churches (EBC)-- raised its needed $ 200,000 of «front» money from denominatons and from their own members (local contributions, mostly from congregations, totaled $ 13,000).

Neither setting was a local congregation, and the needs may well have been somewhat different from those found in a congregation.

At first, local congregations tried to take care of the needs of their former members and friends.

Decisions had to be made from time to time as to where or when services of the church would be held; the church needed to be told of the impending visit of an apostle, or of some prophet or teacher from abroad; a question has been raised as to the good faith of one of these visitors, and there must be some discussion of the point and a decision on it; a fellow Christian from another church is on a journey and needs hospitality; a member of the local congregation planning to visit a church abroad needs a letter of introduction to that church, which someone must be authorized to provide; a serious dispute about property rights or some other legal matter has arisen between two of the brothers and the church must name someone to help them settle the issue or must in some other way deal with it; a new local magistrate has begun to prosecute Christians for violating the law against unlicensed assembly, and consideration must be given to ways and means of meeting this crisis; charges have been brought against one of the members by another member, and these must be investigated and perhaps some disciplinary action taken; one of the members has died, and the church is called on for some special action in behalf of his family in the emergency; differences of opinion exist in the church on certain questions of morals or belief (such as marriage and divorce, or the resurrection), differences which local prophets and teachers are apparently unable to compose, and a letter must be written to the apostle — who will write this letter and what exactly will it say?

TFJA was created to align needs seen at the local house of worship level with possible legal resources that are nearby, perhaps even within the same congregation.

The Counseling Ministry exists to meet many of the relational, emotional and spiritual needs of the First Baptist Woodstock congregation and community by providing professional Christian counseling and reliable referrals to other local Christian professional providers.