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Over the years I have had the privilege of being in a local assembly that is brimming over with godly leadership. I have been able to observe our longtime shepherds labor and pray to see a culture of strong leadership flourish. Seeing the strength, protection, and joy that comes when godly men lead at home and in the church has only increased by desire to see biblical masculinity galvanized in more men.

As a result of that burden, I spent one afternoon writing out all the ways over the years I have observed church boys not grow up to become biblically masculine men. Below is an essay that came from that time of reflection. I pray it encourages and challenges your heart, as it does mine, to be the leaders God has called us men to be.

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Free time is dedicated to his amusements: sleep, video games, social media, TV, shallow friends, YouTube, and hobbies. Good books, deep sermons, robust discipleship, and hours in the Word get only honorable mention for him. His time with mentors at church is only a box to be checked. Sure, he tolerates counsel from godly men, endures strong preaching, puts on veneer of godliness, but ignores putting off indwelling sin. Repentance to him is a term he uses, but not a habit he practices. His hypocrisy grows.

My journey began months before I left. Every student in the Practicum was asked to read No Shortcut to Success. In this book, Matt Rhodes connected the work of missions to the local church. Even more powerfully, he displayed the danger of missions work that is disconnected from the local church. You cannot find a shortcut around the local church in ministry.

While I know this, I often struggle to believe it. When Practicum students arrived in Atlanta for three days of training, every session, every conversation, and every speaker celebrated the local church. Reaching & Teaching insisted that it works alongside local churches. As I heard church-centered talk after church-centered talk, I realized God was exposing my unbelief. I realized God uses imperfect churches in profound ways for his glory. My heart was being primed and shaped for what was about to come. Our training gave me the understanding to interpret what I was about to see in Peru.

Most of my time in Peru was spent getting to know the leaders and members of the local churches in Tacna. Following one Sunday service, I had a thirty-minute conversation with a man named Luciano. I speak very little Spanish, and Luciano hardly speaks any English. By almost every stretch of the imagination, Luciano and I have nothing in common. The amount of effort any communication takes seemingly diminishes any utility that could come from a conversation.

Before the Practicum, brokenness in the church led me to bitterness and frustration. I was too man-focused. Now brokenness leads me to worship and wonder at the power and wisdom of God. Only He God can redeem a room full of sinful people and turn them into a family.

I aspire to ministry, but I am still unsure what that will look like. Whether I pursue missions or not, I have a greater desire to see the gospel made known through the local church. I want to fund, mobilize, and support missionaries. Who knows, maybe I will be the one who needs that same support one day.

In 2010, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) Blue Book on Religion estimated there were 23 million Protestants in China. This government estimate, based for the first time on a nationally representative household survey, included members of the official state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement, as well as house church members.

I agree with the common opinion that it is their liberalism that caused the mainline churches to hemorage members, but is it their theological liberalism or their political liberalism that most caused the decline?

I can say from personal experience that if you hold a conservative view of the Bible, it is very difficult to move through the process of become ordained in the UMC. This is designed to elimination non-conformers. The pastor as a whole, although you will find exceptions, want homosexual marriages in the church, the removal of the word sin, and no song about the blood of Christ. I was criticized the most when I taught Sunday school was when I quoted the Book of Discipline or Social Principles concerning Marriage of one man and one woman. I was told I was intolerant and this is equally wrong. I am to be tolerant of sin? I moved on after many years that began in the pre-UMC Methodist church.

60 years ago the Methodist church where I grew up brought a card carrying Communist to address us from the pulpit one Sunday morning. My dad who was a very staunch anti-communist, stood up, tole off the speaker and the pastor and along with about half of those in attendance, walked out, never to return. The seminaries have been taken over by godless communists and even then I never remember hearing the Good News or of the 4 spiritual laws

While the number of Catholic priests has grown overall, Europe has seen a consistent decrease in clergy, where the number of faithful per priest grew to more than 3,245-to-1. For the seventh year in a row, the number of religious brothers and sisters has declined everywhere, with Africa as the only exception. Religious sisters experienced the sharpest decline, losing 11,562 members.

While clergy members experienced a steep fall worldwide, the number of lay missionaries grew significantly, especially in the Americas and Africa, with only a small decrease in Asia. Catechists saw their numbers reduced by 2,590, with the Americas and Europe registering the highest drops.

The Fides data accounts for all Catholics until Dec. 31, 2019. Given the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent church closures and deaths, experts at a Vatican news conference on Thursday admitted the numbers may have changed substantially during 2020.

The Methodist Church grew out of the Anglican Church and in some ways is the stereotypical mainline denomination, more moderate on social issues with views that are less black and white and open to, for instance, female pastors.

Similar debates have wracked nearly all mainline Protestant denominations, he noted, prompting rifts within Presbyterian, Lutheran and Episcopal churches as well. While Methodist traditionalists have usually won the vote on these issues, progressive churches have tended to ignore those rulings, he said.

Sampson Vryling Stoddard Wilder, famous for hosting a visit of the Marquis de Lafayette at his Bolton home in 1824, donated money, land and impetus to create a new church, founding the Hillside Church in Bolton in 1830.

During the Second Great Awakening, a number of smaller groups started emerging, including a group in Lancaster, the current church pastor, Tim Andrews, said in describing the history of the church, located at 793 Main St., on the corner of Packard Street.

The church's congregation of 40 to 50 people remains a solid group, although the numbers have declined over the years. Andrews said in the 1970s and '80s there were two services. At the time, the pastor was also at the First Congregational Church in Clinton.

Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, the Topeka, Kansas church known internationally for its daily public protests against members of the LGBT community, Jews, the military and countless others. As a child, teenager and early 20-something, she participated in the picketing almost daily and pioneered the use of social media in the church. Dialogue with "enemies" online proved instrumental in her deradicalization, and she left the church and her entire way of life in November 2012. Since then she has become an advocate for people and ideas she was taught to despise -- especially the value of empathy in dialogue with people across ideological lines. She speaks widely, engaging audiences in schools, universities, faith groups, and law enforcement anti-extremism workshops. Her forthcoming memoir will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

In Europe, on average, there is one priest for 1,746 Catholics and church attendance is low. In Africa, far more Catholics attend church regularly but there is one priest for every 5,089 Catholics. At the end of 2020, there were a total of 410,219 Catholic priests, a decrease of 4,117 since 2019. The number of priests in North America and Europe continued to decline, but Africa and Asia saw a significant increase.

I'm a little puzzled by the statement "few Christians were actually executed." It is a surprising conclusion to come to, given the sources. Perhaps if the author would look a little earlier than the third century he would come to a more accurate conclusion. Also, it's probably true that "they did not write a single treatise on evangelism." That's because the early church wasn't really concerned with writing treatises. It seems a little strange to come to the conclusion that they didn't do evangelism because they didn't write treatises about it. It doesn't take much to find one discussion after another about the imperative of mission and proclamation of the gospel in the sources.

And yet, improbably, the movement was growing. In number, size, and geographical spread, churches were expanding without any of the probable prerequisites for church growth. The early Christians noted this with wonder and attributed it to the patient work of God.footnote Teaching catechumens in Caesarea around AD 240, Origen observed that throughout history God had been faithful to Israel, sending them prophets, turning them back from their sins.

The church denomination in which one grows up or if one grows up in a home of non-believers, as I did, makes no difference unless one has a personal, intimate, relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and is guided daily,moment by moment, by His Spirit.

I want to like this, and I agree with most of it. But I really dislike the labeling and stereotyping. Baptists have the same problems as Catholics with people thinking their souls are safe when they in fact are not- they just rely on different standards of measurement. I have spent time in a wide variety of church communities (strict Presbyterian, evangelical Presbyterian, fire breathing Baptist, Assembly of God, Evangelical Free, etc)and noticed pretty similar attitudes towards determining one`s spiritual state, with the exception being the Assembly of God, where I did notice a lot of talk about needing to get saved over and over again. Can we have these conversations as Christians without feeling the need to put other groups into our stereotypically neatly wrapped packages? 17dc91bb1f