Austin Stone Commuity Church has a killer building project going on.
Members/Partners Class – II
We just finished our first Partners Class (what we call members). It ran four weeks, one night a week, two hours per night. We had a non-partner family host the class in their home, as a way of increasing community. This family has also been hosting a City Group, which led to increased traffic in their home. As we cultivate steady state community as a gospel apologetic, we made friends with the neighbors. They began to ask more about all the parties happening at the host home. More connection has been made and even spiritual conversations started. Doing stuff in homes, in neighborhoods can be both community cultivating and missional!
During the four weeks we covered:
1) Vision
2) Gospel/Doctrine
3) Community
4) Mission.
I wrote the material. It was well-received. I think we’ve got a solid dozen committing to the church as partners, so that is encouraging. Here is the material, in case anyone is interested. Disclaimer: This is a first draft and will be refined along the way. If you decide to use the material, please email me for permission. I’d like to hear what’s happening with your membership/partnership process.
Faith Stats on the Election
George Barna reports some interesting statistics from the presidential election. Breaking the voting down into faith groups, Barna tells us what percentage of the poplulation voted for McCain, Obama, or Independent. here are few of the categories:
Evangelicals: Two-thirds of all evangelicals who were registered to vote (65%) were aligned with the Republican Party. One out of five (21%) was Democrats and just one out of ten (10%) was registered independent of a party.
Protestants: Protestant voters were evenly split between being registered as Democrats and Republicans. However, they sided with Sen. McCain by a 53% to 46% split.
Catholics: Nearly half of all registered Catholics were aligned with the Democratic Party (48%), compared to only about one-quarter associated with the Republicans (28%) and one-fifth who remained independent (20%).
Atheist/Agnostics: The second largest faith group in America is atheists and agnostics. These religious skeptics represent about one out of every ten adults. About four out of ten skeptics were registered as Democrats, four out of ten as independents and just two out of ten as Republicans.Three-fourths of atheists and agnostics (76%) gave their vote to Sen. Obama, while only 23% backed Sen. McCain.
Other Faiths: About 5% of America’s adult population associates with faiths other than Christianity (e.g., Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, etc.). Within this group, about half (47%) were registered as Democrats, 30% were independent, and one-quarter (23%) were Republicans.The ballots of this group were most often cast for Barack Obama (62%) rather than John McCain (36%).
Cole: Unstoppable Multiplication
Neil Cole offers two chapters and an excerpt on the Unstoppable Multiplication of the Church from his most recent book, Search & Rescue. This excerpt is one of the gems from Search & Rescue, where he argues that most churches have built their leadership, discipleship, and growth on Addition, not Multiplication. See my review of S&R for more.