{"id":234,"date":"2010-02-08T09:38:13","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T16:38:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/?p=234"},"modified":"2010-02-08T09:38:13","modified_gmt":"2010-02-08T16:38:13","slug":"evaluating-your-faith-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/?p=234","title":{"rendered":"Evaluating your Faith Community"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have been wading through the dense work that is &#8220;Thy Kingdom Connected&#8221;.  I am struggling to figure out how the thoughts, words, and philosophy works itself out in my context.  I am still working on that and will be for a while if not for as long as I&#8217;m alive.  But as I sit here in Starbucks reading I came upon a great quote regarding how you evaluate the effectiveness of your faith community.  And this has helped me, because last week I was struggling alot with trying to evaluate the community and was always coming back to the same old metric of numbers.  Here is what I just read that is so helpful.  Read this, ponder it, and wrestle with it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;To determine how your church is doing, don&#8217;t gauge it by the individuals in your church, or even in comparison to what other churches are doing; go to God&#8217;s bigger narrative.  How is your local faith community participating with God in God&#8217;s dream for the re-creation of heaven and earth?  How is your church participating in the flourishing of God&#8217;s dream of abundant life for all?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>And so I need to ask myself, &#8220;How is Veritas currently participating with God in God&#8217;s dream?  And how can Veritas begin to participate with God in God&#8217;s dream?&#8221;  Those are two great questions that I will be wrestling with and also asking others within Veritas what they think.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll be blogging later this week with more reflections from &#8220;Thy Kingdom Connected.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have been wading through the dense work that is &#8220;Thy Kingdom Connected&#8221;. I am struggling to figure out how the thoughts, words, and philosophy works itself out in my context. I am still working on that and will be for a while if not for as long as I&#8217;m alive. But as I sit [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,26,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-readings","category-church-planting","category-declinegrowth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emergentbrethren.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}