The world of uncertainty and confusion will not listen to us as Christians unless we listen to God. A caretaker, when asked by the pastor why he didn't attend church service, replied: "Have you had any fresh news from God?" The listening church will have fresh news from God.
Suppose on Sunday morning ten minutes were set aside for the audience to listen to God, listen to what God would say in answer to this question: "What would You have us as individuals and as a collective body to do?" Then have a church meeting to prayerfully listen to the suggestions that emerge. It would bring a sense of expectancy into the Sunday morning service. Now we listen to a sermon and leave it at that. And that is the result -- it is left at that, nothing happens.
In order to produce a listening congregation, small groups for prayer and fellowship and listening to God may be the training ground for corporate listening in a church. I know of a church where there are seventeen of these prayer and listening groups. They are the training ground for collective prayer and listening. The total impact is tremendous.
Be the first to react on this!
E. Stanley Jones (1884 - 1973)
Was a 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian. He is remembered chiefly for his interreligious lectures to the educated classes in India, thousands of which were held across the Indian subcontinent during the first decades of the 20th century. According to his and other contemporary reports, his friendship for the cause of Indian self-determination allowed him to become a friend of leaders of the up-and-coming Indian National Congress party. He spent much time with Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the Nehru family. Gandhi challenged Jones and, through Jones' writing, the thousands of Western missionaries working there during the last decades of the British Raj, to include greater respect for the mindset and strengths of the Indian character in their work.His work became interdenominational and world-wide. He helped to re-establish the Indian “Ashram” (or forest retreat) as a means of drawing men and women together for days at a time to study in depth their own spiritual natures and quest, and what the different faiths offered individuals. In 1930, along with a British missionary and Indian pastor and using the sound Christian missionary principle of indigenization. (God’s reconciliation to mankind through Jesus on the cross. He made Him visible as the Universal Son of Man who had come for all people. This opening up of nations to receiving Christ within their own framework marked a new approach in missions called "indigenization") Dr. Jones reconstituted the “Ashram” with Christian disciplines. This institution became known as the ”Christian Ashram.”