A quote from Tim Keller

The gospel has been described as a pool in which a toddler can wade and yet an elephant can swim. It is both simple enough to tell to a child and profound enough for the greatest minds to explore. Indeed, even angels never tire of looking into it (1 Peter 1:12).

 

Life is pretty sweet when you get to talk about Jesus over a Latte in Costa. The highlight of last week was doing a back of a scrap of paper bridge to life diagram and ABC of how to become a Christian with a young lad in Costa Coffee.

What was more fun was that I got to talk about the doctrine of expiation while doing it. I used the term and explained it! Mark Driscoll told a powerful story at The Brighton Conference of how Jesus' blood cleanses us from all sin - not just those done by us, but those done to us. That is now part of my stock Gospel presentation, because so many have been left feeling dirty by the mean things people do to one another. His talk is here

I am praying for more of the Costa and Cross experiences in the coming months! The church plant is gather pace and so I'm in faith for a lot more!

The Acts 29 blog had this sad picture of Itunes spirituality section with the challenge to keep preaching the real Gospel

 

The Resurgence blog has just done a hugely helpful blog series on Spurgeon.  Spurgeon is a huge hero of the faith and they have shown us some of the amazing things he did in his ministry and lessons that can and have been learned by the Acts 29 guys.

 Spurgeon - Introduction

Spurgeon was a Bible guy

Spurgeon laughed, prayed, cared and evangelised 

Spurgeon wrote books the haters hated!

I've finally got my illustrations and quotes database online. You can search for a quote or illustration at www.adventuresofachurchplanter.com/illustrations.php

You can also add illustrations at  www.adventuresofachurchplanter.com/addillustration.php - they will be moderated!

I found Mark Driscoll's use of prophet, priest and king a really helpful nomenclature for building good eldership/leadership teams.

• Prophet: Word guys - doctrine, preaching etc (yes I know! Not so charismatics think the gift of prophecy=preaching! - Think of it as bringing the word of God and it wont hurt so much!!!)
• Priest: People guys
• King: Systems

All three, love people and want the church to grow, but specialise in different areas. The priests often think they are the only ones who really love the people. The Kings want to organise stuff so people get loved better and the Prophets love 'em by preaching at 'em!

The problem is that most church leaders recruit and attract people like them rather than recruiting for weakness.

Mark Driscoll is clearly Prophet-King

Terry Virgo Prophet-Priest

Helpful stuff and easily applied.

A lot of the rest of the teaching will need a lot of prayer and thought to process.

Four of us were in Brighton last week for the Newfrontiers International Leaders Conference, which was amazing!
The main guest speaker was Mark Driscoll who was very, very good!
He challenged, inspired and generally performed open heart surgery on Newfrontiers.

His main theme was on being a missional movement. In session 3 he delivered a powerful word over our movement of Churches.
Mark Driscoll Session 1 - The Holy Spirit empowering us to be like Jesus on mission

Mark Driscoll Session 3
His leaders talks on planting radical churches were mainly question and answer which gave added richness!
The rest of the talks are downloadable from the Newfrontiers website

This time last year we finally sold our house. The deadline we had set for getting to King's Lynn at the start of September was the 30th June. At 5pm the offer on our house was confirmed. God had broken through at the last minute! That happenned a number of times in the process of getting up here, so we are full of faith in our faithful God!

When we arrived we knew we had 11 with us (3 of whom were our kids). We are overjoyed at all that God has done since. We now gather 50 on a Sunday and tonight is the first meeting of our multiplied Life group. We have 3 groups with another on the way.

In April I felt to pray for 50 on Sundays, 3 Life Groups and another worship leader. At the time - only God could give us those three and he has! Greg came back from uni and is going to do Frontier Project - among other things he plays guitar and keyboards and is leading worship for the first tiem in his life group on Weds! Praise God!

Now the sunny weather is here, I haven't had time to do any leafletting - we got 28,000 out when it was cold, wet and windy and I have 8,000 more inboxes in my porch!

Tearfund produced a really encouraging Church report last year - 15% of the nation attend a church at least monthly and 6% of the nation would start going to church if someone invited them or a friend or family member started going. Read the whole report here We had better get asking and leafletting!

The ESV Study Bible with contributions from the likes of Wayne Grudem is available to order from Amazon...

In hardback ESV Study Bible

Or in leather... ESV Study Bible (Genuine Leather, Black)

We had an amazing first baptism service at The Gateway Church plant in Lynn! Loads of friends and family came to see Tom, Lucy and Brian take the plunge - so we had our biggest Sunday gathering by far (98 in all). Everything went so well and there were great prophecies, prayers and Scriptures for them to remember and be encouraged by.

Here's a short video of the baptisms themselves... (It's
Youtube, so not broadcast quality!)

We have been so encouraged by the International Cafe organised by our Russian couple Daniel & Alisa Foytik. A fortnight ago 13 guests turned up - tonight we ran out of chairs and tables! Two Russian Bibles, Janet had taken to give to someone were snatched up eagerly by people who had never seen one before!

The aim of the cafe is to help Russian speaking migrant workers settle into King's Lynn and to build friendship towards a Russian speaking Alpha. Each week we invite a speaker from the community to help them get to grips with life in Lynn. Volunteers from The Gateway sit and chat and help our guests practice their English.

We have an immediate need for next time - we need to buy 4 more cafe tables and 16 chairs to go with them - which is going to cost a total of £396. Does anyone want to sponsor a table or four? Please email me at andymoyle@thegatewaychurch.info

Terry Virgo has put his very wise appraisal of the Lakeland outpouring on his own blog

We've been preaching through Philippians and next Sunday Andy King will be in the last half of chapter 3 "Not that I have already obtained all this, or have been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me"

What a power packed verse - Jesus laid hold of us with His amazing grace and to come to King's Lynn to plant a church that will plant churches in the Fens and around the Wash. We've only started, but have been amazed by the hand of God. We are now pressing on to take hold of what Jesus wants to do in and through us!

Please pray for us...

Sundays have been growing steadily, especially since we moved venue.

I've just finished Mark Driscoll's Preaching and Teaching Jesus while on the exercise bike. It is so good, I will go through it again making notes. Then I found the printed notes. The Acts 29 Network have split the talk into 5 parts, but here's the original. There's gold in them there hills. I would highly recommend this tape and notes for all preachers!

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