Making Disciples: Obstacles and Opportunities in Urban Congregations

Early Christianity is often regarded as an entirely lower-class phenomenon, and thus characterised by a low educational and cultural level. This view is false for several reasons. (1) When dealing with the ancient world, inferences cannot be made from the social class to which one belongs to one's educational and cultural level. (2) We may confidently state that in the early Christian urban congregations more than 50 per cent of the members could read and write at an acceptable level. (3) Socialisation within the early congregations occurred mainly through education and literature. No religious figure before (or after) Jesus Christ became so quickly and comprehensively the subject of written texts! (4) The early Christians emerged as a creative and thoughtful literary movement. They read the Old Testament in a new context, they created new literary genres (gospels) and reformed existing genres (the Pauline letters, miracle stories, parables). (5) From the very beginning, the amazing literary production of early Christianity was based on a historic strategy that both made history and wrote history. (6) Moreover, early Christians were largely bilingual, and able to accept sophisticated texts, read them with understanding, and pass them along to others. (7) Even in its early stages, those who joined the new Christian movement entered an educated world of language and thought. (8) We should thus presuppose a relatively high intellectual level in the early Christian congregations, for a comparison with Greco-Roman religion, local cults, the mystery religions, and the Caesar cult indicates that early Christianity was a religion with a very high literary production that included critical reflection and refraction.

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CgNet: Predicting Urban Congregations from Spatio-Temporal Data using Deep Neural Networks

GLOBECOM 2020 - 2020 IEEE Global Communications Conference ◽

10.1109/globecom42002.2020.9322280 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Tianran Chen ◽

Yongzheng Zhang ◽

Yupeng Tuo ◽

Weiguang Wang

Keyword(s):

Neural Networks ◽

Deep Neural Networks ◽

Temporal Data ◽

Spatio Temporal ◽

Urban Congregations

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Making Disciples in Croatia

Kairos ◽

10.32862/k.13.2.2 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 183-203

Author(s):

Jeremy Bohall

Keyword(s):

Jesus Christ ◽

Spiritual Disciplines ◽

Great Commission ◽

Local Churches ◽

Disciple Making ◽

Definition Of ◽

Making Disciples ◽

Proper Context ◽

Primary Problem ◽

Multiple Causes

This project explores how the Evangelical Pentecostal Church (EPC) in Croatia is making disciples of Jesus Christ today. The goal is to demonstrate that despite the worldwide and local deficit in effective disciple making, the EPC has the resources and potential to live in obedience to the Great Commission. This has been shown by looking at the historical definition of a disciple, exegeting Matthew 28:16-20, exploring the proper context of disciple-making, and interviewing several members of the EPC. Upon examination, while there are multiple causes for the lack of disciples in Croatia, the primary problem is that of what will be called naive disobedience. It will be argued that local churches in the EPC have not been taught how to properly make disciples. By presenting the importance of teaching, relationships and practicing the spiritual disciplines, it will be demonstrated that a solution to the lack of disciple-making exists within the EPC.

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Making Disciples in Croatia

Kairos ◽

10.32862/k.14.1.1 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 11-34

Author(s):

Jeremy Bohall

Keyword(s):

Jesus Christ ◽

Spiritual Disciplines ◽

Great Commission ◽

Local Churches ◽

Disciple Making ◽

Definition Of ◽

Making Disciples ◽

Proper Context ◽

Primary Problem ◽

Multiple Causes

This project explores how the Evangelical Pentecostal Church (EPC) in Croatia is making disciples of Jesus Christ today. The goal is to demonstrate that despite the worldwide and local deficit in effective disciple making, the EPC has the resources and potential to live in obedience to the Great Commission. This has been shown by looking at the historical definition of a disciple, exegeting Matthew 28:16-20, exploring the proper context of disciple-making, and interviewing several members of the EPC. Upon examination, while there are multiple causes for the lack of disciples in Croatia, the primary problem is that of what will be called naive disobedience. It will be argued that local churches in the EPC have not been taught how to properly make disciples. By presenting the importance of teaching, relationships, and practicing the spiritual disciplines, it will be demonstrated that a solution to the lack of disciple-making exists within the EPC.

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Koinonia in die stad: Verhoudinge in die groter stadsgemeentes van die Gereformeerde kerke

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies ◽

10.4102/hts.v49i4.2523 ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 49 (4) ◽

Author(s):

H. J. Hendiiks ◽

C. B. Ludik

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Body Of Christ ◽

Urban Context ◽

Christian Community ◽

Theory Of Practice ◽

Relational Networks ◽

Urban Congregations ◽

Traditional Pattern ◽

City Relations ◽

The Church

Koinonia in the city: Relations in the larger urban congregations of the Reformed churches Koinonia is of vital importance for the church. It is not only a Biblical injunction, but also, sociologically speaking, a prerequisite for the preservation of faith in the Christian community. Therefore it is imperative that the church’s ministry encourages koinonia. This is especially true for the church in an urban context, where relational networks have been severely impaired. The traditional pattern of ministry of churches in the Reformed tradition, the shepherd-flock model, does not succeed in stimulating koinonia under these circumstances. Therefore, the choice is rather made for the body of Christ-model, with complementary koinonia-gwupings as theory of practice.

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