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Editorial

Paul Beasley-Murray

The last full-length sermon I preached in 1999 was also the first I had preached after having been off work for a month with acute back-pain. I wonder how you react to the way in which I began my sermon the first Sunday I was back. Can you identify with ...

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From Feeling to Meaning - the doctrinal foundations of worship as the context for pastoral care

Simon Reynolds

During the past decade, there has been a growing interest in the relationship between liturgy and pastoral care. Much recent writing has highlighted the value of incorporating insights from the human sciences into the content and presentation of liturgy. This development, it could be argued, has contributed to a loss ...

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Better than average - Understanding the changing patterns of church attendance

Stephen Cottrell

Introduction Recent media interest in the Church in the UK has focussed on the apparent continuing decline in church attendance indicated by the research from the National Church Survey. However, changing patterns of church attendance make Stephen Cottrell wonder whether this is the whole story. Here is the problem. In ...

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Your Money or Your Life - The Real Implications of Christian Giving

Alun Brookfield

All attempts to write about Christian stewardship are doomed to superficiality, because, if we define stewardship as "The response which the Church and men and women are called to make to God for all that he has given to us and done for us, above all in Jesus Christ"1 , ...

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Changing Roles

Jen Hawker

For thirty years we had been in parish ministry and, by choice, I had been the 'old style' Vicar's wife - totally involved with my husband in his work and supporting him in every way I could. Our telephone and door bell were rarely silent, our home was a place ...

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I Just Want To Go Home

Mary Barrett

(This article was first published in 'Ministry - International Journal for Pastors' in July 1999 and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Seventh Day Adventist Ministerial Association) My husband held me as I sobbed in his arms. "I just want to go back!" I cried, "I want to ...

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Lessons From Larger Churches

John Balchin

Although a few have the privilege under God of seeing a church grow until it reaches the 400-500 mark (which, in England, qualifies it as a 'larger church'), most of us would find ourselves in a position of ministering in such a situation as a sort of promotion. We have ...

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Team Relationships - a paper for discussion

Paul Beasley-Murray

Our church is big on teams. There is: the 'core ministry team' composed of the senior minister, the associate minister, the youth minister and the church administrator. Their weekly meetings are concerned substantially with the day-to-day ministry of the church, as also preparatory work on strategic issues to be brought ...

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Two Years On & Still the Early Bird Catches ...

Victor Howlett

It's almost 9.00am on Sunday Morning and at first it seems that nothing is stirring in the Wiltshire market town of Corsham. But round in Church Square parents with young children and toddlers are arriving - they have got up early and if you ask them why it's because of ...

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Not Another Newsletter!

Hedgehog

Oh good, some Christmas cards have arrived in the post. But as you open them, your heart starts to sink with despair - most of the envelopes also include "THE CHRISTMAS NEWSLETTER". Every year, thousands of otherwise normal, quiet, shy, modest people seem to feel an overwhelming urge to tell ...

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Book Reviews

Various

The Prophecy of Isaiah J Alec Motyer IVP, Leicester, England, 1993 (H/B), 1999 (P/B); 544pp; £14.99; ISBN 0 85111 652 3 Alec Motyer, formerly Principal of Trinity College, Bristol, has spent a lifetime studying the prophecy of Isaiah and completed this magisterial work for publication in 1993. Now at last ...

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Ministry Today

You are reading Issue 18 of Ministry Today, published in February 2000.

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