in Christ: Andrew Fountain's blog

Newfrontiers Leadership Conference 2006 - Training Track 4-2

This is a very practical session with many good suggestions as to how local churches can do an excellent job at supporting missions.

I have just been reading Ten Conclusions About Expository Preaching from Adrian Warnock's Blog. My favourites are the first two.

Newfrontiers Leadership Conference 2006 - Training Track 5-3

This is one of the best messages that I have heard David Devenish give. He condenses a lot of material into half a session. Although the primary application is for missions, what he says is universally relevant and I found it very interesting. I have written about it on my blog posting on worldview and story.

I just listened to a message by David Devenish on "Discipling those of different cultures" from last summer's Brighton conference (review to appear soon). He makes some very interesting points about worldview, and tells the story of missions work in the Philippines: Missionaries unintentionally gave the people only a layer of teaching on top of their underlying worldview which was spiritism. Successive waves of missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, only succeeded in changing their formal beliefs while the underlying spiritism remained intact.

This got me thinking. There are four levels at which we operate:

• behaviour
• teachings
• attitudes
• worldview

Behaviour can be altered to some extent by external pressure (although ultimately it flows from the underlying layers). Teachings can be taught. Attitudes are far more difficult and need to be taught by example, as Paul and Jesus did. Worldview, however, and this was the interesting part for me, is changed by telling stories.

I just listened to Adrian Warnock's sermon on Reviving prayer which you can download from the Jubilee Church sermons page. It was a tremendous encouragement to me and really connected with my spirit.

Whatever you do, don't miss the ending because there is a real climax as he asks "where is the God of Elijah now?" I won't spoil it for you...

I just preached on temptation today at King's Family Church. It was one of those sermons where it was a real struggle to prepare, but everything came together at the last minute. (To be honest, after the last minute, while I was actually preaching.) I have changed my notes to match what I actually said and uploaded them along with the audio of the sermon. The upload link is here: The temptation of Jesus in Luke 4 and how we can experience victory over temptation.

I was very struck when I learned in seminary about the way Jesus deliberately quoted all his responses from Deuteronomy, and then even more gripped to see the strong parallels with the three categories of temptation in 1 John 2:16, which also mirror Eve's temptation in Genesis 3. What is really important for me is how this understanding can really help us defeat temptation.

One of the greatest blessings of the recent Newfrontiers Canada leadership conference was getting a chance to meet John Lanferman, the leader of Newfrontiers USA. I was particularly interested to talk with him about church planting, since he has planted 28 churches already in his lifetime and plans on planting a Newfrontiers church in each of the 100 largest cities of the USA. I was not the only one—gathered around him at his lunch table were Joe Crummey (The Meeting Place, Frederickton), Ian Jukes (Harbor Christian Church, New Hampshire), Dave Adkins (King's Family, Oakville), and myself from Newlife Church, Toronto.

John began by telling us that before a church plant "goes public", there are five areas that need to be covered:

I have posted the audio for all of the messages given at the Newfrontiers Canada Leadership Conference 2007.

• The audio can be found at Newfrontiers Canada audio download
• The pictures are in the Conference pictures gallery

I hope to be writing some reviews of the messages soon.

I have just re-built the Newfrontiers Canada website. The original site (at newfrontiers.s1te.org) was my first experience of building a site in the Drupal content management system. Drupal is an extraordinarily powerful framework for creating websites very simply and easily. Since that time I have built many, many sites with Drupal and it is rapidly becoming an important source of income. My Drupal development company is quadruple.ca.

Drupal 5 has just become available and I decided to re-launch the Newfrontiers Canada site using the new tools. The photo gallery is much improved, as is the audio download capability.

I just listened to a sermon on Revival by Adrian Warnock, preached at Jubilee church, Enfield last Sunday. It is one of the best messages on revival that I have heard for a long time. He gives two definitions of revival. The first is:

"a powerful intensification of the Holy Spirit’s normal activity" (Stuart Piggin)

What I like about this definition, and the way Adrian develops it, is that it doesn't place revival in some strange and unreachable category so that all we can do is pray and wait passively. As Bill Jackson points out in The Quest for the Radical Middle, (a history of the Vineyard) an unheathy emphasis on the anticipation of a great revival effectively killed evangelistic effort. If God works in a different mode in revival, then what is the point of working hard right now?