Pastor Prince

Acts 4:32-37 tells how the infant church practiced extravagant generosity.  It says that none of the members of the church was in need.  The reason why was that much grace was on them all.  They had received God's grace and were relaying it to each other.  From this sense of grace, no one felt his possessions were his own.  Everyone shared what he had.  Sometimes, people sold pieces of property and laid the proceeds at the apostles' feet.  The apostles distributed them to people according to their need. Extravagant generosity begins with God's grace.  It begins with the insight that God has been extravagantly generous to us.  His ultimate act of generosity was the gift of his Son.   Throughout church history, Christ followers have practiced the spiritual discipline of giving.  In particular, giving a tithe or giving back to God ten percent of what he had given them.  They've seen it as a spiritual discipline like p...

Acts 13 tells us about the sending of the first Christian missionaries.  The church at Antioch had grown rapidly, and its members fasted and prayed about what God wanted them to do.  The Holy Spirit told them to set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work God had for them.  After another time of prayer, the church laid hands on these two and sent them off. Today, most American missionaries go to their mission fields with good support.  But for Barnabas and Saul, their journey was full of risks. Included among them were crime, violence, persecution, sickness, and even death!  The only resources they had were the Holy Spirit and a little money! But off they went.  And the rest, they say, is history.  The world would never be the same again. Early Christ followers learned about risk-taking mission from Jesus himself.  Jesus proclaimed that his mission was to bring good news to the poor and oppressed (Luke 4:18-19).  He told his followers t...

Acts 2:24ff describes the activities of the early church of Christ.  Listed first is that they devoted themselves "to the apostles' teaching."  Before he ascended to heaven, Jesus commanded them to make disciples (Matt. 28:18-20).  This passage shows them fulfilling his command.  They were telling new Christ followers about everything Jesus did and said. New Testament writers emphasize that discipleship is a life-long process.  A leader as great as the apostle Paul said that he hadn't arrived at all he should be, but he was working on it! (Phil. 3:12-14).   The early church was fruitful because it had an intentional discipleship process.  Fruitful churches today have the same.  They focus on both introducing people to the Lord Jesus Christ and helping them grow in Christ once they follow him. Historically, churches have had various processes for making disciples.  Growing up, I attended what we Baptists called "Training Union...

Flowing from its sense of mission, a fruitful church practices radical hospitality.  We see this in the great snapshot of early church life in Acts 1:42-47.  It says one of the things early Christ followers devoted themselves to was "the fellowship."  The Greek word is koinonia .  It refers to a strong sense of commonality.  Early Christ followers held in common a bond to Christ. This bond led them to form strong bonds to each other. Because of this koinonia , they shared everything with each other, including their possessions.  If one in their number had a physical need, others within the congregation met it.  They ate together in their homes, loving and supporting each other. Though they shared strong bonds with each other, their koinonia was open to outsiders.  Luke tells us the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.  It seems early Christ followers cared as much for outsiders as they did for each oth...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . ."  That's how Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities begins.  For most churches in today's America, it's just the worst of times!  There's no "best" to it!  That's because they're stable to declining. These churches cast about for methods and programs that will renew them, only to come up empty.  They're like patients in cardiac arrest in emergency rooms.  They're trying everything they can, including drugs, electric shock, oxygen, CPR, and more to revive the patient.  But nothing is working!   A book I discovered recently offers a good approach. It suggests that churches focus on fruitfulness.  Robert Schnase, a United Methodist pastor and bishop has written the book Five Practices of Fruitful Churches .  Schnase suggests churches focus on the concept of fruitfulness.   Fruitfulness is a great biblical image.  Numerous passage speak of the importance of bearin...

Luke begins chapter 3 by establishing the time when John the Baptist began his ministry.  He said it was in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar.  That was all he had to say to establish the time, because everyone knew when that was.  But he went on to list many other leaders, including governors and high priests.  Why did he do that? Maybe it was because these are the kinds of people the world listens to.  They're the people in power, who appear to be "calling the shots."  They have many messages that they want us to hear.   But in that time, an obscure person whom these leaders would have considered a nobody had the most important message of all.  This message was the word of the Lord, and it came to John, son of Zechariah.  The message was that God's king, the Messiah, was about to appear in the world, and God's people needed to prepare! Today, that message comes to us.  We need to prepare the way for the coming of t...

In Luke 21, Jesus and his disciples are in Jerusalem.  His disciples were in awe of the beauty of the temple.  But Jesus shocked them by saying that soon, not one stone of the temple would standing on top of the other.  For the disciples, this meant the end of the world and the coming of the kingdom of God.   Jesus knew that the coming of the kingdom was more complex than his followers imagined.  He had been trying to tell them that the kingdom was entering the world through him, but they didn't understand what he was talking about.  In his discourse in Luke 21, he tried to prepare them for what was to come. The temple would be destroyed, and there would be cataclysmic events like earthquakes, wars, and more.  These were all signs of the coming kingdom.  But they were to wait patiently, because the end wouldn't come immediately.   Their job wasn't to try to nail down the time of the end.  Their job was to do the things J...