{"id":57441,"date":"2017-02-16T07:12:39","date_gmt":"2017-02-16T07:12:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/ct_is_church_growth_a_solution_looking_for_a_problem\/"},"modified":"2017-02-16T07:12:39","modified_gmt":"2017-02-16T07:12:39","slug":"ct_is_church_growth_a_solution_looking_for_a_problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=57441","title":{"rendered":"[CT] Is Church Growth a Solution Looking for a Problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone wants to be like the first century church, but from what I can tell, it wasn\u2019t much different from today\u2019s church.<\/p>\n<p>They had large and small churches. Healthy, sick and dead churches. Churches with strong leaders, weak leaders and sinful leaders. They worshiped God imperfectly and fought over theology.<\/p>\n<p>They also had a great deal of variety. The congregations in Jerusalem, Corinth, Laodicea and Ephesus had little in common outside of following scripture and practicing communion and water baptism.<\/p>\n<p>In short, the first century church was not the ideal template for Christian life, theology and worship that many people think it was.<\/p>\n<p>But they did do one thing. They turned the world upside-down. (Acts 17:6 ASV)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/karl-vaters\/2017\/february\/is-church-growth-solution-looking-for-problem.html?paging=off\">Read it all<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Everyone wants to be like the first century church, but from what I can tell, it wasn\u2019t much different from today\u2019s church. They had large and small churches. Healthy, sick and dead churches. Churches with strong leaders, weak leaders and<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=57441\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":832,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,440,184],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-life-church-life","category-evangelism-and-church-growth","category-parish-ministry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/832"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}