Yesterday we looked at a series of questions I would consider to be fundamental when seeking to work in partnership with voluntary groups, mission teams, and individual donors. Today, I would like to reverse the questions. So, if you are an individual seeking to support a work like ours (or any work for that matter), […]

Here in Niddrie, we have found the following questions to be very helpful (from a local church perspective) when considering if and when we should receive outside ‘teams’ of young people who come to Niddrie Community Church for a 2 week ‘mission trip’. Obviously, they need to be contextualised to every situation, but they are more […]

This is a popular question when I speak in churches or with those who have an interest in mercy ministries or social justice issues. Here’s my own personal response to this: 1. Is the person saved? In other words, have they believed and understood the saving gospel of Jesus Christ and are now producing fruit […]

About six months ago, a couple of American church planters visited our Sunday service at Niddrie. They claimed to have ‘provable methods’ to grow any church in any context. They’d heard about Niddrie through contacts in their network and wanted to come along and experience it for themselves. Warning them that our Sunday service did […]

Breaking the Missional Code: Your Church can Become a Missionary in Your Community, is written by Ed Stetzer & David Putman, and is aimed at the North American market. This requires some hard thinking in order to extract principles that could apply to the UK. Despite the weird sounding title, I really enjoyed the book. […]

I recently returned from a two-week trip to the U.S.A, in an effort to drum up support for the work of 20schemes. In a packed schedule, I visited Immanuel Baptist Church in Sacramento, pastored by Robert Briggs, one of the members of our advisory board. In partnership with 9Marks, we did a one-day conference on […]

Congratulations. You have been saved from a housing scheme background and you have taken the step to enter into cross-cultural ministry. Ministering to the middle class is fraught with many pitfalls and dangers, and is therefore not to be entered into lightly. Please take time to read the following. As a people group, they are […]

There are lots of little articles flying around the ‘blogosphere’ on how to be more ‘missional’ etc. Some of them are helpful and some of them are breathtakingly hilarious. Here are some of my tips of how not to engage ‘evangelistically’ on a housing scheme. Remember, it’s just for fun! 1. Sit in the front […]

I often get asked how and why we have so many contacts and have so many unchurched people attending our services throughout the week. The answer is quite simple: 1. We pray for people. Are you really praying for people in your area, consistently, specifically, and intelligently? When I first came to Niddrie, I started […]

We have seen a sad development in modern evangelicalism. Churches believe that they exist to make disciples of their own local community. Churches send money to a missionary society in order for that society to make disciples of other nations. We have cut off the local church from its commission to make disciples of all nations. It […]