20schemes is five years old this month (although the idea was birthed over a decade ago while church-planting in Brazil). Personally, I am entering my nineteenth year of pastoral ministry. During that time, I have worked in council estates in the UK, the slums of Brazil, and now in Scotland with 20schemes. We currently have […]
Did you know that less than one-third of 18-year-olds went to university in 2016? Even if we include those who took a gap year, that means that about 60% didn’t go to University. Yet, UK evangelicals have a disproportionate number of churches in student areas and planted to reach students. What if two-thirds of our churches were […]
‘Reach Out’ is a song my wife and I have written together. We’ve both been playing music for years, and while we’ve been involved in writing music before with bands, this is the first song we’ve written as a couple. I primarily play guitar, and Cara sings. We started writing this song years ago, and […]
Over the past few months, myself and a small team have been working on writing, rehearsing, recording, and shooting five music videos which will all be available to view on the 20schemes YouTube channel soon. The five songs consist of three brand new songs written by believers from our local scheme churches, as well as […]
In March of 2016, Kevin DeYoung, author and senior pastor of University Reformed Church (East Lansing, Michigan) visited Niddrie Community Church to meet some of the members and check out 20schemes. In this sort video, Kevin shares some reasons why he loves this ministry. Video Transcript – Kevin DeYoung Kevin: I’m grateful for the ministry of […]
I have done a four-part series on the topic of church discipline in earlier posts, so I won’t be visiting old ground here. To summarise: As a church we follow the Matthew 18:15–17 principles for church discipline at our church. When we talk of church discipline we mean the daily ‘one anothering’ of church member […]
When I first moved to Niddrie Community Church almost 10 years ago, I spent the first six months or so getting to know who was in the congregation (it was very small). I wanted to find out who was who and who was good at what. I quickly discovered that some of the women in […]
I wrote ‘This Is Grace’ after realising that for the past few months, I’ve been going around encouraging believers in our churches to write their own songs and hadn’t until now written one myself. This blog is a detailed line by line self-analysis of my lyrics for ‘This Is Grace’. Please follow @20schemesmusic on Twitter […]
This is the third part of a longer conversation we had in May 2016, discussing the differences and similarities in contexts and issues between Niddrie, a housing scheme in Scotland, and the hood in West Atlanta, GA, USA. If you missed them, check out part 1 here and part 2 here. In this video, Mez […]