Revived church: series introduction

Today we begin our new teaching series and I'm taking the inspiration for each of the weeks from this little book that I came across a few months ago. It's called ‘Anatomy of a Revived Church’. Anatomy of a Revived Church. And the background is that this researcher was asked to explore churches that had been declining but then started to grow again, started to show signs of health, and could he identify any key themes, lessons, changes that helped them. And he did. He found seven that he writes about in in this book. It’s an easy read. I think I read it a little over an hour, but it's helpful, as well as challenging, and I think it grabbed my attention because, we know that as a denomination, the Church of Scotland is declining, we know that there are buildings closing and we're having to downsize. What we do and Brighton's isn't immune to that. If you look at our trajectory, we are probably on a slow decline, unless things change. And so, for those reasons, it grabbed my attention. Now, the aim is not to preach the book. We're still going to preach God's Word but we're going to take those themes, we're going to maybe take some of the examples and illustrations, but we're going to see what God's Word would say in light of these things. What his mandate, his wisdom to guide us and help us know what might need to change in our lives, in our life together, if we want to see renewal and revitalization and the growth again.