SCP RESOURCES

Renovation: A Survey on Divine Design in the Life of the Church

In recent years the church has forgotten the conviction of thousands of Christ followers, across two thousand years, who gave themselves to completing the last sending command of Jesus: “In your going, make disciples of all the peoples of the world” (Matt. 28:19). Instead, in an effort to draw people to Christ, much of the Western church today has sought to become relevant through golden-tongued leaders, star-quality worship bands, large-scale buildings, and myriad social programs. God is on a mission to redeem lost men and women to Himself and restore them to relationship with and representation of Him, and we, the already redeemed ones, are servants in this mission. The primary need of the church in our day is not relevancy; rather, it is to provide people accessibility to the gospel through our day-to-day lives. God’s ultimate design for the church is simply for every member of Christ’s church to live the gospel in whatever places God calls us, thus saturating every home, workplace, community, city, and nation with the gospel message through the people of God.

Alone at the Top: Is Our Idea of a Pastor Really Biblical?: Divine Design in the Leadership of the Church

God has designed the church to be “infinitely reproducible”—so virile and courageous that, swept along by the sovereign ministry of the Holy Spirit, it will reproduce itself infinitely. To build such a church, God has designed leadership to work interdependently to grow Christ’s people in spiritual vitality and empower them for ministry effectiveness. When leaders have cooperated with God’s design, the church has multiplied its numbers and had great impact on the world around it. When it hasn’t, the church has suffered and failed to reproduce. Jesus gave the pattern for church leadership in Matthew 20:20–28: “The rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you.” God is looking for leaders who will lay aside top-down structures and instead empower His people to be fully His and do the work He has designed them to do. The result will be the incarnated holiness of Jesus pulsating through Christ’s people and poured out in the world around them to convince and convict the more than 7.5 billion people on this planet of the resurrection message of Jesus.

Church as God Designed It: Is It Time to Reform the Western Church Model?

The church today is in disarray. What happened to the vitality of an organic body of people on journey with God the Spirit? We had it, but a flood of ideas and slick campaigns on how to organize and grow church life—creating bigger and better programs, controlling service lengths, adding smoke and dark lights—has led to churches that are often loose in biblical convictions, lazy in morals, and ineffective in the redemptive task Jesus left us to carry out until He returns. What went wrong, and how do we fix it?The apostle Paul wrote to Timothy in a day similar to ours, giving him a proscription for the Ephesian church. The instructions apply to us as well. Paul’s book of 1 Timothy helps us call believers to the direction implied by the new birth and the residency of the Holy Spirit within us. Church as God Designed It plumbs the issues Paul addressed in 1 Timothy to see what they mean for local Western churches today. What would happen if Western church leaders focused less on “improvements” that make us more like the world and wholeheartedly embraced the call of God to lead the church well and in the fullness of God’s plan and purpose? Dwight Smith unfolds Paul’s message and shows us how to apply it today so that we will become the church made not by man but by God.

Winning the War Against the Flesh: God's Design for Healing and Wholeness

A rising tide of Christian leaders is confessing to significant immoral sexual thoughts and actions. Multitudes of believers are broken and fractured, missing out on the wholeness God intends for His people. Why?Many Christians today reject the truth that evil decisions and actions are a result of fleshly desires. We believe instead, “I am wounded”; “It’s not my fault”; “My parents made mistakes in raising me”; “The culture defrauded me.” We are not willing to admit, “I made the decision that resulted in this negative consequence.” Instead we look to experts for health and happiness.But experts do not heal us; they simply teach us to manage our pain and engage in safer, healthier alternatives. God is the only One who can make broken people whole again. As we reject wrong sources for our healing and instead die to self and embrace the life of God for which each of us was created, the Holy Spirit through God’s Word will bring about in us joy, spiritual maturity, and victory over the flesh.