We Love God!

God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)

The key concerns that guide us (in church discipline) are: the holy character of God, the testimony of the flock, the effect upon the unity and purity of the flock, and the edification and restoration of the individual.
J. Hampton Keathley

Love will flow from one to another, when each is prepared to be known as the repentant sinner he is at the Cross of Jesus. When the barriers are down and the masks are off, God has a chance of making us really one. But there is also the added joy of knowing that in such a fellowship we are “safe.” No fear now that others may be thinking thoughts about us or having reactions toward us which they are hiding from us. In a fellowship which is committed to walk in the light beneath the Cross, we know that if there is any thought about us it will quickly be brought into the light, either in brokenness and confession (where there has been wrong and unlove), or else as a loving challenge, as something that we ought to know about ourselves.
Roy Hession

    • Robert Raikes

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    Robert Raikes

    Robert Raikes
    1736-1811
    Sunday School, the greatest lay movement since Pentecost, was founded by a layman. Robert Raikes was the crusading editor of Gloucester Journal. After becoming frustrated with inefficient jail reforms, Raikes was convinced vice could be better prevented than cured. While visiting in the slum section of the city, he was distressed with the corruption of children. Raikes shared the problem with Rev. Thomas Stock in the village of Ashbury, Berkshire. They conceived of a school to be taught on the best available time–Sunday. They decided to use the available manpower–laymen. The curriculum would be the Word of God, and they aimed at reaching the children of the street, not just the children of church members.

    The movement began in July, 1780, when Mrs. Meredith conducted a school in her home on Souty Alley. Only boys attended, and she heard the lessons of the older boys who coached the younger. Raikes wrote four of the textbooks, but the Bible was the core of the Sunday School. Later, girls were allowed to attend. Raikes shouldered most of the financial burden in those early years.

    Within two years, several schools opened in and around Gloucester. On November 3, 1783, Raikes published an account of Sunday School in the columns of his paper. Excitement spread. Next, publicity was given the Sunday School in Gentlemen’s Magazine, and a year later Raikes wrote a letter to the Armenian Magazine.

    Raikes died in 1811. By 1831, Sunday School in Great Britain was ministering weekly to 1,250,000 children, approximately 25 percent of the population.

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