Tim Adams explains the differences for ministries.

A lot of churches are wanting to switch their lighting systems over to LEDs because of the inherent electricity savings and long-lasting nature of the technology. However, it’s important you understand exactly what to expect when considering a change.

First, LEDs are certainly more energy efficient than any other lighting technology in the industry, save for plasma, but that’s a technology that never seemed to get legs underneath it and thus, we have LEDs. The rough average is that LEDs run 1W of power for every 10W consumed by incandescent fixtures. They also have no filament to burn out, so they last much, much longer. The realistic usefulness of an LED emitter is around 30,000 hours before you’ll likely see a noticeable drop in intensity, depending on your fixture. Cheaper fixtures will likely burn out faster than that due to poor thermal management, quality control, and sub-par manufacturing practices.

Heat is another advantage that LEDs have; they create significantly lower amounts of heat. I should caution, though, that some manufacturers will attempt to cram more wattage into a fixture than the fixture can naturally dissipate on its own. I’ve seen this common in household LED replacement lamps and they can reach temperatures that rival their incandescent competitors. For most professional fixtures, though, there will either be adequate convection cooling (built-in technologies that draw heat away from the emitters) or fans. There are two important areas this lower heat output affects: the amount of heat that people feel when in the light beam, and the HVAC system. Less overall heat being generated by the lighting system translates to less electricity consumed by the HVAC system to keep the space at a consistent temperature. It also makes being on stage a more pleasant experience with no heat being put into the lighting beam, unlike incandescent lighting that transmits a fair amount of heat down the light beam and onto the talent.

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(RNS) Can a megachurch survive the departure of its megastar pastor?

For Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, it’s an open question.

Mars Hill announced last week that it would dissolve the multisite network of 13 churches across the Northwest that took root under pastor Mark Driscoll, who stepped down in October after supporters lost confidence in a high-wattage leadership style that was criticized as bullying, hypermacho and intolerant.

For many megachurches, a pastor can become larger than the church itself — particularly for multisite churches where the pastor’s sermon is the only thing binding disparate congregations connected by little more than a satellite feed. Before his resignation, the name “Mark Driscoll” was more widely known than “Mars Hill.” The dueling brands sometimes clashed along the way; some say Driscoll once told staff “I am the brand.”

Driscoll’s edgy personality built up a congregation of an estimated 14,000 people at 15 locations across five states. Weekly attendance is now reportedly about 7,600. In August, the church saw a budget gap of nearly $650,000 as expenses exceeded revenues.

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R.C. Sproul says if a church is not evangelical, it is not an authentic church.

When we consider the predicament that the evangelical church of the twenty-first century faces in America, the first thing we need to understand is the very designation “evangelical church” is itself a redundancy. If a church is not evangelical, it is not an authentic church. The redundancy is similar to the language that we hear by which people are described as “born-again Christians.” If a person is born again of the Spirit of God, that person is, to be sure, a Christian. If a person is not regenerated by the Holy Spirit, he may profess to be a Christian, but he is not an authentic Christian. There are many groups that claim to be churches that long ago repudiated the evangel, that is, the gospel. Without the gospel, a gathering of people, though they claim otherwise, cannot be an authentic church.

In the sixteenth century, the term evangelical came into prominence as a description of the Protestant church. In many cases, the terms evangelical and Protestant were used interchangeably. Today, that synonymous use of the adjectives no longer functions with any accuracy. Historic Protestants have forgotten what they were protesting in the sixteenth century. The central protest of the Reformation church was the protest against the eclipse of the gospel that had taken place in the medieval church.

When we turn our attention to the first century, to the churches about which we learn from the biblical record, we know that all of the churches addressed in the New Testament, including the churches in Ephesus, Corinth, Thessalonica, and the seven churches of Revelation, were evangelical churches. They all embraced the biblical gospel. Yet at the same time, these churches were different in their strengths, in their weaknesses, and in their compositions. An evangelical church is not necessarily a monolithic community. There may be unity among evangelical churches but not necessarily uniformity. The distinctions of the seven churches of Revelation are set forth clearly in that book. They manifest different greatnesses and frailties, but they all faced perils. Each confronted the dangers that assaulted the church in the first century. They faced hazards of varying proportions, but there was a common threat to the health of the New Testament church from many sides. Those dangers manifested in the first century are repeated in every age of the church. They certainly loom large at our time in the early years of the twenty-first century.

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Nathan Busenitz asks how much is your church like the ancient church?

That’s a popular question these days—especially if you read guys like Robert Webber, Brian McLaren, Wolfgang Simson, or Frank Viola and George Barna.

Most of the contemporary discussion about the ancient church attempts to show discrepancies between what is now and what was then. The not-so-subtle implication is that there is something very wrong with the contemporary church. Blame Constantine. Blame the Enlightenment. Blame Capitalism. Blame the Fundamentalists. It doesn’t really matter. The only way to fix the church today is to get back to the ancient church.

Based on this premise we are told (by some) that the church needs to be more sacramental, more liturgical, and more mystical. We ought to light candles, burn incense, celebrate the arts, foster community, and avoid conventional church structures (like, especially, preaching). By others, we are told that we need to meet in houses and not church buildings. (And again, cut down on the preaching.)

All of this is proposed on the supposition that these practices characterized the ancient church.

Really?

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