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Life Groups kick off again in Term 4 – 9 & 11 October

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Life Groups at Bedfordview are kicking off again on the 9th / 11th of October – next week!

We’ll be doing Life Groups orientation this Sunday (7 October) and next Sunday (14 October) in the Side Hall at Bedfordview. This is to help people meet the leaders and make decisions as to where they would like to visit or join.

Meeting together in each other’s homes is a value that we at Cornerstone hold highly. Our recent Life Groups course goes through all of our reasons why, highlighting the theology behind Life Groups as well as the practical implications.

You can download all the talks on the Life Groups course here in either mp3 format or as PDF transcripts.

50 Shades… The Story So Far

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Uptown have been hosting 50 Shades…, a series that has to do with God’s design for sex. It’s been a fantastic series thus far with plenty of insight offered from Mark Gungor’s Singles and Stinking Thinking DVD series. This has facilitated some brilliant discussion around the topics of sex, dating, singleness and relationships in general.

As a culture we suffer under a lot of over-romanticised ideals where we tend to think in terms of “The One” and a “soul-mate”. This series has gotten to the heart of this thinking, showing how we need to make good decisions in our lives and need to stop being victims of idealistic thinking around romance and sex. God gives us freedom to make decisions and we need to make sure that we take responsibility for our decisions and make better ones going forward.

The 50 Shades… series is named after the top-selling novels 50 Shades of Gray – a typical example of bad thinking, over-romanticised ideas and our culture’s harmful understandings around sex. While marketing may say otherwise, what this book series presents leads to despair and a good deal of confusion. God has something better for us.

50 Shades… will be continuing at Uptown this Sunday, 30 September. This will be the end of the series. Details below.

50 Shades…
Sundays 9 – 30 September
9:00am
Cornerstone Church Uptown
Cnr De Beer & Smit St, Braamfontein

Why Lead Worship? – Part 4 – God is Serious About Shepherding

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Written by Jonno Warmington

I argued in my previous post that the particular trait David exhibited which was ‘after’ God’s own heart was that he was first and foremost a shepherd. He was commended because he dealt well with God’s most loved possession – His people.

If His people are God’s prized possession then the shepherding and leading of His people is naturally an important thing to God. This is why He places such an emphasis on the care with which the role must be handled. In fact, scripture says that those who would lead His people will be held to account for those they lead (Heb 13:17, Ex 34:10). It is also why scripture doesn’t pull any punches in its harsh treatment of false shepherds. Ezekiel 34 gives us a good picture of a God who sets Himself against false shepherds who would use the flock to their own benefit, requiring a reckoning for their abuse. It also shows us how He will rescue His sheep from these false shepherds. A shepherding role is not something to be taken lightly but when we are motivated by love in obedience to God we are taking on His own heart! We love what He loves.

I believe that this is an important part of what made David a worshipper that pleased God. He loved God and proved it by how he loved and led God’s people.

If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
– 1 John 4:20-21 ESV

So what does all this have to do with “leading worship”? Well, quite frankly, I believe it points to the role that must be adopted by anyone who would step up to lead a gathering of the local church in any of the things that we gather to do – including worshipping God in song. We must first take on the role of a shepherd.

Developing Your Child’s Sporting Ability – 3 November

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 Developing Your Child’s Sporting Ability with Top Sports and Conditioning Specialists

Cornerstone Church is hosting a workshop on how parents can develop their child’s athletic ability. The event features international, top sports and conditioning specialists with a focus on children ages 3 to 13.

Cornerstone Church Bedfordview is hosting “Developing Your Child’s Sporting Ability” on Saturday 3 November, a workshop providing practical advice to parents with children ages 3 to 13. The event includes international, top sports and conditioning specialists on how parents can develop their child’s athletic ability.

The event is a free community initiative organised by Samantha Quinn, a physiotherapist who specialises in golf and other sports injuries.

“The age group of 3 to 13 years is a delicate but vital stage in child development and it can often be overlooked. Each of the speakers are passionate professionals in their fields and the point of the workshop is to encourage parents, provide valuable tools and insights, help parents with the challenges of developing their children mentally and physically in sport, and dispel myths surrounding development and supplements that parents must contend with,” she says.

Those scheduled to speak are:

Dave Benstead-Smith – “Physical literacy”

Benstead-Smith is an internationally respected biokineticist. He will be talking on developing a child’s “physical literacy”, covering topics such as the importance of functional movements, when to specialise in one sport and how to recognise athletic gifting in a child.

Theo Bezuidenhout – “How to encourage your child to play sport and perform well (while not driving them crazy)”

Bezuidenhout is a very respected professional sports psychologist. He works with many professional golfers, heads up the World of Golf and works at the High Performance Centre in Pretoria. He will be speaking on how to encourage children to play sport without becoming overbearing, which tends to drive children away from sport rather than encourage them.

Dr Peter Baxter – “Should I be giving my child sports enhancing products?”

Baxter is a sports doctor and will be talking about the use of sports enhancing supplements (like creatine) all the way through to the use of banned substances like steroids.

Developing Your Child’s Sporting Ability will be happening at 9am to 12pm on Saturday, 3 November at Cornerstone Church Bedfordview, Benard Road East, Morninghill. For more information contact 011-616-4073 or email info@cornerstonechurch.co.za.

Excellent child-care will be made available for parents at the event.

Developing Your Child’s Sporting Ability
Saturday, 3 November
9:00am – 12:00pm
Free
Hosted at Cornerstone Church Bedfordview

For more information email info@www.cornerstonechurch.co.za or call 011 616 4073

Tanzania EQUIP (Sep 2012) Report-Back

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A team from Cornerstone recently spent nine days ministering in Tanzania for the Tanzanian EQUIP time. The team also met up with Keir Taylor to encourage and minister to our friends in this part of the world. Being an EQUIP, there was also a lot of training, especially some training with the church in Makumi.

Check out some of the photos above. There are a lot more at the Facebook page.

Lesotho Trip Report-Back

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On the weekend of 14 – 16 September, Mark Meeske, Dave Campbell and the Cornerstone Life Team went on a ministry trip to visit the churches in Lesotho that we work with there. They had a really great time encouraging and teaching the churches.

It was a cold weekend of snow with some Life-Teamers even getting snowed in after the team split into three to minister in various places. The snow prohibited the team from doing some ‘door knocking’ in some of the areas but altogether it was a wonderful time of building up our friends that we partner with in Lesotho.

Check out some of the photos.

Meet the Campbells!

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Dave and Sarah Campbell will be on eldership at Cornerstone until the end of this year. They’ve come all the way from New Zealand with their four children – Braden (8), Gracie (6), Luke (4) and Emily (1). It’s quite exciting having them as a part of the team for the next while.

Dave and Sarah hail from Horsham Downs Community Church (HDCC) in New Zealand. Many of you might know Bruce Benge who has visited us several times and is a good friend of Marcus and the team. Bruce leads HDCC where Dave and Sarah have been elders for the last four years.

Cornerstone is something of a different context for the Campbells in a number of ways which opens up some great opportunities for learning, which is partly why Dave and Sarah are here. They’ve embarked on something of a working holiday where they will be on eldership at Cornerstone while also enjoying what our beautiful country has to offer and visiting many of the churches here.

They’ll be visiting all the sites in the next while so if you see them, grab your chance to enjoy a good coffee with them and enjoy their much-loved New Zealand sense of humour! Dave really likes photography so that’s one way to get him talking!

Open Mic Night Was a Party

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by Phil Quinn

Last Friday, the Uptownies held an Open Mic Night – an evening where anyone could come and showcase their talents. The idea behind the event was to initiate our new venue as a place in which we can relax and have fun and be a source of life in our community.

So we declared the mic open and sat back to enjoy what would come of it. It was wonderful to see so many budding artists and performers looking for an opportunity to express themselves and it was great fun to cheer them on: poets, dancers, saxophonists, singers and rappers.  Our venue was packed out with Uptowners, visiting Bedfordviewers and students from the Braamfontein community.

The Life Team put on a dance best described as “mixtape”; Liziwe Fihlani from the Johannesburg Youth Orchestra performed a sax solo; and a young performer known as Kooch, hailing all the way from Cape Town, also put in an appearance. And these were just some of the highlights.

Draco, a rapper that used to work with Andy Sherman and who enjoys radio play was our guest performer. He was supplemented by our own Jonno Warmington and the Christ Revolution Dance Crew.

We finished off a highly successful evening with Jon Hing performing his famous MJ impersonation. It was a super event and we’ll certainly be doing it again!

The Exchange – 12 October

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with guest speaker Jedd Schroy from Paradigm Shift

A handout might enable the poor to survive one more day, but can they be given tools to escape poverty for good? Paradigm Shift is a ministry equipping South African churches by training them to provide business training, micro loans, mentoring and discipleship to the urban poor as an ongoing church-based outreach. By empowering South African churches to provide the poor in their communities with economic development and discipleship, the Paradigm Shift programme equips South African church volunteers to provide long-term solutions to the poverty around them.

Jedd Schroy is the Executive Director and co-founder of Paradigm Shift. Before Paradigm Shift, Jedd was a branch manager for a US-based Fortune 500 financial services company, served as the Director of Development for the National Association of Evangelicals and worked at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in Washington DC. Jedd is an entrepreneur, having started and managed his own business. He is also an author and has been a guest speaker for the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business’ MBA programme. Jedd has worked, studied and served in more than thirty countries.

The Exchange
Friday, 12 October
At Cornerstone Church Bedfordview
6:00am: Coffee
6:30am: Prompt Start
Followed by a delicious breakfast

Contact us or click here to find out more about The Exchange.

Key Women – 11 October

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Note that because of Equip we will be meeting on the second Thursday of October.

Join us for Key Women on Thursday, 11 October for next part of our Remarkable Women of Scripture series. Avril will be speaking on the Proverbs 31 Woman.

Key Women
Thursday, 11 October
The Lounge at Cornerstone Church Bedfordview
9:00am & 3:00pm