Over the past 2,000 years the world has certainly been changed by the presence of the Church.  From the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended and Peter stood up with the eleven Apostles, preached the first sermon and three thousand in Israel believed, the Church has been on the move and literally has gone into all of the world.

As organizations grow, they begin to hire employees.   

Churches are often started with a minimum of employees and rely heavily on volunteers to handle most of the assignments and responsibilities.

One of the megatrends in churches has been to rethink the concept of Membership.   

Some of the largest churches in the country no longer offer memberships and instead encourage their regular attenders to consider a partnership with the church.   These partnerships are similar to membership in many respects however it does allow the church to identify some unique differences:

Based on most of the historical research, the development of the practice of using beads in prayer has a very significant connection to the practice of the early monks in their Liturgy of the Hours, which began with the early Christian ascetics and hermits of the third and fourth centuries. These holy men desired to separate themselves completely from the vices and temptations of society as well as some of the corruption that was creeping into the church, and they developed strict disciplines to keep their minds and bodies focused on spiritual things. The Liturgy of the Hours (the equivalent of the Office, which is the required obligation of every Roman Catholic cleric to pray through daily) originally included reading through the 150 Psalms. These were broken into fifteen decades of ten psalms that would be recited or prayed at various prescribed times during the day. These daily readings were a condensed version of the entire Liturgy of the Hours and were often called the breviary (from the Latin brevis, meaning “short or concise”).

The above is a short expert from Chapter 15, page 82 of Roaming Catholics: Ending the wandering to embrace the wonder by Rev. Kenneth Behr Th.D.   

This book is designed to encourage, answer questions, illustrate how the church has adapted and changed but remains the Body of Christ

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