Week 38
Your Weekly Round-up Sunday!
Your look ahead at everything coming this week — the teachings, the videos, and where to find it all…
This is the last round-up in this shape. Next Sunday, the 20th, it changes — and I am not going to bury that at the bottom of an email and hope you spot it. It is all set out properly under News further down, and it is worth the two minutes it will take you, because it changes what lands in your inbox and when.
Before that, though, there is a week to walk through. And this one has been sitting on my heart for a long while.
This week we turn to the Church. Not the building. Not the programme. Not the platform, the branding, or the personalities standing on it. The Church as the Bible describes it — the body of Christ, with Christ Himself as the Head — and the honest question of how far the thing most of us sit in on a Sunday has drifted from that. None of it is said to wound anybody, and it is certainly not said to talk you out of fellowship. But you cannot mend what you are not willing to look at plainly first.
So we are giving it four days, coming at the same subject from four sides: where the preaching so often stops, what lies beyond the cross, how the power the early church took for granted got quietly explained away, and why so many would rather be soothed than corrected.
Then on Friday we begin something new — Ephesians Part 1. Everything God has already given you, settled and sealed before you had done a single thing to earn it. After four days of looking hard at what has been lost, it is a good place to be reminded of what is still ours in Christ.
Take your time with it this week. Read slowly, and let the Word do the work in you.
With Christ's love,
Dave & Elaine
Building Your Faith on Biblical Foundations! Discover core Christian principles and deepen your relationship with Christ through biblical teaching and practical application…
Is Urban Christianity the Future of the Church?
The future of the church was never about postcodes — it was always about the Rock it is built upon…
There is a phrase you will hear at conferences, in church-planting circles and all over Christian media: "urban Christianity is the future of the church." The cities are swelling, the towns are emptying, so the reasoning goes that if you want to reach the next generation you plant in the city, build for the city, and the church has a future. There is real truth in part of that, and we should not be sniffy about it. The early church was largely an urban movement. Paul did not wander aimlessly; he went straight for the great population centres of the Roman world — Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, and finally Rome itself. And he continued there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them [Acts 18:11 KJV]. If urban Christianity simply means taking the gospel to where the crowds are, then amen and get on with it. The lost are stacked high in our cities, millions of them who have never once heard the Word explained plainly.
Here is where we must be careful, because buried in that phrase is a quiet danger. The future of the church is not a place. It is Christ. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it [Matthew 16:18 KJV]. Read it again — I will build my church. Not the city. Not the model. Not the demographic trend. A church planted in the trendiest urban quarter, with the best lighting and the biggest crowd, will still collapse if it is not built on Him; and a faithful handful of believers in a forgotten village, built on the Rock, will still be standing when the storm has passed. Part of our confusion is that we picture church as a venue at all. The New Testament knows nothing of that. For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ [1 Corinthians 12:12 KJV]. You can move a body into a city. You cannot make it alive by doing so. Only the Head gives life.
Every generation has its buzzword. Once it was seeker-sensitive, then missional, now urban, and tomorrow it will be something else. Trends are not wicked in themselves, but they turn dangerous the moment they quietly take the place of the gospel. You can fill an auditorium with hearers and stream the message to thousands, but a crowd of hearers is not a church with a future — it is a congregation deceiving itself. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves [James 1:22 KJV]. The wise builder in our Lord's own illustration is not marked out by his location but by his obedience: Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock [Matthew 7:24 KJV].
👣 Walk it out: wherever you are — city, town or village — stop asking whether your church fits the latest trend, and start asking whether it is built on Christ and full of doers. Then be one of them. Pray today. Obey today. Build on the Rock today…
Coming This Week: 14 - 18 September 2026
The Church — Four Days, One Subject, Looked at From Four Sides
Every teaching this week comes to you two ways, so you can take it however suits you best. The blog goes out early in the morning, ready to read with your first cup of tea. Then later the same morning the matching short video is recorded and published on our Back to Basics: Christian Living YouTube channel — same teaching, same truth, just spoken rather than read. Read it, watch it, or do both if it is one you want to sit with a while longer…
Something to Think About: Monday 14/09/26
📖 Read 👉 The Church is Stuck at the Foot of the Cross
The cross is where we begin, not where we are meant to pitch our tent and settle. Yet listen carefully and you will notice how much preaching arrives at Calvary and simply stops there, week after week, as though nothing happened on the third day. Monday asks why that is, what it costs a believer to be kept permanently at the foot of the cross, and what God intended us to go on to once we had been forgiven.
▶️ Playlist 👉Something to Think About? - YouTube
Messages from the Outpost: Tuesday 15/09/26
📖 Read 👉 Beyond the Cross
If Monday shows the problem, Tuesday shows you what is waiting on the other side of it. Not a sadder, softer Christian life, but a risen Christ, ascended and seated, with all authority given to Him — and a people meant to live in the good of that today, not merely hope for it one day. It is a short teaching, but it lifts the eyes, and most of us need that more than we admit.
▶️ Playlist 👉 Shorts: messages from the Outpost! - YouTube
Write This Down: Wednesday 16/09/26
📖 Read 👉 How the Church Lost Pentecost!
The power the early church simply took for granted is, in most places today, quietly explained away — filed under “that was then” and never spoken of again. Wednesday traces how that happened: how it was reasoned out, who benefited from it, and what a church is left with once it has talked itself out of the very thing God gave it. This one is worth reading with your Bible open.
▶️ Playlist 👉 Write This Down... - YouTube
Messages from the Outpost: Thursday 17/09/26
📖 Read 👉 You Can't Handle the Truth!
Thursday closes the week where it hurts most. There is a kind of churchgoing that wants comfort without correction — encouragement by the bucketload, but never a word that asks anything of us. Scripture has a phrase for that, and it is not a flattering one. This is the hardest of the four, and it is meant to be, because it is the one that sends you looking honestly at what you have been sitting under and why you have been content with it.
▶️ Playlist 👉 Shorts: messages from the Outpost! - YouTube
Back to Basics Teaching Blog: Friday 18/09/26
📖 Read 👉 Part 1 — Blessed Before You Did Anything
Friday begins the series properly, and it begins with good news. Part 1 of Ephesians opens up everything God has already given you in Christ — chosen, accepted, redeemed, blessed — all of it settled and sealed before you had done a single thing to earn it, and none of it resting on how well you performed this week. After four days of looking hard at what has been lost, this is where you are reminded of what can never be taken.
▶️ Playlist 👉 Back to Basics: Christian living - YouTube
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News! — content updates, newsletters, and anything worth knowing this week…
A New Name — and One Email Instead of Two
What changes at the weekend from Sunday 20 September…
Until yesterday you were getting two sends at the weekend: The Christian Compass on Saturday, reviewing the week gone, and this round-up on Sunday, opening the week ahead. Yesterday's Compass was the last one on a Saturday, and the round-up you are reading this morning is the last one of these. From Sunday 20 September the two become one email, and it keeps the Compass name — The Christian Compass — doing both jobs in one place: looking back over the week's teachings and videos, then opening up the week ahead.
Looking back. Pressing on.
Now I could leave it there and let you think we were simply tidying up the post. We are not. This is the visible edge of something far bigger, and you deserve to hear it straight. We have been publishing here for years — blogs most mornings, videos on the channel, shorts, posts, newsletters — and by God's grace a great deal of it has gone out. But there was a gap in the middle of it that we could no longer ignore. People were reading a teaching and never knowing there was a video that went with it. Others were watching a video and never finding the fuller teaching behind it. And someone would be convicted by something, take a real step of obedience in their own front room on an ordinary Tuesday, and have nobody to tell and no idea that hundreds of others were walking that same week alongside them. Four good things — reading, seeing, doing and sharing — all happening, and hardly any of them joined up.
That is not a small problem, and it is not a presentation problem either. A person can be well fed and still going nowhere. They can enjoy the teaching, agree with it, even pass it on, and change nothing — and that is precisely what Scripture warns about. But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves [James 1:22 KJV]. Hearing without doing does not leave a person where they were; it leaves them believing they have moved when they have not. So if the way we publish makes it easy to read and hard to do, then our publishing has been quietly working against the very thing this ministry exists for. We were not willing to leave that alone. So the whole thing has been rebuilt from the ground up around one loop with four movements — read the teaching, see the video, do the one step it gives you, then share it with one person.
Next Sunday a teaching called Joining the Dots goes out the same morning and sets the whole of it before you: what was broken, what has been rebuilt, and what you will notice changing over the coming weeks. Give it ten minutes. It is the most important thing we will publish this year, and it does not just inform you — it asks something of you, because a ministry is not an audience.
And hear this clearly: what is not changing is the ground it all stands on. The King James Bible quoted exactly, never paraphrased or modernised to suit the times. Plain teaching over entertainment, with nothing of the world's spirituality mixed in. Every piece standing on its own, so whoever arrives halfway through a series still gets the full teaching and their own step to take. The system serves the doctrine here. It will never be allowed to bend it…
A Change of Heart — One Post a Day, Not Two
What changes across all our social accounts…
Until this week, every teaching we publish Monday to Friday went out on social media as two separate posts — one carrying the link to the blog, and another, later on, telling you the reason behind it. Two posts, same teaching, and you had to catch both to get the whole of it.
We experimented with joining them together on X to see what would happen, and it worked. The numbers showed us why: the post explaining why a teaching was written is the one people actually stop and read, while a bare link tends to slide past unnoticed. Because of that, we have decided to publish this way across every social platform we post to — Facebook, X, Threads, Instagram and YouTube.
From now on it is one post a day. The reason that teaching was written, in plain words, with the link to the full blog sitting underneath it. Read the short version on your feed if that is all you have time for; follow the link when you want the whole thing.
Nothing else changes. Same teachings, same days, same time each morning — it will simply all arrive in one place…
🎯 This Week's Mission: Test the Foundation, Not the Fittings
Every week the Word gives us something to carry — not just to know, but to do. Here's your one step for the week ahead…
Most of us judge a church by its fittings — the music, the welcome, the preacher's manner, whether we come away feeling lifted. None of that is worthless, but not one bit of it holds a building up. A house can be beautifully furnished and still be sitting on sand, and you never find that out on a sunny Sunday; you find it out when the storm comes [Matthew 7:24-27 KJV]. So we are not asking you to inspect anybody's decor or go hunting for faults. Just put your hand on the foundation. Is Christ genuinely the Head here? And when a matter needs deciding, does the Word settle it — or does opinion settle it and the Word get fetched afterwards to agree?
👣 Your step: This week, ask one honest question of the church you attend — or of the one you have drifted away from. Not about the music, the building or the personalities. About the foundation: is Christ the Head here, and is the Word what settles matters?
❓ Walk it out: Write the answer down somewhere only you will see it, and pray over it before you say a word to anybody else. If it is yes, thank God and get stuck in — a good foundation deserves doers, not spectators. If it is no, do not storm out; take it to God first and wait for Him to show you what to do.
📖 And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence [Colossians 1:18 KJV]
So don't overthink it. One step. One act of obedience. Do that, and let God do the rest…
▶️ Prefer to watch? Each Mission teaching comes as a short video — find it on our YouTube channel 👉 Mission: - YouTube
Back to Basics: Christian Living – Your Faith Journey. We're excited to share insights and practical guidance to help strengthen your faith journey…
What is Pagan Christianity?
When the world's ways are dressed in church clothes, hardly anybody notices the swap…
The phrase sounds like a contradiction, and that is exactly why it works. Nobody walks into a church and announces that they have brought the world in with them. It does not arrive wearing a label. It arrives as an improvement — a better way to hold people's attention, a method that worked elsewhere, a practice borrowed because it filled the seats or calmed the nerves. Pagan Christianity is simply the world's thinking and the world's practices given a Christian coat of paint and set down in the middle of God's people. The Lord Jesus named the problem plainly when He dealt with the religious men of His day: Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men [Mark 7:7 KJV]. Notice what was wrong. It was not irreverence, it was not chaos, it was not an empty building. It was worship offered sincerely and counted worthless, because what was being taught had come from men rather than from God.
It happens slowly, and it almost always begins with something reasonable. A practice is adopted because it works. It is kept because people like it. It becomes tradition because it has always been done. And eventually it is defended as though Scripture commanded it, when Scripture never mentioned it at all. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ [Colossians 2:8 KJV]. That word spoil is worth sitting with. Nobody sets out to be spoiled; you are robbed while you are busy admiring the thing that is robbing you. The same warning stands over anything we import from the world's spirituality — atmospheres, techniques, self-help wisdom, whatever promises an experience without requiring obedience. If it did not come out of the Word, it has no business standing in the place of the Word, however well it goes down.
So how do you keep it out? Not by suspicion of everybody and everything, but by a settled habit of testing. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good [1 Thessalonians 5:21 KJV]. Ask of anything taught or practised where you gather: where is this in Scripture? Not where is it implied, or where might it fit, but where is it actually written. If the honest answer is nowhere, then it is a preference at best and an intruder at worst — and it must never be treated as a command of God. The alternative is the drift Paul warned Timothy about, where people gather teachers to suit their own appetites and turn their ears away from the truth [2 Timothy 4:3-4 KJV]. The remedy is as old as the church itself: open the Book, take it as it stands, and let it settle the matter.
👣 Walk it out: take one practice or teaching you have simply accepted because it has always been there, and this week look it up honestly in your own Bible. Keep what Scripture gives you. Hold the rest loosely…
See You Next Sunday — New Name, One Email
Same weekend send, now called The Christian Compass — with Joining the Dots going out the same morning. Don't miss it…
Find us everywhere — 🌐 Blog: https://back-to-basics-christian-living.ghost.io/ ▶️ YouTube: youtube.com/@backtobasicschristianliving 📱 Socials: https://linktr.ee/backtobasicschristianliving
