Steve Timmis and Tim Chester:"Churches are full of people who love listening to sermons. But sermons count for nothing in God's sight. We rate churches by whether they have good teaching or not. But James says great teaching counts for nothing. What counts is the practice of the Word. What counts is teaching that leads to changed lives. We must never make teaching an end in and of itself. Our aim must be good learning and good practice. And that is a radically different way of evaluating how word-centered we are.""Colleges . . . suit a certain type of person, and this then shapes a view of what it means to be a church leader. Most church leaders today are middle class graduates who were trained in a college and whose qualification for ministry is a degree. The first apostles were from very mixed social backgrounds, most with no education. They trained by accompanying Jesus, and their qualification for ministry was that they knew Jesus. When the Jewish leaders saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men they were astonished and took note that these men had been with Jesus. One of the reasons we have middle class churches that are failing to reach working class people is that we have middle class leaders. And we have middle class leaders because our expectations of what constitutes leadership and our training class are middle class. Indeed working class people only really get into leadership by effectively becoming middle class. Paul had the highest education possible (Acts 22:3). It is not bad to be highly educated. But the qualities he outlines for leaders are not skills based but character based."Speaking on why the times they had pursued church discipline hadn't really led to full restoration of the sinning member, they write "I do not pretend to have all the answers but I suspect a significant factor was that the discipline foreseen by Jesus in Matthew 18 and by Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 was meant to be the end point of a process. Our real failure was the process leading up to it. The culture created by our leadership was not a culture of mutual discipline and care. Anyone who has a family will know that there is more likelihood of success in dealing with acute disciplinary issues with children if as parents you have shown commitment to creating an environment of care and discipline. Church discipline needs to become a daily reality in which rebuke and exhortation are normal. Without this, any form of confrontation will itself create a sense of crisis. We need a culture of daily and mutual discipleship. Structures and programs cannot create it. It requires sharing of lives and gospel intentionality."