Discipleship on the Back of a Napkin
In case you missed it, I’ve been attempting to put reproducible patterns on the back of a napkin.
The following posts describe the different parts of DNA in greater depth:
On Discipleship: Nurturing Relationships
On Discipleship: Apostolic Mission
The Back of a Napkin Series:
Church Starts In the Harvest
Yesterday I saw a new book by an author I follow hit the internet. Just seeing the book stirred my heart a bit, because though I know the author to be a church planter who talks extensively about starting churches the book is entirely about sharing the good news of Jesus with those who don’t know Him.
The reason this book stirred my heart was so often we can get caught up in planting churches that we forget why we do it. Church planting in the west has become about leadership, ecclesiology, and even sometimes doctrine, but Jesus meant it to be about something more.
In fact, Jesus doesn’t send us to start churches, He sends us to be His witnesses and make disciples of all nations. Church, real church, starts here. Churches are started when a group of people over time come to Christ and commit to Him and to each other as disciples of Him. This has to be our primary focus. If it’s not, all the new churches that we plant are really just shuffling around existing believers from one church to another, with no benefit to the Kingdom.
This will require of us to spend less time thinking through church structure and leadership styles and more time thinking about how to love the lost. It will require us to leave the comfort of our living rooms or sanctuaries or wherever our churches meet and bring Jesus to the places where people are. For true movements of the Gospel to happen we have to be where the people are.
If (and it’s a big if) we can get good at that, we will start to see churches planted where they’ve never been planted before: Under bridges with homeless folks and among gang members and in the board rooms of America. These things can happen. They already are in some places in this country. We just have to start seeing the role of church planter as evangelist + disciplemaker instead of church founder and CEO.
Remember, church starts in the harvest, not in the barn.
Photo Credit: Sharing the Good News by Chris Yarzab
Learning from Imperfect People
Most of us want to learn from perfect people.
Now, I don’t mean technically perfect people. Outside of Christ there is no one who is truly perfect. What I mean is many of us want to learn from those who have their lives together in a greater degree than we do: a pastor, an evangelist, a great teacher. Someone higher than us.
I understand where this attitude comes from. It’s a growth mentality that continually wants to improve and push the boundaries of development. The problem is I don’t know that this is the attitude Jesus wants us to have.
When Jesus comes into the life of a person, we assume that person starts at ground zero. They know nothing about Christ and they have nothing to contribute. The truth is they have no facts, but they have the fullness of God dwelling in them by the Holy Spirit. This is a significant reality that most of us minimize. The Holy Spirit living in us is real, not just a nice thing we say about people. What this means is we have to be willing to learn from those who don’t have their lives completely together, because Jesus still might be speaking to us through them.
Jesus was like this, too, right? He didn’t learn from others, He was the Teacher, but he often pointed to people outside of religious circles to teach others about following God. He used a Roman Centurion as an example of faith in Matthew 8:5-13. Surely the Jews of Christ’s day would have been horribly offended by this. But Jesus didn’t mind that the Centurion in many other ways wasn’t perfect. He zeroed in on his act of faith and put it on display for the whole world to see.
My point is, in your world there are people who, to your critical mind, are imperfect examples of following Jesus. It’s tempting to write those people off and never learn from them. But I have a secret for you: There are no perfect examples of following Jesus. In fact, if you waiting for a perfect example to come into your life to learn from, you’ll be waiting for a long time. Instead, don’t think of yourself more highly than you are. Associate with the lowly. Don’t be to proud to enjoy the company of ordinary people.
Imperfect examples have much to teach us. I’ve learned much about what not to do from listening to imperfect people reflect on where they’ve made mistakes. I’ve seen real life apostles sit in humility as the Holy Spirit moved on the most common people within a church speaking life-changing truth. I’ve sat in Bible studies with new and not-yet believers and been struck with truth about Jesus as we’ve looked at the Bible through their eyes.
All it takes is enough humility to learn from someone you might think doesn’t have it all together. Imperfect people are all around you. You have plenty of opportunities to learn if you want. You just need to be open to it.
Cluster Map
Pursuing Glory 