Lets see here.
Order of service is right. Sermon is inspiring. Songs are suitably pitched to deliver the right emotional outcome. Meetings in the week to keep up the impression that we’re active. Outreach activities like giving to the local food-bank or helping out at the local home for the elderly. Got a youth group and a group for the women and men to meet separately.
Everything seems to be in place to keep this machine going.
In as much as these efforts are noble in and of themselves, it is interesting that there is little emphasis in the way of disciples making disciples who know its their inherent requirement and God-given ability to make disciples.
I’m sure some might argue that some of the activities mentioned initially are disciple-making activities. Even if that were true, it has not really delivered on that score. At best people get drafted into the routine of how things are done and find a comfortable niche in all that which requires a level of commitment to attendance and subscribing to the key doctrinal tenets, but little else than that. There is certainly no onus, stimulation or thrust to be held accountable for how things are going in making disciples.
So it’s no wonder that people look for the ‘five-fold ministry’ to get all that sorted. Pew-sitters expert the anointed experts to be cracking on with all that stuff – the teachers teaching, the evangelists evangelising, the pastors pastoring, the prophets prophesying and the apostles … apostling. (OK, you get the point.) Either way, once I’m in the club I might need to hand out a tract from time to time explaining to a stranger why they’re going to hell and need to be saved, but God forbid that I should actually seek to build a relationship with a friend in the hope that it will be a disciple-making opportunity. Heaven forfend that I should see it as much as my responsibility as anyone else’s to share with others this good news and help them in being conformed to Christ’s image.
What would happen, then, if that was the driving factor of a perspective of church? As in that driving motivation was in as much as we follow Jesus do our bit to help others follow Jesus and use every opportunity presented to us to do that. What would church be like?
I’m grateful for blogs and such that report on what that journey may look like for the individual pursuit and for the corporate expression. I am grateful for them and hope to contribute more to that movement as my own steps, ordered by the Lord, get to reflect further this mentality.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
Life With CD 