What Is A Gospel Partnership?

After the recent post on appreciating gospel partnerships, it occurred to me it might be of some use sharing some lessons I’ve learnt in pursuing them.  I hope to share those in an upcoming post.

I am not arrogant enough to believe I have the answers in this area or am in any way an expert.  I have had experience, though, and in line with application of scriptural references to relationships in the Body, it might be of some help to you, should you wish to explore if further.

Before I engage in that, it might help to start then by defining what I mean by gospel partnership.  To do that requires some context.

My church experience has been about witnessing the church gather together for set services two or three times a week, and beyond that for relationships to be fairly superficial.  That is not to dispute the care that members have for each other, or the decent rapport that is seen when we meet and as we eat.  It is to state that often outside the set gatherings there is little in the way of intentionality of living and expressing the gospel.

I stress – this is my experience.  Or rather, has been up until the last seven years or so.

As I mentioned, it was in 2006 that I started my first intentional gospel partnership.  What made it such, was that the brother and I agreed to live our lives intentionally before others for the sake of the gospel.  It was during my time working at North Staffs YMCA where I had a position as a Christian Spiritual Development worker.  Yet the partnership was about more than what happened at the YMCA.  It was what we did through life.

That’s not to suggest we suffocated each other.  We had our own families to support and some of our interests lead us to do things separately.  More often than not, however, we would engage in life together and incorporate gospel proclamation or demonstration in what we did.  It wasn’t about overtly mentioning Jesus at any given opportunity or manufacturing contrived connections to hammer people with the bible.  It was about being spiritually sensitive to those around us – believer or not – and conversing with them or sharing with them something that might allude to Christ or His Kingdom.

I hasten to add that this was not my only gospel partnership.  I was blessed to have a few going on and they would often overlap even though the friendships did not always so easily cross over.

Each partnership would then have a different expression and level of intensity even as the personalities in it differed.  One partnership was an occasional one that was about using comedy to connect with people and open channels of communication.  The initial partnership I’ve referred to was far more intense and regular and had a greater span of interests from taking people out to meals, to arranging trips to church services and other jaunts.

What marked them out as gospel partnerships as opposed to regular church relationships, was that intentionality to somehow use our lives to express the gospel for others to see, hear, respond and engage.

With that definition in mind in the next entry I’ll share some of the lessons I’ve learnt from pursuing these partnerships.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden